Traversing the city of blogs : pedagogy, performance, and public spheres

Abstract

In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of blogs in order to understand their potential use in the composition classroom with the goals of students writing for a public audience and developing their rhetorical and civic agency. I do so by exploring the potential for the blogosphere as a public sphere and by arguing that it would be productive to view the blogosphere as an ideal city. I argue that the ideal city, as described by theorist Iris Marion Young, provides a potential model for inclusive democratic discourse and for our movement online that can guide the ways we use, design, and engage blogs. While prior studies have viewed blogs as diaristic, I argue it is productive to understand the blog as a genealogical descendent of the zine (amateur, independently produced magazine). By focusing on a study of Fag Rag, a 1970s radical queer zine, I show that blogs can be understood as having a counterpublic readership, challenging traditional notions of authorship, circulating in the public, having multimodal content, and being indeterminate and palimpsest in form. From this analysis, I draw implications for public student writing in the composition classroom in relation to design, editorship, multimodality, and exigence for student writing. I conclude by outlining some possible material practices for the composition classroom, critiquing some potential limitations of my study, and raising questions for future research.