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August 7, 2003
Taranto Likes His Grapes Sour
I'm thinking that one of the projects in the Freshman Composition course I'm teaching will be a rhetorical analysis of a weblog. With that in mind, I might ask them to read this article by James Taranto from the Wall Street Journal Online that claims that political blogs are not well-suited to the medium because they are not sarcastic enough:
Blogging, in short, thrives on sarcasm. Politics doesn't. So it's hardly surprising that Dr. Dean's blog is earnest to the point of sanctimony, all we-can-make-a-difference and let's-build-a-better-America.It's pretty clear that Taranto has his own goals in dissing Dean's blog, and he's making a hasty generalization or two about the blogosphere. After all, Dean's blog seems to be working pretty well, thank you very much (note: in the fifteen minutes I composed this entry, at least ten new comments were added to Dean's blog). And pardon the sarcasm deflation, but since when did believing that one can make a difference become a bad thing?
Still, the editorial might serve as a useful starting point for talking about audience, argument, that sort of thing. Howard Rheingold also has an interesting comment or two about Dean's grassroots use of blogging.
Posted by chuck at August 7, 2003 12:09 PM
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Interesting stuff. You'll keep us updated as to how the class goes this semester?
A few other things that play into the dynamic you're highlighting here: First, a recent post on Rhetorica with some opposite thoughts on blog sarcasm:
http://rhetorica.net/archives/001398.html#001398
And then this BBC article about the (already) declinging nature of the blogosphere. I'm hoping the author is being ironic, as his text repeats more egregiously the very thing he condemns in blogs, but it's another index of the kind of parsing going on in terms of blog "substance." The link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3134629.stm
Posted by: kenrufo at August 10, 2003 3:24 PM
Thanks again for the links. Rhetorica will probably be required reading in my freshman composition classes, especially in terms of the anlyses of the media, which will be an important component of the first unit of my classes. I'll certainly blog about teaching. I think it's an important part of my everyday experience. I've been lucky at Tech so far in that my composiiton classes can cross-pollinate slightly with my research.
Posted by: chuck at August 11, 2003 12:51 PM