Introduction to a hybrid genre
I like to begin with explanations to render my writing and its purpose as transparent as possible. This is an academic essay; this is a blog entry; this is an academic entry in a blog that can best be described as a hybrid. This is a blog entry/academic essay that attempts to extract the important generic conventions of both to create a piece of writing that is reflective of its content. This is an academic essay about blogging posted as a blog entry.
So, what do I mean when I call this a hybrid? Well, first of all the content is itself a kind of hybrid. I’m discussing a synthesis of the private journalling undertaken by those trying to heal from traumas and the public act of blogging. I believe that by synthesizing these two different genres a third hybrid genre emerges taking on the characteristics best suited to promoting healing. At the same time, I hope that writing my own hybridized essay will draw on the strengths of the blog genre and the academic essay. The goal is to be accessible but grounded in theory; entertaining but situated within the current academic research and popular literature. Ultimately, since I am arguing for the importance of blogging as a genre it seems only appropriate that I should use the blog as my mode of delivery. Of course, in doing this I am violating one of the conventions of the blog genre–brevity–but I hope that the length isn’t a deterrent to the reader and, since my other entries do adhere to the convention of brevity, I hope that my ethos as a blogger will allow this anomaly to be take seriously.
As further evidence of the validity of this work as both academic and bloggerly, I cite the numerous academic blogs that successfully merge blogging with rigorous academic research. Culture Cat and jill/txt are two such examples. The latter of the two, jill/txt, is maintained by Jill Walker who has also published extensively in academic journals and collections on the topic of blogging. I base my own understanding of the academic blog on her description of an academic blog as one “that both discusses the content of research, the ideas themselves, and that also discusses the process and experience of researching” (“Uses”, 5).
Writing to Heal
Self-help literature, scholarship in writing and psychology, and creative writing theory is rife with discussions of using writing as a vehicle for personal change. One of the greatest proponents of writing as a tool to facilitate healing is Louise DeSalvo. Her Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives is well-crafted to be useful to a general audience and beneficial to scholars interested in this particular area of writing research. DeSalvo is careful to point out some of the dangers in using writing to work through trauma. She emphasizes the importance of using writing as a safe space to work through the traumatic experience and actively
avoiding a retraumatizing or a glorification of suffering. In fact, DeSalvo recommends that such writing only be performed while under the care of a trained professional. However, she still emphasizes the effectiveness of writing as healing and provides strategies for such writing as well as a plethora of ways that such techniques have been employed.
Diane Morrow, MD, a writer and physician, advocates the use of writing in promoting both physical and mental health. Her website, One Year of Writing and Healing, is devoted to helping others heal through writing. While Morrow does note the importance of professional help, she also strongly encourages individuals to use writing as a mode of healing and on her site she provides prompts and ideas to help people engage in a healing discourse. Her approach is strongly rooted in both current research and personal experience. Morrow describes her personal introduction to writing as a way of healing:
I began, during my first year of medical school, a habit of writing in the mornings. Like swimming laps during those same years, it became for me a kind of healing habit. Those were years during which I encountered several firsts—my first encounter with a dead body, my first experience with death, my first time hearing someone told that they were going to die. (“What did you think?” he said to me afterwards, “that I was like a houseplant? That I was going to live forever?”) Writing became a way to record these experiences, and navigate them. It wasn’t that I never got thrown off kilter during these years. I did. But writing was something that helped me get back on kilter. Writing was able, over and over, to help me regain a sense of balance. (“About Me“)
Professional writers have made careers out of publishing writing about traumas that they have experienced. Essayist Joan Didion wrote her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, as a way to work through the trauma of her husband’s death. She too needed to discover herself through writing “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable,
if only for myself”(8). According to DIdion uncovering those thoughts and beliefs could only be accomplished through writing. While memoir-writing seems an obvious outlet for dealing with traumatic experience, the healing powers of writing can also be applied to scholarship. My own scholarship has frequently served as a kind of therapy; my master’s thesis deals with the effects of trauma on language and much of my writing was rooted in my own personal experiences as a survivor of trauma. More well-known scholars have used academic writing as vehicles for psychological healing as well. In fact, Kenneth Burke once said that he had to write Permanence and Change in order to survive.
