Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture

Abstract

State of scholarship on weblogsDuring the past two decades, we have witnessed the introduction of many new digital spaces for writing and communicating, from hypertext, to chat rooms, to newsgroups, to discussion boards, to MOOS and MUDs, to wikis, to peer-to-peer file sharing networks.The proliferation of new spaces for communicating via the Internet has evoked scholarship in the fields of communication, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies from researchers seeking to address the social, rhetorical, and discursive implications.Recently, there has emerged a new object for study of great rhetorical impact: the weblog.The scholarly exploration of weblogs is still new, having up to this point taken place at primarily at conferences.Some examples include Computers and Writing 2003 and 2004, Conference on College Composition and Communication 2004, the Association of Internet Researchers 2003, and Harvard Law School's BloggerCon, a conference devoted to "the art and science of weblogs."At these conferences, scholars have recognized that blogs are more than mere tools for communicating online; rather, they provide new possibilities for the Internet as a rhetorical space.Blogs, some would argue, have revolutionized the way we receive information and connect with each other in online environments.Enthusiasts claim that blogs allow anyone's voice to be heard and resist hierarchical modes of information dissemination and communication.While this idealist egalitarian model of the Internet has often been criticized, we find value in the power of blogs to forego the institutionalization of communicative practices and offer spaces for writing that are more collaboratively constructed than other online spaces, as bloggers freely link to, comment on, and augment each other's content.In this way, blogs allow for the possibility of developing new cultural practices of online communication in relation to previously established modes of ownership, authorship, and legitimacy of content and access to information.Looking at blogs as rhetorical artifacts allows scholars to examine the ways in which they contribute to changing what it means to communicate online.To this end, the articles presented here view the blog through the lens of their social, cultural, and rhetorical features and functions.Through study of the language, discourse, and communicative practices of bloggers, the authors provide insight into weblogs as a means of representing and expressing the self, forming identity, facilitating student-centered learning, building community, and disseminating information.Research approaches range from personal reflections, to critical analyses of segments of blogs, to corpus studies of blogs, to quantitative studies of blogging activity.Building on each other by offering both in-depth descriptions and broader pictures, these articles provide a wide-ranging look at the rhetorical implications of blogging. Definition of weblogsBefore introducing the articles in this collection, we would like to take a moment to define what we mean by "weblogs," or "blogs" as they are often called.Of significance is the emergent nature of the blog as a genre; as Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd note in their article, "The appearance of a new genre is an event of great rhetorical interest because it means that the 'stabilized-enough,' a negotiated balance between innovation and decorum, has broken down