If one were to examine my blog/twitter activity over the last, say, 24 hours, one would notice that all of it occured in the last, say, half an hour (except for one tweet of the amazing new OK Go video).  This is partially because I’ve been pretty busy all day and haven’t been near my computer.  But there’s something else going on…I’ve had time to check my email and my facebook and a couple of other sites at least once over the course of the day.  I had to hear about that music video somehow!

What’s going on here is that my time spent filling our online requirements for this class is still just that…time explicitly set aside for doing what I feel I should rightfully do to feel like I’m adequately participating in this class.  It’s set apart from other activities just like reading an article or writing a short essay is–and I don’t think is how this aspect of our class should work.  I was hoping that tweeting, blogging, and commenting would become part of my daily rhythm, and especially that my ideas for blog posts would flow rapidly and possess an casual air that my current attitude in writing this post certainly lacks.

But I don’t think this is completely my fault, nor can it be blamed on any individual in the class.  I think the…blooming, if you will, of our blog community into somewhere that we flock to and check up on regularly would be an organic process that’s a bit hard to explain.  Shirky discusses, early in his book, the widely-acknowledged phenomenon that group behaviors are complex and cannot be explained as the sum of the behaviors of many individuals.  And I’m trying to find some explanation in Shirky why blogging still feels (to all nine of us, I think it’s safe to assume) like an obligation (blogligation?).  I mean, it is an obligation.  But still.  I have this vision of a class blog filled with all sorts of impassioned conversation; I think I remember Jason mentioning that the Wire class’ blog came the closest to this, because the Wire is so %&*~@($ing good that it inspires that kind of passion.  In our little blogborhood (ugh…though maybe a better term for our little community), I’ve been trying to comment on people’s posts, but it feels like a bit of a fruitless task, and I feel like I’ve been dragging my feet every time because: 1. there is little chance of that comment inspiring further discussion, and 2. my posts have been commented on twice, both times by prof. Mittell.

I think Shirky’s “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production” chapter–which mostly focuses on Wikipedia and how it functions quite differently from a traditional, capitalist and/or hierarchical organization–holds maybe the closest thing to an answer.  And I think it has something to do with the way people contributing to any given website are a small percentage of those even visiting that site, and that group is in turn a tiny fraction of all web traffic, and they go where they go on the web because those are places catering to their very specific interests.  Shirky mentions the fact that in order to voluntarily make time for a new activity, one must find that new activity more interesting or fulfilling than something else that already occupies a portion of their waking hours.  And media studies interests me quite a bit, so I’ve tried to absorb information on the topic in the past, but I didn’t, say, visit any blogs focused explicitly on media criticism.  So perhaps, as a group, we simply all haven’t made that shift in priorities that would allow our blogmunity (blogdom? blogitory?) to truly flourish.  It’s not something you can force……but I think we’re getting incrementally better at it.

So, I guess the best way to close (if you’ve read this whole thing, or at least skipped to the last paragraph) would be to say, please comment!  Let’s have our first real online conversation right here!  Tell me if you think I’m talking out of my ass, if you think you’ve thought of a better tie to Shirky than I have, or if you have an idea for some way to more thoroughly blend, right here in our blogship (these get worse and worse…), the personal/fun with the academic.