An established author like Didion is able to voice her emotions publicly, to experience a safe witnessing by publishing her text. The majority of folks, however, do not have the luxury of the open podium of books
and magazines. Many do, however, have the power to blog, to self-publish, in real time and with an audience who can easily and immediately access their thoughts. Such an ability is empowering. As Rebecca Blood has noted: “I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from ‘audience’ to ‘public’ and from ‘consumer’ to ‘creator.'” The issue that creeps in here is one of audience. Witnessing requires an
audience and publishing contracts aren’t prolific. Weblogs provide an outlet for writing and the potential for audience. This is important because even if no one ever reads one of these blog entries, the mere fact that the story is accessible, a public document, gives the writer a sense of being heard.
Witnessing
The psychological community has consistently found that healing from trauma necessitates that the trauma be integrated into narrative memory and that in order to integrate traumatic memories, a person needs to be able to articulate the events that have occurred. It is only through language that we are able to process and work through our experiences. Narrative memory is our historical memory; it is memory that we know to be past and which we can narrate as such. Significantly, additional research has shown that the most effective method of integrating traumatic memory into narrative memory requires not only that the individual tell the story of their trauma but that there is also an audience to listen. Typically this is referred to as witnessing. Witnessing serves as a kind of validation, the recognition by another human being that the trauma did in fact occur. This is particularly important in cases of incest, rape, and other “hidden” traumas in which those who are traumatized are often told that no one will believe them or have been convinced or convinced themselves that they have imagined their traumas. Blogs provide a space where not only can one articulate the story of trauma but also where one can make that story public to an audience.
As an example to further argue for the significance of the weblog as outlet for traumatic narrative, I was able to locate one essay that addresses the powerful possibilities that the blog provides for those suffering from depression and other psychological conditions. One of the interviews conducted by David Kline and Dan Burstein in Blog: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture is particularly useful. In the chapter “A weblog saved my life last night”, Ayelet Waldman relates the story of her “thinly veiled suicide note” (308). Having reached a low point in her manic depression, Waldman was at the point of counting pills, “evaluating the neurotoxic effects of Tylenol, Topamax, SSRI, and Ambien cocktail” when she wrote a blog entry that basically saved her from a suicide attempt. She soon received responses from readers offering support and advice; a friend who read her blog called repeatedly until Waldman answered the phone insisting that she see her psychiatrist immediately; and Waldman’s husband, who was currently on a business trip, read the entry and immediately left for home. Her comfort with and even compulsion to share the personal details of her life on a public blog gave those around her insight into her mental state, something that we usually learn only after a suicide attempt or, in some cases of successful suicides, never at all. Part of writing is coming to understand ourselves; by sharing that writing with others, we also have the potential to help and get help. It’s likely that Waldman, without her blog, would have never asked for help directly. As hyperbolic as it sounds, her blog probably did save her life. Expressing ourselves and communicating with others can be crucial to psychological well-being. As someone who lost her best friend to suicide, never knowing what he was thinking in those last moments, I wish that he had had an outlet of expression, a way to voice his struggles with manic depression, to catalogue his decision to stop taking his medication. Emotional motivations aside, as a writing teacher and rhetoric and composition scholar I believe in the power of language and the importance of writing and as a blogger I believe in the potential of blogs for therapeutic communication.
Why blogs?
An obvious question that my argument raises is: why blogs? Or, why not notebooks, journals, word documents, etc? In other words, why make the writing public? Given the dangers faced by the bloggers that I will discuss later, this is a particularly salient question. Why am I advocating the use of blogs when there are so many ways to write privately? The first reason is that a blank notebook cannot serve as a witness
Secondly, blogging, writing for a public, is a much different enterprise. I do believe that trauma victims should also have a private writing space but in writing for an audience you engage the memories in a different way
As Toril Mortensen and Jill Walker have noted in their research of blogging as academics: “weblogs are more than simple tools and…the way we write in a blog reveals something about how we think that would not be explicit in another medium.” Not only is it significant from a cognitive perspective, there are unique features that blogs possess that make them ideally suited for writing about trauma in a way that promotes healing and invites community. Specifically, I am referring to the practice of linking and blogrolls. A blogger does more than just write their own thoughts and post them; blogging engenders a desire to read blogs, to think about what others have said, and to respond to other bloggers. If the generic conventions are followed, these responses would include links to the original posts.
