Boese, Christine. “The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution.” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 6 Nov. 2005 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/the_spirit_of_paulo_freire.html.
While weblogs and knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware tools for organizations, klog interface features seem to allow political openings to change corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, through a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy of workers helping and teaching other workers outside the realm of “official policy.“ Given the unvarnished nature of such in-house knowledge making, institutional controls on worker’s minds and voices can be undermined, creating a tension between officially sanctioned controls and policies and contingent and disciplinary knowledge or professional expertise (Friedson, 1986; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Geisler, 1994). Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that klogs can create on a small scale. As another journalist covering the war, I was reading warblogs as my own kind of public knowledge-log, to expand my knowledge of the subject I was covering by reading the postings of independent colleagues in the field.
While Boese is discussing corporate culture (media in particular) when referring to klogs in this way, I wonder about the applicability of this statement towards academia. Could her statement be rewritten to read “klog interface features seem to allow political openings to change [academic] cultures in ways most groupware never intended, through a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy of [researchers] helping and teaching other [researchers] outside the realm of ‘official policy.'” Is this too utopic?
And this interests me:
Michel de Certeau writes of a diversionary workplace tactic called ‘“la perruque,“ or “the wig“ within the sometimes invisible “arts of practice.“ Something of a ruse, “the wig“ is
…the worker’s own work disguised as work for his [sic] employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. …The worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family. (1984, pp. 24-26)
Boese discusses her colleague Josh who was forced to shut down his warblog by TimeWarner, his employer. Was he asked to do this because his blog could be viewed as competition to CNN and Time Magazine, or because his intellectual products are viewed as property of TimeWarner? Was it because TimeWarner didn’t want him using the “scraps” from work that they didn’t value?
But here is the subversion of unedited and interactive blogs and klogs. They live in a place at the intersections of a number of different border regions, between expert and contingent knowledge-making, between disciplinary boundaries, between populist and elitist systems of access to research or technology or capital or power, boundaries between professional life and home life, not to mention, with telecommuting, physical boundaries between work and home (Friedson, 1986; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Geisler, 1994).
Wow! I like this view. The author also relates how we have to negotiate new borders – for example, “TIME magazine is renting my eyeballs right now. No one else is allowed to use them for the moment…“
More utopic ideas:
Peter Elbow would likely recognize these klog evangelists as leaders of a dialogic writing workshop without teachers, with co-teachers, outside of traditional classrooms. But this is also something more—something like the Freire model as a response to oppression, a kind of oppression Freire himself would be hesitant to name as such, centered as it is in the overprivileged West. But if spontaneous and dialogic writing workshops are springing up in this medium, is this not what Freire sought to foster outside the socially limiting and often authoritarian spaces of traditional classrooms? As a tool that not only poaches the texts of the mass media and business knowledge-making, but also discourses of the classroom, klogs as envisioned by Phil Wolff have a very auspicious beginning, at least in theory.
Hmmm…I am unsure of what to make of this article overall. Boese is arguing that klogs in the corporate industry have a way that could induce critical consciousness, but as in the case of her klog at Headline News, didn’t. Also, Josh’s blog was shut down because of the confusion between their intellectual property and his own; that is, his work became disguised as the work of his employer (co-opted, I might say). There is definitely a contact zone here (what Boese calls a border, but I like Pratt’s view better).
Since the klogs I am concerned with deal more with academia (though I am of course, going to try to look at other klogs), I am thinking about how this article relates to academic klogs. I agree that they have a way of changing academic discourse, and of overthrowing the “oppression” of the way academic writing is done – because it can change from product oriented with hidden process to very process oriented that’s open and dialogic (polylogic?). Of course, that’s a simplified, utopic-esque view.
But from the university’s point of view, and from the point of view of the system, who owns this knowledge? Would an investor in a science or engineering department want research to be made public. I know the HCVL has a blog that is password protected, and while I haven’t heard back from any of the researchers involved yet, my guess is so that it protects the research from competitive researchers [Edit: I was wrong. Alex informs me that it is password protected because it is Wiki and therefore open source; the act of logging in creates a trail so that there is evidence of who changed what code when]. So the system is going to actively work to continue to make knowledge a commodity, to ensure that corporation x and university y can own the research and get patents. Especially if this research is done and held on university servers.
In “Blogging Thoughts” by Mortensen and Walker, they bring up the fear that some express of putting their research out there before they publish traditionally, thereby making it easier to “steal” that research. They bring up that blogging is publishing, and therefore blogging one’s research is in effect publishing it and copyrighting it (under current copyright laws), but what if you are blogging the process, and who’s to say some other scientist doesn’t steal your research ideas and then get all gung-ho and complete research on your topic before you do? They will in effect have beaten you to publishing a paper and not have technically stolen a thing (especially if they cite your blog).
I know I have a not-completely-accurate view of science here, but I think I’m on to something? (Notice that is posed as a question and not a statement.)
So, let’s say utopia-land (haha): researchers start klogs and they’re open to the public. Discourse communities arise online where everyone offers feedback to everyone else’s klogs (within a field mostly, and across fields as well). Researchers no longer compete to who can get their idea published first, but rather begin to collaborate and work together. Researchers in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Iowa could all be working together online while working on their separate projects. Competition (and perhaps capitalism? oh, I could wish) breaks down, and collaboration arises, at least within the academic world.
Of course, this is next to impossible. Who funds science research? Private companies who are interested in new technologies, new commodities to sell, new processes to better market or create their commodities, and profits. While I think that an academic world built on collaboration would hasten academic and scientific research, it would also hinder private interests (because knowledge would, in effect, become less privileged and open to all).
So, of course, we’re caught in a contention between conservative, competetive, capitalist academic research and revolutionary, collaborative, communal academic research. Obviously, we aren’t headed towards some utopia – but perhaps we’re headed toward some kind of change?
