267 Computer Culture VI: Aristotle’s Dream: Coming to Terms with Online Genres
In this session, there were two presentations. The first of which dealt with seeing blogging as the sort of new rhetoric. Here are my notes:
Blogging enables orality in a written media - allows discourse - allows “read/write web”
The conversation is important.
Authoritativeness of written stuff. Writing takes away memory enables us to forget.
Dynamism of weblogs enables change.Greek culture - classical rhetoric really valued orality/discussion. The advent of writing as a tool for the common person had severe questions - if people could write things down did that mean that people’s memories would deteriorate?
The second presentation was about technology and worship theology. I don’t have a lot of notes from it, mainly because I think during the whole time I was trying to grasp the big picture - but I think I was trying to grasp the wrong big picture.
During the questions I asked about the PrayerBlog phenomena. I probably didn’t articulate myself well. The answer was something like “prayer request boards have been around for a while”.
To me this is in fact a deep commentary on the popular conception of a prayer as when we ask God for something - as opposed to us just being still and listening to God.
Otherwise I had no comment on this other than that imagining a bunch of people in a chat room typing “and also with you” seems a bit comic.
Here are some notes from the discussion afterwards that reflected a sort of convergence of the general notions that could, IMHO, be extrapolated (with a bit of stretching) from both of these papers - but also went well beyond that too:
There are extremes of interactivity (from extreme to lack):
RealLife - Blogging - WrittenPrintBlogs: a return to importance of the author (in terms of credisility) versus the text
Certain Greek words of relevance
topos (place - would be Socrates’s name for his blog?)
ethos (character)
kriyros(sp?)Continuing redefinition of the term blog.
Individual blogs as a source of information - “not good” - same with anything on the web - same with any written text - same with anything - people must think critically.
To conclude and to link back to some of my stuff, the “Writing takes away memory enables us to forget.” reminds me very much of some thoughts about the impact of technology on my life.