The role of community
In Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks discusses the role of community in healing from emotional traumas: ”Emotional healing is a process that can take place in any setting where we are genuinely cared for, where problems and difficulties can be talked about and solutions found. Folks without access to therapy can look to supportive friends, family members, and co-workers for help“ (90-91). However, it is significant to note that the modes and methods of healing vary depending on the material realities of those who have been traumatized. As hooks’ notes African-Americans have traditionally relied on community as a source of healing and dealing with the traumas of racism because of the value and importance of community in African-American culture and because their trauma has been a shared one. Community as a mode of healing is significantly increased by the shared experiences. For those who have been traumatized in other ways, those whose traumas occur in a less obviously systemic way, the community of shared experience is not so easily found. The potential for finding and building community online creates access to the supportive resources that would otherwise be unavailable. However, I do want to emphasize that the access provided is still limited to a certain population, namely one with material access to the internet and comfort with using computers as well as a level of comfort with writing ability. It is too easy for those of to whom writing is as comfortable as breathing to overlook the vast numbers of functionally illiterate people in the world. Still, there are many who do have access to blogging and especially for those who are unable to seek professional help either because of financial limitations or because of familial/cultural norms that associate psychotherapy with stigma. As hooks mentions in Salvation, cultural norms have often restricted African-American access to professional psychotherapy.
The Rape Culture of “Meatspace”
Feminist theorists have consistently argued, in what seems to me clearly logical and transparent ways, that we live in a rape culture. Our lives are controlled by the constant threat of rape. To be clear, I am distinguishing between ”fear“ and ”threat.“ Although it may be accurate to say that all women fear rape, fear is something specific to the individual. I’m talking about systemic control. While the fear of rape may influence the way that an individual woman engages the world around her, it is the of rape that controls the way that we all, men and women, are culturally conditioned. In Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape Susan Brownmiller made the first comprehensive attempt to conceptualize rape on a macro level. The basic principle is that because we are immersed in a culture that frequently sexualizes and decriminalizes acts of rape and because as women we are taught to be ever-vigilant in protecting ourselves against rape, the threat of rape functions as a mechanism for control and domination. According to Brownmiller ”rape has played a critical function…a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear“ (15). As I write this, over thirty years later, I have the benefit of decades of research and theorizing on rape and its social functions. As a result, I am more inclined to understand this issue as a systemic one, perpetuated by a patriarchal culture (in part contributed to and continued by individual men) that enlists rape as a method of social control. Still, deflecting all blame on the institution of patriarchy isn’t sufficient , since institutions are created and upheld by people, male and female. Patriarchy is not the rapist and not all men are trying to control all women through the threat of sexual violence. Nevertheless, patriarchal systems of inequality provide fertile ground in which individuals are encouraged to implicitly (even at times explcitly) condone acts of violence. An imbalance of power relations among the genders as well as among those of different racial, ethnic, religious, and class background (to say nothing of the blatant hostility to same-sex relationships) is the scaffolding that allows a rape culture to go unchecked. As Andrea Dworkin noted in her 1983 address to the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, by not actively working to dismantle this rape culture that is inherently beneficial to men, makes them accomplices in the terrorization of women. The failure to act makes us all accomplices in a culture of violence, misogyny, racism and homophobia.
Is there a rape culture in cyberspace?
[Note: I have included very few links to actual sites inhabited by members of Anonymous in this piece because I find the message boards and websites linked to Anonymous to be so objectionable. I have no desire to add to their web traffic or in any way associate this site with theirs. I do, however, include the unlinked urls to my sources should you want to investigate further.]
Before delving into the more specific details of the Anonymous attacks, I want to share what I believe to be an illustration of one of my points–the internet as safe space is a myth and women are silenced to varying degrees by not only specific attacks leveled against them but by the culture produced by the threat of violence. The rape culture produced by violent acts committed. While as of yet there haven’t been reports of people carrying out their violent threats in the F2F world, this is not to say that it has not or will not happen.
My silencing was due to the very real risk that it put my site in. I did not want to become a target of Anonymous. And that was almost enough to keep me silent. My responsibility as webmistress made me further hesitant to speak out. Ultimately, as this paper and its mode of delivery indicates, I decided to speak now and worry about repercussions if and when they come.
I use this as an example because I am not a timid person. On the contrary, I am a firm believer in voicing my opinion, especially when I feel that others have been intimidated into silencing their own. Of all of the people that I know, I am the last person that I can imagine backing down out of fear. Frequently this has been to my own detriment, but I believe that speaking your mind openly is more important than pleasing others. My philosophy–I have two choices: I can speak my mind and feel good about having done so or I can stay silent and maybe please other people while definitely making myself feel bad. While I have the educational background and the relative freedom to speak my mind (even though it frequently comes back and slaps me in the face), not everyone possesses that same level of privilege. While the ability to express oneself freely and safely should be a right, it unfortunately has not been. And while cyberspace has opened up some new spaces for voices to be heard, it has been equally responsible for silencing those voices.
