As we have discussed blogs this semester, we’ve circled around questions of narrative technique, technological affordances, and identity construction using the “technology of self” made available through blogging. Recently, I arrived at an enlightening moment in the analysis of my particular blog, which I think will be helpful when considering other blogs as well. At some point—quite early on—the narrative agency exercised in blogging is not the story told, but the writing of it. The construction of identity is the time investment people put into the blog in order to communicate some sense of mediated self that is vital for them to make public, to put on the record. And the blog is what they use to do so.

In “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre” (1994), Carolyn R. Miller suggested that there are “some centripetal forces that are rhetorically available to keep a virtual community from flying apart (or dissipating)” (p. 74). We have referred to the blogosphere, to bloggers, as some kind of collective rhetorical community. Yet there are many ways to tell a story and construct identity online. So what keeps bloggers together, shapes them in a recognizable way in their particular choices of identity construction online? Miller identifies three centripetal forces in virtual communities that stay “together”: 1) Genre, 2) Metaphor, and 3) Narrative. I believe each of these “forces” is helpful in considering how blogs function as virtual spaces of identity construction.

We’ve discussed blogs as a genre frequently characterized by their features. For our purposes in this class, we used many of these features to discuss our individual blogs: reverse chronological order, comments, dated posts with multimodal capabilities, and hyperlinks to other posts, blogs, or websites.

But is a genre merely a sum of its parts? In “Weblogs as a Bridging Genre” Susan Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Elijah Wright, and Sabrina Bonus (2005) analyze a sample of blogs based on the features present, and those that were commonly understood to be most popular or most replicated within blogs—particularly hyperlinking and commenting—were not actually present in the statistical majority of blogs.

This does not appear a loss for blogs or bloggers, people who live within the rich metaphor of the blogosphere and still seem compelled to write, to link to others who are writing, and in this act of writing and publishing to participate in this “technology of self” to construct an identity that can reinforce their offline identity—or recreate it.

The blogosphere itself is a combination of metaphors under construction—the weblog (“web” as link or connection to others online, “log” as a record of events) and its “sphere” (a space that covers an area, or a place somehow bound enough to be understood). Whether the sphere analogy taps into the additional metaphorical layer of “space” or “place,” there is a sense that every writer needs some place to construct their narrative and, thus, their identity. Bloggers do not have to write about themselves typing on a keyboard any more so than we would have to write about ourselves applying pen to paper, but they do seem to pay attention to the blogosphere as a public space in which to do so. For example, Jeannie Mark (on the individual blog I chose, Nomadic Chick) does not write about the features of the blog she uses—including links and comments—but she does write about connecting to people online and offline using the mutually constructed space of the blogosphere as a starting point of conversation (often in private e-mail and then face-to-face).

In this way, bloggers seem to cohere around the metaphor of shared space—even considering that much of that shared space is under contention and not everyone agrees about what people should be doing there. This makes sense when considering the very Bakhtinian theory and ideas presented in “Emerging personal media genres” (Lüders, Prøitz & Rasmussen, 2010). Here the authors argue that genres are both centrifugal and centripetal. On a macro level, the task of genres is to establish expectations through recognition and repetition (centripetal function of blogs that need to be recognized in order for the blogosphere to continue) while at the same time remain open and useful to the forces of change in situated, shifting contexts (centrifugal function of blogs that individuals take up in everyday practice for their own purposes).

This flexibility of blogs as a genre then allows the multiplicity of bloggers within the blogosphere to flourish, and what also abounds are the variety of stories they (want to) tell there and the narrative techniques they use to construct complex online—and offline—identities. In essence, the success of the blogosphere as functioning metaphor seems to result in large part from the convergence of its technological affordances and the rhetorical exigence of its users to construct narratives and virtual selves (Miller and Shepherd, 2009). (Though the authors do argue that the blog has shifted from genre to medium in their article and more in-depth study of public affairs blogs.)

If the blog offers technological affordances (and ease of use in online publishing) as a genre, and the metaphor of the blogosphere is already strengthened by the links that hold it “in place,” then the blogger herself can focus on constructing the narrative she wants to build. Whether it’s personal or professional or both, whether it’s an alternative vision for herself than the one her cultural positions created for her, whether it’s built as a recovery of a former self or a crafting of a future life. The blogger can focus on what many people assume bloggers come to the ‘sphere for—“self”—without having to invest much time in the “technology” that enables the construction of however many selves she wants to present, represent, construct, or defy.