Since the
first combined use of “web” and “logs” in 1997, blogs have evolved rapidly. It
is easier than ever to create a user blog, and many websites have several
templates to assist one in doing so.
Rettberg discusses three different types of blogs: personal, filter, and
topic driven. Personal blogs have replaced the personal journal as a text to
display the writer’s thoughts and emotions. These blogs describe the author’s
lifestyle and experiences. One of the issues associated with personal blogs is
the amount of privacy a blog has. Anyone with Internet access can see the words
written on a public blog, even if the author did not intend for the text to
reach a wide audience. A filter blog is a collection of articles and links that
finds interesting. These archives can, but don’t have to be, related. They
cover topics that interest the author, and thus filter blogs are convenient to
be shared among those with similar opinions. The third type of blog is topic
driven. The idea is self-explanatory, as these blogs are geared to include
writings on the same topic. The voice of the author is not as relevant, as the
content of the articles will drive the reader to access the blog.
So, how do
we go about analyzing blogs? This is not an easy task, as the concept of genre
has been concrete for several years. In order to answer this question, we must
look at the rhetorical situation of blogs.
Miller and
Shepherd argue that the rhetorical situation requires kairos. This concept alludes to the idea that a rhetor must know
when to produce an argument, as a well-argued point will be worthless in the
wrong situation. Blogs have reached the point at which they fulfill the kairos of the rhetorical situation. Internet is accessible around the globe with
the click of a button. As stated before, anyone can see what a blogger has
written. The publishing process for books is moving into the digital realm. Log
onto amazon.com, and you will likely see a link to the kindle store. In a few
minutes, you can download a full book to your iPhone, kindle, or other digital
reader, often for a reduced price. Print journalism is no longer sufficient to
reach a wide audience, and eventually the market for print will become so small
that it will near extinction.
Kairos as timing can make or break any rhetorical situation. It acts as one of the exigencies of the success or failure of discourse in the public’s opinion. It must be well received and accepted by the intended audience and fit into the cultural timing of an argument for the text to be rhetorically effective. I first encountered kairos as Bitzer’s sense of rhetorical timing, but after reading Miller and Shepherd’s more contemporary definition of kairos, I feel that it takes on a much different role in the rhetorical situation than I had previously understood.
ReplyDeleteThe kairos that facilitates the blog as a genre is more than Bitzer’s concept of timing and instead similar to the “cultural moment that Miller and Shepherd refer to. Like you said, knowing the when in producing an argument is important in how the audience will receive the discourse and how the exigence surrounding your claims would be affected. In that sense the kairos, Bitzer’s timing, would be significant in trying to frame or outline your discourse. But this relationship between the rhetorical situation and the kairos surrounding the blog has a greater depth than that. The kairos that surrounds the success of the blog comes from the cultural events of the 1990’s; it is more of a collection of well-timed and well-received events that created the “cultural moment” Miller and Shepherd give kairos credit to. With the blurring of media voyeurism and media exhibitionism and growing accessibility of the internet, social media had begun to change. The dynamic between what should be considered public and private changed so much within the decade that I don’t think it was any one event that created the spring board for blogs to take off with such rhetorical success. I would consider it to be more of a series of “cultural moments” that created this larger rhetorical moment for blogs as a genre to cater to a new kind of audience, under changing constraints, and developing exigencies.
That being said, I agree with you in that blog has become revolutionary in its ability to publish and generate information to an audience much larger than any text had been intended for. But I feel the blog has also outgrown the previously, well established definition of what a genre should be. It is more than just the rhetorical situation and formatting similarities. There are variations in topic, design, purpose, audience, etc; too many for it to fit into the mold of just one genre. It’s as if there are too many exceptions to a rule that the rule then becomes obsolete. I think the rhetorical situation should be considered in defining any genre, but to consider something as a genre is categorize it as operating differently from something else. If every text or discourse has some kind of rhetorical elements, then genre must be defined as something greater than just the situation it creates. Miller and Shepherd cite that genres “change, evolve and decay”, and with this shift in thinking about how we communicate and publish, our ideas about classifying and stereotyping what constitutes a genre must change too.
-Jenn Gaudreau
Blog Reponse #1