Looking from the inside out: academic blogging as new literacy

This chapter draws on an ongoing ethnography of blogging which centers on our lived experiences of digital writing and online publishing, tracing how this maps onto and extends social networks, and contributes to an emerging affinity group or online community (Gee 2004). The production and consumption of blogs is seen as a new form of social practice, dependent upon specific genres of writing and meaning making—a practice which reconfigures relationships and can engender new ways of looking at the world. Our autoethnographic approach provides an insider view of blogging as a new and popular screen-based literacy practice. In this chapter, we reflect on the processes involved in the production and consumption of blogs as well as blogs as textual material in their own right. We have become interested in exploring the way in which blogs work as interactive texts; as texts which are jointly composed and which are interwoven with other texts, texts for which authorship is often multiple and unpredictable. We have found that an autoethnographic approach has allowed us to experience at first-hand, and therefore to understand more closely, how blogs work as a new type of text. Furthermore, the nature of the inquiry itself repositions the researcher, as both subject and object, and in this way breaks with the more separate stance of traditional cultural ethnographers. Here we comment on some key C H A P T E R E I G H T