not sooooo frustrated

Blogtalk is winding up. Much better than yesterday, but then again, I nicked off after lunch for Mel’s seminar yesterday, ditching Glen, so who knows?

Feh. I got bogged down with description in my presentation and missed my opportunity for the fucking excellent audiovisual moments. Bah. Then I got nervous and totally fucked up my explication of the paper’s core points. Shit.

Wow: the illustrious Mark Bernstein suggested that I write him a feature for TEKKA magazine. “Finally, someone’s critiquing the digital storytelling form,” he sighs as I blush prettily. (Sorry, Mark, I gave up on Tinderbox in the first hour of use. Steep learning curve indeed.) I brought up digital storytelling’s tendencies towards teleology to relate it to narrative therapy’s presumption of a coherent subject. I’m currently thinking of ways to work the medium with the destabilising insights of blogs as an accretive medium, rather than to succumb to the closures of more teleological narratives. Yeah! Marica Sevelj from the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand gave me a headsplitting bunch of digital storytelling resources for just such an enterprise, which I’ll be following up in earnest.

Mark also just broke my head open with the observation that content aggregation, whether it be via RSS or whatever, is fundamentally unable to capture the meaning that lies in between texts. A possibly obvious point, but when posed in the current context, this points in a really interesting direction for my research project. Oh, and another bite of his, about authenticity: “nobody’s who they say they are”. Huzzah!

Didn’t quite know what to make of Chris Chesher’s identification of the refrain of authorship in blogging. I kept compulsively finding counterexamples to his points.

Katie Cavanagh’s presentation, which was about writing marginality and the space between public and private, was incredibly dynamic. While she doesn’t share any of the bases that I’m working from, and I’m really skeptical of her humanism, but she provided an irresistable context for me to think more.

In the middle of a quite interesting and potentially radical geek critique of monastic authoritarianism and corporatisation in the education system, Sebastian Fiedler just made a really weird conflation between “open, conversational learning” and blog narratives in general. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said, “Why try to create ways to find marginal stories as a project? If you structure your writing in a certain way that supports the opening of conversations about how to achieve X or Y goal, people will naturally come to you”. WTF?? Talk about the utter instrumentalisation of the Web! Such a conception of value does my head in!

And right now, Rebecca Blood is saying something much more interesting about value anhd publics, as perhaps a corrective to a discourse of “zoologically preserving the Long Tail” (my term) that she thinks Mark and Katie are creating. “‘We’ need them more than they need ‘us’ — maybe not everyone wants to be read by a lot of people.” Hmmm.

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference, theory ]