Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Thinking about Community on Jezebel.com
Hey all, for our practice run of the new blog project we've chosen jezebel.com, a multiple-author blog that talks about "celebrity, sex, and fashion for women" from a feminist slant. I've also gotten several links to adorable cat videos on youtube from jezebel..... if you're into that sort of thing. The posts are pretty varied.... some are interesting juxtapositions of visuals and text, some are opinion pieces on gender issues, and some are brief commentary on news links. Take a look at a number of posts to get an idea of the conversations, tone, and different slants on the blog. Look through the suggested prompts for respondents on the blog project assignment sheet and start commenting. I'm particularly interested in different approaches to feminism and "fashion" and femininity and how they interact on the blog.
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I thought it interesting to note what a great emphasis the blog--and its comments--placed on appearance. By appearance, I don't simply mean a focus on how we dress (since one of the blog's three main stated goals is to talk about fashion). A large part of the posts are merely pictures with captions or magazine covers prompting a long string of responses. One of these magazine covers features Brad Pitt and a shocker title about an alleged affair. The comments in response address not only the content of the story, but the way that Brad Pitt looks on the cover. Many of the posts also discuss airbrushing and the way that models and actors appear on magazine covers. In consequence, the ideas of sex and celebrity (the other two advertised topics of the blog) become intrinsically connected with how we see and perceive people. (To be seen is to be a celebrity. How are celebrities seen as sexy?)
ReplyDeleteThis emphasis on appearance leads me to consider the appearance of the blog itself--the literally two-faced woman that graces the banner with the blog title Jezebel, and the highly colorful ads that promote shows like Nikita (the female killer) and books titled Dirty Sexy Politics (by Meghan McCain). The blog seems dedicated to a readership of motivated, assertive, even aggressive women. The comments of the readership would seem to support this assessment as curses, abuse, and competition vie for attention. Perhaps molded by the images and attitude of the blog itself, the readership becomes the Jezebel, the sexy yet potentially violent or disruptive woman. This is the woman/women that the blog truly displays, turning itself into a tool of self-observation (Who will respond to my comment? Look at my witty jab.). A box tallies the number of comments displayed within a 24-hour period, drawing attention again to the readership, and we are reminded that many of the posts are dominated by reactions to pictures rather than written text produced by the blog authors. One of the most highly visible things on this blog are the readers--and these appear to be largely women. The blog both produces a certain vision or a certain way in which women appear, and simultaneously is also produced by the female readership.
“As Suspected, Facebook Is Popular With Bad People”
ReplyDeleteGenerally, the comments on this post tend to question the blog’s claim that most people who use Facebook are either inherently self-absorbed or desperate and lonely. I think the term that people are turned off about is the use of the word “bad” to refer to people that are popular and liked on Facebook. One comment, responding to the idea that most people who use the system are narcissist and people who have a low self-esteem, argues that there is a much wider audience on Facebook than the writer realizes and that simply because a person decides to post pictures of themselves and has a lot of friends does not mean that they are less ‘good’.
What I immediately thought of when I saw the word ‘bad’ to describe Facebook users is that society has a very real habit of using terms like "us" and "them" to describe each other. I think that the person disagreeing has a point, when I had a Facebook I saw a variety of users and while there were people with an impossible number of friends, it never bothered me one little bit. I think that you can start to get to know someone based on what you observe on their Facebook (what sorts of reading they’re into, movies they enjoy, etc) but ultimately web profiles do not cut it. How would you respond to the claim that many Facebook users are egotistical and therefore ‘bad’ people?
http://jezebel.com/5633035/as-suspected-facebook-is-popular-with-bad-people#ixzz0yzU3ke56
I think that this blog's choice of tags to display on the header is interesting. By way of providing examples for how to tag a post, the categories of #tips, #snapjudgement, and #groupthink are repeated at the top of every blog-post and page. Indeed, they're visually linked with the icon and name of the blog, as they share the same, regular visual space. These tags therefore seem to emerge as part and parcel of the blog's persona.
ReplyDeleteIt is notable, then, that two of these tags lead only to a list of user's reply-comments. Disconnected from their original contexts on the blog, the #tips and #groupthink stitch their contents together into one continuous stream. Even #snapjudgement, which does link to authorial blog posts, provides a list composed almost entirely of pictures -- posts that, for the most part, lack any text beyond the headline. To me, it seems that, not only in wording, but in the content linked to as well, this trinity of repeated tags suggests that an emphasis on the importance of community (feminine readership) and appearance (of celebrities) is central to Jezebel's identity - an observation which echoes some of Erin's suggestions above.