In 1993 writer and computer aficionado Stephanie Brail was involved in one of the first well-publicized attacks in cyberspace. At the time Usenet was a popular collection of newsgroups and Brail and her boyfriend, who were working on creating their own print zine, joined the alt.zine newsgroup. Brail became involved in a flame war after a young woman posted a request to discuss riot grrl zines. Her request resulted in negative responses from male group members including the abusive post suggesting that the poster start her own newsgroup and call it “alt.grrl.dumbcunts.” The woman who had posted the original request responded and thus began the flame war that Brail became involved in. As she describes it: “What happened is less interesting than why it happened. I was harassed not because I was an innocent bystander, or another female using the Internet, but because I had a mouth. I dared to speak out in the common space of the internet, the Usenet” (144). The flame war devolved into more personalized attacks perpetrated via email. Brail’s boyfriend who also spoke up on the behalf of the riot grrl poster received anonymous emails with messages such as “fuck ’em, their daddies did” and “Heh heh–I’d love to see a porno with a father doing his Riot Grrl daughter–she has a bad haircut and is wearing boots with a pink mini. He says, this will give you something to rant about! as he sodomizes her little riot ass” (145). Shortly after those emails, Brail herself became the target of increasingly abusive emails to the extent that they were physically distressing. “When I received email with the word “cunt” splashed across the screen, I became sick to my stomach.” (145) This email and others like it, including “pornographic text detailing gang rapes” (146) seemed to be sent by the same individual, “Mike,” from a variety of fake email addresses. In addition to abusive emails directed at Brail, “Mike” impersonated her on other sites including alt.sex.bondage. As disturbing as all of this was, the moment that Brail became truly fearful was when she received an email from “Mike” at one of her other email addresses and this one said: “I know you’re in Los Angeles…Maybe I can come over for a date and fix your ‘plumbing'” (147). The harassment and violence of the Usenet attacks were rapidly bleeding into the physical comfort zone.
In the Spring 2008 issue of Bitch magazine, “Whack Attack–Giving the Digital Finger to Blog Bandits,” Jaclyn Friedman discusses this summer’s attacks on feminist blogs. Friedman, while guest-blogging on the popular feminist site Feministe, “got word that a loosely organized cybermob known as Anonymous was attempting to crash feminist sites, including Feministe, flooding comments sections with misogynist rants and threatening feminist bloggers with rape and other violence” (45). Friedman and other bloggers believed at first that the posters were trying to silence them and so they “decried these attacks in blog after blog;” they fought back, refusing to be silenced. As Adrienne Rich has said: “silence is oppression, is violence.” Only these posters weren’t trying to silence the women and men posting on these feminists sites; on the contrary, they were trying to piss them off; they wanted them to respond. So, unwittingly, the bloggers gave Anonymous just what they wanted–“hostile chaos” or, assuming you aren’t the one whose site is being attacked, lulz.
So,what is this “lulz” of which you speak?
First of all, the word “lulz” is described as a bastardization of “lol.” Basically, it’s “doing it for the laughs” and there is an online demographic that devotes part of its time to generating “lulz”. (I refer to them as a demographic rather than as a community because their anonymity prevents the organizing necessary for a community.)
Well, their idea and my idea of humor happens to be different. Threats of rape don’t constitute humor to me. But what about the female members of Anonymous (lulz)? We must assume that there are female members, although by their very nature groups like Anonymous maintain a level of secrecy even amongst other group members making such determinations difficult. They don’t frequently publish statistical data detailing their demographic breakdown. So, I don’t know how many women or men belong to this group and if I assume that they are all male, then I would be relying on a stereotype that only men are capable of such acts of violence. Left with little other choice, I entered their sanctum to learn more. Actually, it would be more accurate to call Encyclopedia Dramaticae, itself a lulz site, a more public face of Anonymous. Filled with offensive and self-aggrandizing material–a space of hedonism and homage– it is nonetheless more of a space of record keeping and legal (or at least not identifiably illegal) exchange of information and materials for the group. More importantly perhaps, Encyclopedia Dramaticae has the most comprehensive coverage of Anonymous that I’ve yet to find, particularly because it is a collaborative wiki and because it is written in the voice of the group. The other sites that I located had such offensive material on the first page that I found myself disinclined to look further…at least not from my home IP address. Much of the content evokes the groups overt mysogyny and racism. For example, according to E.D. (pun intentional) there are “No girls on the internet” and those who are (I realize that there is a bit of a logical flaw here, but it’s their website.) should show their tits or leave. For those who will surely respond with an “aw, there just joking around,” read this comment posted by a self-proclaimed member of Anonymous to Women’s Space blogger, Heart:
A. Friend | [email protected] | IP: 66.90.103.37
Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you. In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.
