The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

Users and uses of private blogs 49
2.3.4 Thinking by writing
Nardi et al. observe that a number of informants rely on blogs to “work through
the writing process”, often tied to other contexts, such as academic writing:
While “thinking” might seem a solitary activity, or one not quite
social, in blogging the presence of the audience and the writer’s
consciousness of the audience clearly introduce the social into an
individual’s thought process [..] “Thinking by writing” embeds cognition
in a social matrix in which the blog is a bridge to others
for getting explicit feedback, but also a means by which to regulate
one’s own behavior (writing) through connecting with an audience.
(Nardi et al., 2004a, p. 227)
These observations are somewhat problematic. Firstly, it is not “the presence
of the audience” that has any influence on the production of a blog entry,
since the audience is variable, opaque and passive. A blog reader may write
a comment on a blog entry after it has been posted, but this logically has no
influence on the text of the post. Blog entries are (sometimes) written as a response
to news items or other blog entries, but in such cases the overall direction
and shape of the post is still determined by the blogger alone. Thus it is the
awareness of the audience – or, more precisely, the blogger’s conceptualization
of an audience – that shapes his writing, not any factual audience itself, since
it is spatially and temporally detached from the blogger. Furthermore, though
it is simply a counter-claim to a claim, I dispute the assertion of Nardi et al.
that bloggers necessarily regard their blog as “a bridge to others for getting explicit
feedback”, because it contradicts how many bloggers (including those in
the study conducted by Nardi et al.) characterize their own activity. Concrete
readers cannot directly influence bloggers, but the perception of being observed
and acknowledged by others appears to be an important source of motivation
in relation to blogging.
My counter-claim can be substantiated at least somewhat with a very brief
review of the psychological aspects of composition. In their extensive work
on the subject, psychologists Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) introduce the
concept of discourse schemata, which act as cognitive blueprints for different
types of discourse (essentially the strictly psychological dimension of discourse
genres). They assert that discourse schemata can be described as closed or
open, depending on whether or not they require social input to be produced.
Thus a conversation constitutes an open discourse schema – there is constant
feedback that eases the communicative process for the participants, because they
do not have to determine direction and structure alone. By contrast, a narrative
constitutes a relatively closed discourse schema, because it requires the speaker
to direct and organize his speech (or writing) by himself, without external input.
Children, Bereiter and Scardamalia found, have difficulties producing longer
uninterrupted pieces of coherent discourse even about familiar subjects. While
there are various explanations for this (lack of experience with the practice,
insufficient motivation) it can be hypothesized that the systematic organization
of thoughts that takes place in writing over a longer stretch of time (hours,
days, or in the case of academic theses or novels, months and even years) can
in and of itself be a positive, grounding and even therapeutic experience (see
below). The human ability to create structures of language-encoded thoughts