I’m beginning to understand Brabazon’s (2008) objections to Web 2.0: ‘The long tail of proliferating mediocrity, where bloggers link to other bloggers and podcasters namecheck other podcasters, is the great cost of Web 2.0.’ Having started this blog as part of the final component of my MA, I realise that there is, essentially, no audience for one more educational blogger.
It makes me thinks of monks in the medieval scriptorium. They produced beautiful psalm books, for example, but in a cultural context in which literacy was marginal. They had drawings, too, accompanying the script. Sometimes these were didactic, underlining the point of the psalm (and providing a learning experience for those who could not read) but they also did funny drawings, sometimes with a surreal quality that Terry Gilliam would be proud of. I remember seeing one in which a knight has approached a lady, and has slain a unicorn lying between them. The unicorn was a symbol for chastity (no idea why, given the horn in the middle of its head), the idea being that the knight has removed or is about to remove said maiden’s chastity.
Maybe they were bored. I suspect you can only write about the Lord’s greatness a few thousand times before it starts to lose its gloss. But I wonder, too, if they were ever beset by a sense of futility, that they were investing their time and labour in something that wouldn’t achieve much. Maybe not, and I accept that their sense of selfhood can’t be conflated with selfhood as we understand it in the twenty-first century. But, in the absence of an audience and communication, the lone mind undertakes some odd journeys.
Learning needs friction sometimes, so maybe, for a blogger to have a satisfying experience in a quiet room, they need to just play with the technology, think about the creative potential of blogging, and let the learning and teaching ruminations (the content) come after the form has been figured out.
Try
Brabazon, T. (2008) ‘Nothing to lose but our mobiles: review of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations”’, Times Higher Education, 3–9 April, no.1, p.839.
Disruptive Technology Enhanced Learning 
Excellent comparison, I too wonder how much impact another learning technology blogger has in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps, like to the monks, we should be guided by the inner sense of acheivement and fulfilment one might get from publishing creative thoughts of their own.
The question I’m finding difficult to answer, what are my motivations to blog and do I need an audience?
Regards
MarkC
Thanks for your comment Mark. What I realise now is that I should have had an answer to your questions before I started blogging. I think this is one of those contexts in which form should precede content.
A significant test will occur once the final component of the MA is submitted (Sept 28). Will I keep bloging thereafter? I’ve already given some thought to removing the blog from the public gaze (not that anyone is gazing) and keep it as a learning diary, because I’m going to undertake further postgrad study hereafter.