Not Spam — Aug 4, 1:57 AM — [ View Post ]
Since this post was made, the Women’s Space blog has been removed from public access and can be read only at the invitation of the blog owner. This may not mean complete silencing, but they have certainly muted this blog and diminished the potential of these bloggers to reach broader audiences. By forcing the Women’s Space bloggers to take their words “underground” and transform their discourse from a public one to a private one, Anonymous creates silence through the threat of rape, a kind of double violence.
On the other hand, popular tech blogger, Kathy Sierra, was completely silenced by similar attacks earlier in 2007. Bitch magazine writes about Kathy Sierra’s ended blogging career providing a further sobering glimpse into this “humor”:
Her Web site, Creating Passionate Users, was about “the most fluffy and nice things,” she said. Sierra occasionally got the random “comment troll,” she said, but a little over a month ago, the posts became more threatening. Someone typed a comment on her blog about slitting her throat and ejaculating. The noose photo appeared next, on a site that sprang up to harass her. On the site, someone contributed this comment: “the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.”
On yet another Web site came the muzzle photo, which struck her as if she were being smothered. “I dream of Kathy Sierra,” read the caption. “That’s when I got pushed over the edge,” she said.
In what she intended to be her final blog post last month, she wrote:
“I have cancelled all speaking engagements.
I am afraid to leave my yard.
I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”
Still, if we take to heart the definition posted on 4chan.org, which is cited on numerous sites as being the main Anonymous image board, then it would seem that either: a.) the writer of this post has not read the guide to nonsexist language usage; or b.) Anonymous is composed entirely of men.
Who is “Anonymous”?
“Anonymous” is the name assigned to a poster who does not enter text in to the [Name] field. Anonymous is not a single person, but rather, represents the collective whole of 4chan. He is a god amongst men. Anonymous invented the moon, assassinated former President David Palmer, and is also harder than the hardest metal known to man: diamond. His power level is rumored to be over nine thousand. He currently resides with his auntie and uncle in a town called Bel-Air (however, he is West Philadelphia born and raised). He does not forgive. (4chan.org)
Of course, there must be at least a few female members, as evidenced by girlVinyl, a Encyclopedia Dramatica contributor and founder. Her status as female has been confirmed by her public appearances at Lulzcon. There’s another irony here that I’d like to point out. It has been said that works of literature and quotations attributed to Anon. were probably written by women. Anonymous was a woman.
Real world v. cyberspace
There are those who would argue that the distinction between the “real” world and cyberspace is such that the latter is somehow less serious or “real” than the first. I have several responses to that argument. First, I would certainly argue that these threats became real world issues when addresses were published and bodily threats made. An extension of that is that I think that “real world” versus cyberspace is a false binary. Mark Nunes in The Cyberspaces of Everyday Life makes a similar argument. Nunes focuses on the ways that we use spatial metaphors in understanding cyberspace and how those metaphors are not sufficient in understanding the way that we engage in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In “real world” versus “cyber world” we are creating a false dichotomy in which the former is material while the latter is only metaphor. Nunes argues that :
By casting the spatiality of CMC as a world of pure symbolic exchange, distinct from the “real” world of materiality and presence, and thereby creating a binary opposition between the real world on one side of the screen and an imaginary world beyond, this understanding of cyberspace dislocates the spaces of communication from the spaces of everyday life. (11)
I, like Nunes, believe that the complex interaction that occurs in CMC is “not so cut and dried” and that its permeable boundaries are becoming less and less distinct as our technologies and reliance on them advance. As Nunes argues so well: “Certainly the space we are calling cyberspace neither begins nor ends at the computer screen” (11). At the risk of making my logic circular, I believe that the attacks perpetrated by Anonymous prove that cyberspace is not so limited.
Free Speech or Hate Speech?
