Fame: I'm Gonna Make It To Heaven
So someone at the Saginaw Valley State University likes me. Because I already feature on the Introduction to Information Design (Fall 2002) handout.
And now I feature - albeit in the appendix - in the handout for a paper Gary Thomson gave at the Watson Conference, University of Louisevill, on Saturday on Weblogs as Online Performance. Gary deconstructs performance theory, and applies it to student writing, and how students might regard their assignments as a "cultural performance" and "social constructs" and how weblogs can help students break out of the teacher-student power structure, when writing about popular culture. Or something.
Gary does say something that's been on my mind:
"To all these can be added performance as "all activity carried out with a consciousness of itself" (Bauman). Self-consciousness produces liminality, or the state of being in-between (ideal/actual, make-believe/real)"
And it's true; once more than two people (and you're on of them) start reading your weblog, you're unlikely to be writing "with the door shut"; everyone I know who has any kind of traffic does a "this isn't all me, y;know" rant. And people who get sudden fame - like the Guardian competition winner, scaryduck - tend to add caveats: "Everything you read here is true. Only the facts have been changed." Having a weblog is the ultimate liminality experience; you self-consciously choose what's actual, what's make-believe, and seamlessly pull the two together.
Hey, Gary, I've got an idea: why don't you make me weblogger-in-residence?
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