I agree with Erin that most of this blog is dedicated to being a "tool of self-observation" as she puts it. There is much more content in the comments than in the blogposts themselves, which are often part of a section simply called: Snapjudgments (the pictures plus captions Erin refers to above). While the FAQ section says that in order to become a commenter you must first "audition" by writing an interesting, humorous, or substantial comment or reply to a thread, these standards don't appear to be difficult to meet in practice. In fact, most of the commenters' credibility seems to come from the fact that they are people with opinions who believe those opinions should be heard by (inflicted on) others. Interestingly enough, when one of the Snapjudgments mentions Snooki being upbraided through the use of popculture references by a judge for "disturbing the peace," many of the commenters express anger at his doing so. As one commenter puts it, "Hey Judge, stick to judging and leave the pop culture references to us, ok?" as though his "ordained" ethos actually takes away his right to make petty, snap judgments.
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ReplyDeleteJezebel has been doing a great job in taking on intersectional issues of race/gender lately, I think, along with its focus on "Celebrity, Sex and Fashion." I was really drawn to this post ( http://is.gd/f7q5W ) on Gabby Sidibe's October Elle cover. The author, Geneva S. Thomas, isn't a Jezebel staffer-- she has her own blog, which the editors chose to repost this article from.
ReplyDeleteCommenters generally agreed with Thomas. One example from commenter Valkyrie670votesMizJenkins: "...and yet her smile is so fabulous and infectious that it took me several minutes to notice the hair, which, I agree looks completely wack. And the amazing photoshop or lighting job which makes her look several shades lighter than she really is. WTF. Total #racefail, Elle. Thanks for reminding me why I don't buy your crap magazine."
So, there’s clearly a lot of interaction, and identification with the author being reflected in the comments. Disagreements seem to revolve around exactly how bad Sidibe looks, how much it matters, and whether it has more to do with her race or her figure.
However, I was especially intrigued by the 15-post debate this posting by commenter happydance spawned: "why is the author being so mean about another black woman's hair? As a black woman myself it's that which I object to. Sometimes I have good hair days and sometimes bad; for another woman to judge me harshly simply because I'm black snd thus my hair should not show any trace of that is absurd and really superficial. Why does her hair have to look 100% " typically white" to be acceptable? In this instance you ( the author) show yourself to be less supportive of a beautiful black woman than ELLE"
To highlight just one rhetorical move, happydance draws on her authority as a black woman to refute Thomas' (another black woman's) opinion about another black woman. It's a pretty basic one, and an effective one, as I think some other comments reflect.
Though white women are not excluded from this conversation, some white commenters' rhetorical move in postings for this piece note their personal distance from the issue.
Commenter nansense says: "I don't know how much one white girl's opinion counts on the matter of black hair, but I'm just going to say it: I think she looks beautiful and happy and fucking *radiant*, and I'm beyond thrilled that she's on the cover of Elle."
Stellalukin commented that: "This isn't the best she's ever looked, but I love the glow about her. The 14 year old white suburbanite in me who subscribed to Elle ca. 1986 is completely knocked out by this cover, no matter what the hair looks like."
I think it’s interesting that, in spite of one’s opinions on “playing the race card” as a rhetorical move, the Jezebel online community is clearly one in which the commenters feel comfortable self-identifying in terms of race. Maybe it’s because it’s assumed that they are already united in terms of gender and a vaguely feminist POV?
I like the idea that Jezebel is a "tool of self-observation," and am interested in what that might imply. The title of the the post that Carmen looked at--"As Suspected, Facebook Is Popular With Bad People"--makes me anxious, presumably because of the lens it casts back on me as a Facebook user. The blog post was based around a link to a newspaper article describing a study at a Canadian university which found that college students who exhibited traits of narcissism or self-hatred tended to be the heaviest users of Facebook. While the writer of the Jezebel post, Anna North, shows some skepticism towards the study based on its sample size, and also raises the crucial question of correlation vs. causation, she still ends with the line: "So if these studies are to be believed, Facebook is basically composed of egotistical, sexy jerks, and the sad, lonely people who judge them. The future is sure looking awesome." This sarcastic line, along with the deliberate semi-irony to the word "bad" in the title attempts to draw the reader in with humor. It works, at least insofar as there are 15,000+ views, and a few of the comments seem mildly funny. But if the goal of this post was to encourage self-reflection (and maybe it wasn't--it is certainly possible to view it as simply an attempt to garner hits, an opinion supported by this depressing Slate article by former Gawker staffer Emily Gould suggests: http://www.slate.com/id/2259434/), it seems like less of a success, in that the discussion is limited and polarized by the good/bad, narcissist/self-hater language employed by the piece. As Carmen noted the impulse of many of the commenters is to respond in somewhat defensive terms, either with snark, or with an earnest counter-claim for a "good" Facebook user who is neither a narcissist nor filled with self-hatred. Still, that’s not the whole story, and one of the interesting things about the comment threads is that a range of types and tones of comments can exist side by side, the reasonable and analytical (see Ellbells' comments about the youth of the study's subjects, and moonbird's appeal--from the rhetorical position of a researcher--for skepticism regarding the methodology of the study and the way in which it has been reported) along with the glib and snarky. How effective is this in creating a range of views? Do the different tones talk to one another, or across one another? To what extent is there a community, if a community is defined by sustained two-way interactions among members of a group?