With Anonymous’ postings we have the issue of free speech to contend. Seriously? Free speech? Is the man (I refer to this user as male because of the reference to genitalia, which may or may not indicate the user’s sex/gender ) who says he wants to create new orifices that he can use to continue raping a woman exercising free speech? Is this what we fight to protect? The right to terrorize and verbally attack others in an online forum. I’m not talking about espousing unpopular beliefs; I’m talking about harassment. If someone stands on a street corner and says those same words, would we not expect someone to take action? Ah, but our problem is that no-body is doing it. This seems to me to be not unlike the KKK supporters who wear their hoods and cloaks before they make public attacks. Hiding behind their white sheets, they can remain anonymous and are no longer bound by the same social codes that govern their face-to-face interactions. They don’t have to worry about their neighbors knowing what kind of cruel and racist human beings they are. Hate speech. Other aspects of Anonymous’ “work” can be debated separately, but it’s the words that I want to examine and I want to question their right to write them and our responsibility to do something about it. As Brail comments: “In real life harassment isn’t confused with free speech…Threats are not free speech. Extortion is not free speech.” (156).
In one of her last posts, in which she chronicles the threats and harassment that led to the close of her blog, Kathy Sierra explains her own position on the free speech debate:
Do not let them get away with calling this “social commentary”, “protected speech”, or simply “criticism”. I would never be for censoring speech–these people can say all the misogynistic, vile, tasteless things they like–but we must preserve that line where words and images become threats of violence. Freedom of speech–however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life. (Archive of “A Very Sad Day”)
I’m opposed to censorship. But I argue, as Brail and others have, that those who threaten and attack online are already acting as censors. They censor internet users through creating a culture of fear. Kathy Sierra no longer blogs. Stephanie Brail stopped posting to alt.zines. Womensspace.com has become a private blog. When Wired_Women was published in 1995 Brail referred to the internet as a Wild Wild West where law had yet to be established. It’s now 2008 and the Anonymous’ attacks of last summer demonstrate that little has changed.
So, why is this important for bloggers dealing with trauma?
I have two reasons for emphasizing the importance of addressing online harassment. The first is that I abhor the silencing of anyone, even those, like Biting Beaver, with whom I do not agree. While her comments were horrific, they were not threats or directly abusive (I think that her comments, if made available to her son, would definitely constitute abuse.) My other reason for addressing this is that I am struggling to find ways to help people deal with trauma. Given that my areas of expertise are mostly computer and writing-related, I am trying to find ways that computer mediated communication can serve as a healing tool for working through trauma. I believe that blogging about trauma is therapeutic on several levels, both for the writer and the reader. What happens when a rape survivor starts receiving comments like the one Heart received? What happens when an incest survivor’s address is posted on the web? How can I advocate blogging as a therapeutic method when these risks run unchecked?
These are our online identities. Why is it that they seem so familiar already?
Sources
- “Anonymous.” Encyclopedia Dramatica.
- Blood, Rebecca. “Weblogs: A History and Perspective.” Rebecca’s Pocket. 07 Sep 2000. 2 April 2008 < http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html>.
- Brail, Stephanie. “The Price of Admission: Harassment and Free Speech in the Wild, Wild West.” in Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds. New York: Seal Press, 1996.
- Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
- DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
- Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005.
- Dworkin, Andrea. “I want a twenty-four hour truce during which there is no rape.” in Transforming a Rape Culture. Eds. Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993.
- Friedman, Jaclyn. “Whack Attack: Giving the Digital Finger to Blog Bandits.” bitch magazine. Spring 2008.
- hooks, bell. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: Morrow, 2001.
- Kline, David and Dan Burstein. Blog: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture. New York: CDS Books, 2004.
- Morrow, Diane. “About Me.” [Weblog One Year of Writing and Healing] 20 Apr 2008 <http://www.oneyearofwritingandhealing.com/about.html>
- Mortensen, Toril and Jill Walker. “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an
Online Research Tool.” In Researching ICTs in Context: A research report from
InterMedia University of Oslo. Ed. Andrew Morrison , Oslo: University of Oslo, 2002. 249-79. - Nunes, Mark. The Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. Minneapolis: U of Minn Press, 2006.
- Sierra, Kathy. “A Very Sad Day.” Creating Passionate Users. <n.d.>
- Walker, Jill. “Blogging from Inside the Ivory Tower.” in Uses of Blogs. Eds., Axel
Bruns and Joanne Jacobs. Accessed from <http://hdl.handle.net/1956/1846> - –“Learning in Public.” On the Horizon. 13:2, 2005. 112-118.