A while back, I said that I was going to think more about what blogging undoes when it comes to affect. Especially related to academia, I think blogging undoes, or has the potential to undo, stuffiness, rigidity, dualistic thinking, etc. It’s not that everything is all happy and nice all the time in the blogosphere, it’s just that attitudes are less pretentious. Or, maybe, I guess it could be that less pretentious people in general inhabit the blogosphere.

I’m thinking mostly of academic communities of committed bloggers and not bloggers who are “forced” to be here.

I think blogging undoes complete attention to one thing. There is less focus on one thing. I know I seem to always be multi-tasking. Just now, my emailed dinged. I clicked over to see who it was since I’m expecting a bunch of students’ prospectuses by midnight.
In Feeling Power, Boler says “living with ambiguity is discomforting” (197). No surprise there! Developing an informed pedagogy and teaching while acknowledging ambiguity is hard. Doing so when there are so many other things to attend to is really hard. Time is a definite constraint. However, I don’t agree with her that a pedagogy of discomfort only happens in the real material world (196). Whether an idea originates offline or online, virtual worlds can embody a particular pedagogy or habituated behavior. Knowledge is just situated differently. It’s mostly public and freely available.

So, blogging undoes economic and geographic constraints. Usually when we’re farther apart we’re less connected and less affected by the other.

One thing that bothers me about the blogosphere is that gender and race are still issues. I haven’t counted my blogroll lately according to gender, but I’m afraid it may be unbalanced. I know it’s unbalanced when it comes to race. I need to do more to add more diversity to the conversation.
—–