ReplyDeleteI was left me wondering a little bit about prompt number seven: do I think Jezebel actually does anything? If I limited my views to the post I just discussed, or to the clip of the worst fight from Jersey Shore, I'd almost certainly say no. But there are actually a range of other posts on the site that seem a great deal more useful, both to me and the commenters on Jezebel. There's this girl's guide to losing your virginity to a girl, which quite apart from its possible practical applications, also seems to foster a sense of support among queer commentators, who are happy to see a more visible presence for queer sex issues on the site, and post a bunch of supplementary reading: http://jezebel.com/5633948/social-minefield-giving-your-v+card-to-another-lady
There's also this intensely thoughtful piece from a few months ago about how to fashionably accessorize your insulin pump (full disclosure: I know the author), which seems to have struck many commenters as tremendously useful in spurring their thoughts about femininity, disability, and fashion, and even though I don't an insulin pump, it immediately got me to thinking about my relationship with my CPAP machine (the device that I wear while I sleep to counter sleep apnea): http://jezebel.com/5553766/insulin+pump-accessories-and-cyborg-embodiment
Any other thoughts about the utility of the site? Is the Jersey Shore video more useful than I'm giving it credit for being?
I read these comments before I wandered over to the blog, so it’s possible my opinion was pre-formed, but I agree with Erin when she says that the blog is mainly a tool of self-observation. The blog itself actually reminded me of an old SNL skit with Mike Myers called Coffee Talk (maybe? It’s been a while) when his character would simply bring up a topic and then say “Talk amongst yourselves.” I clicked on a link to an article questioning whether an ad telling new mothers that they would lose weight by breastfeeding was really appropriate. Three short paragraphs and two YouTube clips later, the article simply appealed to the reader: “What do you think, commentors? Is the ad effective or offensive?”
ReplyDeleteThe comments ranged from funny to serious, but all of them were opinionated. In fact, many were opinionated without seeming to have any basis for the opinion. The comments section became simply a place for women, many of whom confess to never having had a child, to make blanket statements about what it was “right” for other women to do.
Another link showed a gallery of photos from Charlotte Ronson’s fall line. Minimal text, thirteen photos, and a whole lot of comments. And again the clever, strident opinions. Like Ben, I wonder: does Jezebel actually do anything? Sure. It provides a place for me to go, view fashion or snappy articles, and then to let other readers (mostly women) know what I think about the topic in question. Alternatively, it provides a place for me to read similar (or not) opinions. It gives just enough information to get the conversation started. “Here,” it’s saying. “This seems interesting. What do you think?” But it doesn’t really want to know. It just wants me to say something.
Like Ashley and a few other commenters, I was struck by the commenting policy on Jezebel. It seems both brazen and ingenious to demand that commenters “audition” to appear on the blog. The word choice implies a kind of desired visibility that underlies nearly every commenting feature on blogs. Though the commenter is not the Blog Author (capitalization intended), s/he is part of the virtual community, and as such, possesses certain responsibilities to maintain a high level of discourse. In theory. Of course, we see a wide range in the quality of blog comments, from those on Lamebook to Gawker’s self-proclaimed readership of “smartest, savviest and funniest in the business” (the business of commenting?), but the goals of content-moderation are similar, whether the moderation is done through official or unofficial channels.
