Comments

• • Glenn Groulx@glenngr4

  

  Glenn Groulx February 24, 2011 - 5:40pm

  Hello mark,

  You have hooked me back in to the academic blogging venue with this provocative phrase:

  the desire to blog as a question of addiction

  The reality for me is that the act of blogging takes me away from doing other things. As a student getting assignments ready, networking with classmates, and building a personal network, the blogging has had a point, and its importance was higher than other things. My desire to blog was higher than my desire to do other things. I made time for the blogging.

  As an alumnus member, blogging has definitely taken a back seat to other matters. I was thinking about this the other day - what I have been doing is letting the distractions distract me, because the consequences are not so severe for dilly-dallying and putting aside blogging.

  My desire for bloggigng has waned in recent months, as the desire for doing other things was greater. Besides, family matters have come to the fore ,as my granddaughter runs in and wants to sit up on my lap, or a purring cat parks himself on my lapand my keyboard .These days,  I am not going to shoo away the cat right away or pass up the chance to spend time with my 3 year-old grand-daughter. I have already spent a few years putting aside these things too often, and so I want some catch up.

  Blogging is great, and I do enjoy it. As long as I can stop whenever I need to without feeling withdrawal, without feeling like I have to get back to the blogging and nothing - I mean nothing - else matters. It gets to be a compulsion, however, and I think you have to stop for awhile. That is when it becomes an addiction. You are addicted when you are checking the blog analytics for the number of visits to your blog five times a day, or when you are  spending a few hours a day blogging while your family sits aroundlaughing and having quality time in the next room, go out for coffee, and come back and you have not even moved from your chair. Now that is addiction. 

  I don't agree that blogging that enhances your personal experience and connects you to others takes you away from the real world; I thinksuch blogging focuses your attention and adds a richness to your reality. It requires you to participate in personal meaning-making. It requires you to re-visit what you wrote and look at it critically as new ideas pour in, new feedback is received, and new experiences are encountered. As long as you have an ear out for what is going on around you, and put aside the blogging when called to dinner, and not have to be called twice, blogging has a positive side.

  To reflect using a blog is not always a solitary activity - some think it sets you outside of the physical space of being present with others? Really? My best blogging has often occurred while participating at conferences, listening and taking notes, adding tweets to a twitter backchannel, and hurriedly jotting down notes and making idea maps on related ideas. For me, academic blogging encompasses the capture of ideas as they occur, and the capture of the personal meaning-making processes is key to better understanding ideas.

  Capturing how we navigate resources, what we do to interact with others, and the challenges and successes we have on a daily/weekly basis is also part of academic blogging. It is primarily for oneself, to log our sense-making activities. That it can be useful for others is a side-effect, not the intent of such "way-making" posts.

  I have been silent on the Landing for some time; I needed some time to let things float in the background

  I have lurked, watched, read and considered in silence. Perhaps I was looking for a reason to blog again in an academic setting.Though I think I needed a respite; I have been busy playing with my grand-daughter (now 3), catching up on pleasure reading, playing on the Wii,  walking the dog on a bit more often, taking longer walks and hikes, playing with the cat, talking more with family and friends, playing board games, and playing more games on the PC. And yes, I have been online on Facebook re-connecting with friends and family.

  The opportunity cost of doing graduate studies is that you lose out ongoing out on stay-cations whenever you want, messin around, playing games, chattin on the phone or on skype, or spending time with the little ones. I am glad I have had the chance to learn about blogging, and I am just as happy to have had the chance to have a time-out these past few months.   

  I think that many alumni feel the" swing-back effect": they have been so focused on academics for so long that it takes a while just to come back out of study mode and back into other things. So I swung back, and pretty much let the academic writing alone while I had my fill of reading paperback SCI-FI novels, watching Star Trek and SCI-FI movies, andnow I think I have swung roundagain somewhat to wanting to reflect and blog again.  

  Time for supper...no way do I need to be called twice.

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon March 7, 2011 - 10:17am

  Thanks for sharing reflections on your experiences here, Glenn. I'd wondered where you'd got to: graduation, it sounds like. Congratulations!

  In thinking through these issues, your intuitive sense of when there's a problem is a helpful reminder about context: there's a problem when whatever it is one's doing alone -- I won't restrict it to blogging -- interferes with everyday life and alienates one from family and friends. (Then again, from another angle, interference with everyday life and alienation from one's peers can, for some, represent the goals of pedagogical praxis.)

  Your comments on what we might call triggers or enablers for addictive blogging point, significantly, to details of its technical form, like traffic analytics. Wordpress promotes its analytics as "stats to obsess over," and sure, I have found myself doing just that. We must recognize the ways in which social media, especially dominant apps Facebook and Twitter, intentionally build "enablers" for addictive use into their very design. For example, both Facebook and Twitter deploy dynamic visual cues to draw the otherwise occupied user back to their feeds. Jon Dron pointed out that clicking a link in Facebook opens a new tab or window because Facebook has commercial reasons to keep you in Facebook even as you navigate elsewhere. The profit motive embedded into the very form of most social media is arguably producing addiction as a major externality.

  So, given these built-in technological "enablers," I find it useful to try thinking whether what applies to blogging applies equally to reading and writing more fundamentally. Watch what happens if we tweak the wording of one of your comments:

  Jane Austen is addicted when ... she is spending a few hours a day writing while her family sits around laughing and having quality time in the next room, go out for coffee, and come back and she has not even moved from her chair.

  Now, is -- or was -- that addiction? It seems that not all media but more particularly new media, like drugs, draw the fire of public anxiety in establishing good and bad "uses" of one's time. And this anxiety factors in the extent to which one is doing or perceived to be doing something alone.

  "To reflect using a blog is not always a solitary activity," you write, seeming to infer (and correct me if I'm wrong in drawing the inference) that what redeems blogging is its social character. Does writing as such require the same social validation -- or is the figure of the solitary writer by now sufficiently romanticized to command its own cultural legitimacy?

  It might actually depend, strangely, on content: on what one is writing. That blogging is seen (and practiced) as alternately confessional, or casual -- or both -- have, I think, contributed powerfully to its ambiguous and controversial status in academia. Blogging's confessional, "overexposed" aspect has prompted a widespread re-deployment of the politicized hostility with which autobiography and confessional writings were met when first popularized in Austen's Regency England. (De Quincey's 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater made an easy target for outrage over both personal overexposure and drug addiction.)

  As for blogging's casual character, you put a premium on precisely that when you write that "academic blogging encompasses the capture of ideas as they occur." To me, this is the most compelling and compulsive aspect of blogging: not just drafting a new idea but doing so in a way that can draw a radically unknown and unknowable response -- by peers and public alike. That I've been trying to post at least one entry a week is something I've been approaching as discipline, not addiction -- exercise to stay in writing shape, as it were. (Of which there are a myriad kinds: try to write twenty-two lines a day, suggested Harry Mathews; or for twenty minutes a day, advises Cory Doctorow.)

  Is the line so thin, then, between discipline and addiction, in this digitized graphomania, this desire to only connect?