In a way, a blog is a virtual home for our overwhelmed, overstimulated minds: a ‘world wide’ place where we can create a space to curl up with our thoughts, whether casual, political, humorous, or intellectual. Jennifer’s blog is a visually-stimulating digital romp through all the methods a spectator/viewer/reader finds in order to engage in performance or literature or music or visual art. From a nod to HGTV and musings whether the homeowners maintain their new modern digs to a considerable interest in library spaces and major book retailers (where have those comfy chairs at Barnes and Noble gone?!), the blog invites viewers to contemplate where they choose to perform the role of spectator/viewer/reader, why certain spaces are preferred over others, and how these choices affect the experience of viewed objects (or things).
Jennifer’s blog posts continuously challenge viewers’ notions concerning the scriptive nature of individuals, the spaces they inhabit, and the things they encounter. Consider - did the comfy chair at Barnes and Noble script Jennifer’s experience at the store, enabling a complete reading of Kafka’s Metamorphoses, thus making unnecessary actual purchase of the book? Or did Jennifer’s preference for reading while in a cozy seat script this non-monetary involvement with the major merchant? Viewers come away from the blog with an understanding that a surrounding environment can influence participation with a ‘spectacle’ (to borrow from Debord), but also that individuals have power to change or affect personal interaction with nearby settings: neither subject nor surroundings can completely control a situation. [However, I am currently inclined to blame Jennifer for the disappearance of the comfy chairs from my bookstore…but I digress.]
Finally, Jennifer’s blog posts point to the practice of scholarship: ultimately a scholar is challenged to create a scriptive thing for an academic audience and that audience has the power to interact with the scriptive thing in the manner it sees fit. Currently, scholarship strives for multidisciplinarity while maintaining due respect for the various fields implicated by such work. While striving for multidisciplinarity, scholars are also challenged with carving out recognized places (homes) within institutions for their academic work – creating a field (“firm ground on which to hold our ideas”) while maintaining ties to multiple disciplines (diligently using “portable concepts/words/terms/ideas”) (http://juszkiewicz.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/charles-bazerman-the-problem-of-writing-knowledge/). Scholars must find the work within which their comfort lies, but their work must have a comfy home in which to be produced. Perhaps our blogs and our involvement in this class are steps in that direction. [Too saccharine? Perhaps that’s appropriate for a metapost...]
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