ReplyDeleteAs a person who reads many blogs and writes a few of her own, I find that one can always tell a lot about a blog by its commenting policy. There are those that completely disable comments and those that strictly moderate comments--and of course, there are the free-for-all blog comment sections which can prove both appalling and arduous to slog through. The interesting thing about blogs that don’t include commenting capabilities is that they often spawn “reblogging” sites that poach content and provide commentary on the original blog--often of the vitriolic sort (see Reblogging Nonsociety to Julia Allison’s Nonsociety website). This reblogging phenomenon raises great questions about authorship, meta-discourse, and virtual communities, but it seems to suggest, more than anything, an attempt and inability to contain content on the internet.
So back to Jezebel. In the website’s post “Know Comments: Rules for Readers,” the writer outlines some essential FAQs for participation in the commenting sections. The rhetoric of the post suggests that this site is something apart from other unfiltered, haphazardly-run sites out there. It demands that its readers follow some scholarly conventions, such as citations and proper grammar and punctuation. The writer of the “Know Comments” post states, “We will not tolerate YELLING at us or at other commenters, and that goes for the use of ALLCAPS, over-the-top punctuation (!!!???), excessive sarcasm, overheated rhetoric, hyperbole and ad hominem attacks.” Clearly, these are all things for which to aim in any sort of writing, but I have to ask myself if the underlying goal of Jezebel’s commenting policy is actually to exclude a certain segment of the commenting population from that desired visibility written into the process of blog commentary. Would any person off of the street automatically know what it means to include a citation--or for that matter, would everyone understand that an all-caps treatment is inherently a source of derision? These questions present some interesting contradictions in our ongoing discussions of academic versus public writing. In this instance, public writing conflates or attempts to edge into the territory of academic writing, by using the conventions and textual references implicit in academic writing. Jezebel actively seeks to separate itself from its web counterparts by spotlighting and enforcing a division between those versed in certain writing conventions and those who are not. Is Jezebel’s commenting policy just about moderating the quality of comments or could it also be about enforcing us/them distinctions between the “smartest, savviest and funniest in the business” and ... everyone else?
Applause to Annie for a great artifact choice! I was particularly drawn to three features of the interface. For ease of reading, I’ll divide them into three separate comments.
ReplyDelete1. Tagging as Rhetorical Performance
As on Twitter, Jezebel authors use their subject "tags" as a site for rhetorical commentary and humor. I particular adored #americanappalling, #socialminefield, #snapjudgment, and #crapemailfromadude.
Could be a super fun class exercise to generate snarky (or depressingly honest) tags about your classroom blog. Would they tag stuff as #awesome, #rhetorockstar, and #analysisforthewin or would they say #boring, #obligatory, #required, or #pleaseusetheenterkeymoreoften?
2. It's About the Convo, Not the Content
ReplyDeleteI noticed that *less than half* of Jezebel's interface is devoted to actual content, yet ample space is given to the posting time, author, number of page views, and number of blog comments.
There's also very little encouraging us to stay on any one given page. It's almost as if Jezebel says, "If the content compels you, stay awhile and view/join the convo. If it doesn't compel you, find something else on Jezebel that does compel you. We don't want to bore you."
That might seem benign, but--and I'm cringing with guilt as I say this--that's probably not the same effect that we'll produce on our own FYW blogs. If we're not careful, our blogs might say, "Compelling content is just our shill game. In reality, you *have* to read this whether it's interesting or not." I'm hoping to track down a few less-than-stellar blog posts where commenters constructively steered the author toward a more compelling way to present the content--after all, Jezebel-style blogstars are made, not born, and half of our students' work is to sustain and improve the original author's convo.
Jezebel could be a great convo starter with students about the Commonplace interface and how crucial a great title and opening line can be in attracting, and holding, an audience for their Commonplace piece.
3. The Genealogical Approach: Jezebel as Feminist Stepchild of Gawker
ReplyDeleteIf I were going to teach Jezebel as rhetorical artifact, I'd draw attention to its genealogy as a Gawker spinoff. Remember Sarah Palin's email account being hacked during the election and some blog published the screen shots, photos, and address list from that email hack? That was Gawker. They are also famous for the now-defunct Gawker Stalker, which allowed people to post celebrity sitings in Manhatton on an interactive Google Map.
When Gawker discovered that about 70% of its readership was female, they created Jezebel to better capture sex, fashion, and celebrity topics. A fascinating heritage for an allegedly "feminist" blog.
If I were teaching Jezebel as rhetorical artifact, or any "big blog" for that matter, I'd encourage my students to hit Wikipedia and learn the blog's heritage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezebel_%28website%29
I'd also encourage them to check the audience statistics through Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/jezebel.com). IMHO, no rhetorical analysis of a blog is complete without a careful look at its audience.. And boy can that be a rich source for analysis--for example, I want to see the two-page freshman paper about why Jezebel.com is the third-most common destination (behind Wikipedia and Youtube) for people who entered the term "gay for pay" into a search engine.
4. Okay, finally a blatant linkout. I hope you'll swing by my own blog, where I have been making a series of posts about the Pre-Quarter Workshop and relevant tech resources for English 110 teaching. Sometime Monday or Tuesday, I will def. add one (or two or three) posts about tools for awesome-ifying your teaching of blogging. http://www.jenmichaels.net/blog/
As someone who doesn't frequent blogs at all, I may be speaking more to a feature of blogs in general than Jezebel in particular, but I found it interesting how posts on what are nominally the same topic (Lady Gaga, in this case) garner vastly different conversations and reactions. I followed the one about Camille Paglia calling Gaga the end of the Sexual Revolution and the conversation was essentially a shouting match between people who hated Camille and people who hated Gaga. There wasn't a lot of love for either one; it was much more attack-based.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the posting of Gaga's VMA White Carpet appearance in an Alexander McQueen dress, with two LGBT ex-military (I think?) escorts was just a long string of love notes for both Gaga and the dress.
I suppose this is partly a function of relative areas of interest (feminist politics v. red carpet fashion), but since I clicked on both, I assume that others would do the same. It makes me wonder, then, what makes someone post a comment on one "issue" and not on another, particularly since many comments consist of a short sentence or two, and are presumably not a giant time-suck.
Because this blog seems to be generally focused on the conversations surrounding posts rather than the posts themselves, I wonder quite a bit about the community here. Are most people frequent visitors? Once a day? Once a week? What proportion of visitors comment? What does it mean if you're someone who frequently visits a blog that consists mostly of conversation and you never contribute?
For me, blogs including Jezebel serve as a "tool of self-observation" (or self-examination) in the sense that I use them to discover the limitations of my own experience and perspective, to define and then try to fill my cultural blind spots. I'm the person who follows the #rape tag, and the #fatpanic tag, and the #blackhair tag, and the #transgender tag, and the #xenophobia tag, because what is most valuable about the blogosphere, to me, is the opportunities it gives me to learn about other people's experiences and perspectives, and to recognize my own privileges. This is very important, I think, for critical thinking and analysis; if my only frame of reference is my own experience, I have no way to even know where my blind spots are. Of course, for every tag I follow on Jezebel, there are a slew of blogs out there devoted to the subject, and treating it in far more depth- so I usually end up reading through archives elsewhere on the web. Jezebel seems particularly useful to me, though, because it's so general- including those tags and many more, along with links to other sources of information- that it can function as a gateway blog for people who may not even know, starting out, that they have blind spots to fill.
ReplyDeleteReading through comment threads, it's apparent that many commenters use this as a place to share experiences, but there's no way of telling how many, like me, read (and learn) without ever commenting. My suspicion is that on virtually every blog, lurkers vastly outnumber commenters- but I don't know what it means, if anything, to belong to that category. My feeling is usually that I don't have relevant experience to share, or in the rare event that I do, I'm usually so late to the post that the conversation is basically over. I'm a pretty irregular visitor to this blog.
The last prompt for writing about the blogs perhaps intersects the best with my thoughts after wandering around Jezebel.com for a while.
ReplyDeleteI'm left from my meanderings with the feeling that I've been walking around Times Square or central London for a while, and my senses are overstimulated.
I am going to pose this as a question: how,as teachers, do we help guide a discussion (or do we?) when there is a posting of a blog such as this one? By that question, what I mean is that this blog has incredible richness in terms of its content, but as other posters have already commented, the range of topics is almost too much to comprehend (hence,overstimulating). If this were to be used in, say, a class on representations of women/women's issues in pop culture, it would provide everything from commentary on social networking (Facebook, Twitter), to fashion, to vintage advertising/how advertising to women has changed over the years, to entertainment news of allsorts -- music awards, gossip, papparazzi-esque photos, etc.
Sites like this feel like they are meant for those who are already passionate and knowledgeable about a topic area, and know the few things they come to look at -- hence, people above have commented that they follow certain tags. But how does this help the knowledge of someone completely new to either the topic or to this form of organising material?
I ask this in part because I am not a blogger; and maybe I am just too old or too slow to realise that everyone is used to this much information being thrown at them and already knows how to filter it? But it seems to me that perhaps it is possible that a blog with less information might actually convey more information to viewers new to the topic, such as me, or such as our students? I'd be curious what others think.
Now I'm off to go waste more time trolling Jezebel again ... who needs sleep, anyway?
@Andrea- you write, "it seems to me that perhaps it is possible that a blog with less information might actually convey more information to viewers new to the topic"- I agree. I'm reasonably familiar with Jezebel and with blogging more generally, and I much prefer more focused (usually single-author) blogs because I find them much easier to handle, more consistent, and more likely to treat their subjects critically and in depth. On the other hand, one possible advantage of broad multi-author blogs for pedogogical purposes is the sheer range of stuff available to comment on- easily overwhelming to the individual reader, but full of interesting opportunities for discussion when you have twenty people each noticing/focusing on (see what I did there) something different.
ReplyDeletePicking up on what Erin said a while back, I, too, was struck by the limited amount of words each "article" contained; in fact, it seemed to be a mash up of videos, photos, and a few words peppered in here and there. It definitely makes this site more approachable, right? Some of my favorite posts dealt with videos, such as the "10 things you missed this week on TV" or small "bite-sized" nuggets of text like the "article" on losing your virginity to another woman.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, after looking at this site, I am curious about what "conversation" it enters into and how I might work it into my own course theme: "The Rhetoric of Activism." This site seems to be influenced by the culture (or cult) of Sex and the City, and like this groundbreaking show, represents perhaps a new dimension to feminism. Here, I would want my students to try to articulate how this site is an activist site? What traditional conventions does this blog dismantle or refocus? How does our critique of this site change after we read Steinem's "Woman's Work"?
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ReplyDeleteI found the blog to be interesting in its supposed focus on examining the visual world of fashion and women (though that's a pretty broad description of one of their aims). Mostly I noticed that despite the blog's intent on criticism, the page space seems to be comprised mostly of pictures and visuals. Each post was accompanied by some form of visual media (a picture or short clip) and the content to follow was limited in scope.
ReplyDeleteI found that issue of empty content to be most evidenced by the article "Social Minefield: Giving Your V-card to another Lady." This articles was written in response to another article that discussed women losing their virginity, and this particular post focused on women losing that status to another woman. What I expected (especially due to the title Social Minefield) was a discussion regarding the unique nuances of women losing their virginity to other women as opposed to men. I hoped to see the author comment on some of the differences between the two situations and then perhaps discuss the nuances of the latter over the former. What I encountered, however, was a list of outside quotes structured beneath bigger ideas such as "Keep communication lines open." And while the quotes excerpted did address some of those issues, I would be hesistant to call this article a post so much as a cornucopia of different ideas loosely listed alongside one another. This seemed quintessential of Jezebel, and I was dissappointed to see the blog shy away from critical writing and instead opt compilating the thoughts of others
In each post, the authors of Jezebel take on a near-identical authorial persona, one that intermixes the snarky, hyperbolic rhetoric of a pop-culture junkie and the critical and deconstructive language of academic discourse. Their invented ethos as feminist pop-culture commentators comes explicitly from a balance between fan-culture and critical distance, where an occasional Saved By The Bell reference is used to clarify a particularly dense snatch of queer theory. At times, this authorial persona allows the writer to position herself outside the mainstream of media criticism, to the point where outside opinion can be derided carte blanche. In one essay, author Anna North repudiates the sterile and sober sexual rhetoric of a Daily Beast article, one that investigates the divide between pornography and art, by delivering a shrug-inducing “who cares?” In other articles, the author positions herself more as an avid consumer of pop-culture than as a critic; their Lady Gaga articles are, in particular, a little fannish. In all, the authors of Jezebel linger in the liminal space between consumer and critic, fan and scholar. The authorial personae found in their articles are informed, contrarian, and engaging, but above all honest about the paradoxical relationship between writers and pop-culture product.
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ReplyDeleteI lack serious blog experience. But this one shows a wide array of peoples' opinions, and I like this. The articles themselves seem lacking in length, but the comments were interesting to read. After reading this, I confess I went hunting for blogs more up my alley. And boy did I find some. I had no idea so many blogs existed on so many diverse topics. I found a few blogs about my hometown, some on authors I like, and one even on insect fighting (the gambling on insect fighting, to be more specific). So I have full confidence taht my students will find their own blogs, no problem. I would hope, though, that they choose some of the more livelier blogs. A few blogs seem to have only two or three comments per post. This will not do. I think it would pay to give examples of worth blogs to our students, and make clear that the blog not be too obscure for real analysis to take place.
ReplyDelete