Thinking out loud here. Excuse the randomness and the highly questionable connections I'm about to make...
In the newest issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Amy Lynch-Biniek describes the popularity on her campus of the grammar guide Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, which sat on best-seller lists for months last year. I was interested in her suggestion that one of the causes for the popularity is what Barbara Ehrenreich elsewhere calls "the fear of falling," an insecurity among members of the (shrinking) middle/professional class, an anxiety (a justified one at that) that they might fall out of their comfortable positions. Lynch-Biniek suggests the cultural obsession over "correctness" in writing (she argues that--at least on standardized tests--comma errors trump ineffectiveness in terms of what damns a piece of writing) reflects this anxiety. Grammar guide as self-help book. Grammar guide as means to (maintain or achieve) social position.
In my own research, I've critiqued ways that open-admissions colleges institutionalized (via curriculum, obviously, but also in representations of college mission and particularly in its communications with working-class community members) this use of language as class marker and "achievement."
But I'm thinking about the present moment, the burgeoning popularity of blogs, for example, and moments where the culture maybe chipping away at a middle-class sense of formal-correctness-above-all. I know the party line is that blogs, like any other textual phenomenon, build their own conventions which are just as rule-bound as any other. But I'm not so sure. Doesn't blogging, at the very least, break down notions of middle-class decorum inherent in what books like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
The grammar guide revels in its ha-ha titular pun, which is a warning about the lack of "clarity" that arises from a punctuation mishap. But don't blogs revel in something quite different...a reveling in language that's messier than the "1) learn the rules, 2) become part of the initiated crowd, 3) make fun of those on the outside of the club" assumptions of grammarians? Blogs revel in language play that doesn't necessarily require the initiation process? Join in the reindeer (language) games and take part in appropriation, error-making, tentativeness, randomness, and incoherence.
And yet, blogging requires access, so we get a new version of elitism and exclusion.
6 comments:
Hey Bill,
Interesting thoughts that you're having here. I think that ideas of blogging and the correctivity of "language" seem to break down ... but to a point.
A lot of bloggers have no patience for what some might call "netspeak" with all of the inserted symbols for words that are just too hard or (not cool enough?) to type out.
So I think your last point about accessibility and elitism is a very profound one. Whenever there is a broad based, culturally pluralistic system of communication it still seems to all break down into levels of caste. Even language caste. One of my very dear blogging friends is a grad student in Pakistan and in order to be understood on the internet she must constantly be typing in English.
So, in a way we're connecting. But then, doesn't it seem like we're perpetuating a lot of constructivism in the way of rules as well?
Don't get me wrong, I adore blogs. And somehow, I've come to think that I've just really had this crazy circular logic going on that makes no sense.
So! I've been thinking quite a bit about how it's going for you up there in good old MI. Sounds like bloc party was a rad show. I got out to Sufjan Stevens the other day (what a bore) but I'm looking forward to going to a New Pornographers show in October.
Good to talk and bounce things around again!
-Chelsie
Bill! I did it! I went to the protest! It was the most amazing thing I have ever done in my life. I'll send you pics. Courtney
I don't think blogging necessarily breaks down that sense of middle-class decorum: in fact, I'd argue that blogging is what Veblen would call an act of conspicuous leisure; it shows that one has the privilege (via, yes, access) to learn blogging's conventions. "LOL," "ROFL," smilies, and "1337" are not signs of sloppiness as much as they are shibboleths. But yeah, I'm totally with you on the fear of falling thing.
Chelsie:
Have fun at New Pornographers show. I've been spinning the "Twin Cinema" disc a lot at work (I hope I'm not pissing off my neighbors!). Was initially sad that there weren't more Neko Case-sung tunes on it, but I really like the peppy tunes like the title track. Good stuff.
-B
Mike:
Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the access and leisure-time issues are always among us. It's important for me to keep that in the foreground constantly. But, at the same time, I see the rhetorical tropes of blogging as moving against, say, what Bourdieu defines as decorous. A materially priveleged group of agents using non-decorous tropes. But, as you say, tropes that nonetheless become shibboleths. Institutionalized non-decorum?
I'm late to this party, but I thought I'd give my two cents.
I found this blog after googling my name--not out of vanity, but out of fear. I am job hunting, and a stream of articles in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Ed tell me to fear my google results. Potential employers, it seems, generally detest blog activity in their potential employees. So, while I might enjoy breaking rules and ground in my own little corner of cyber space, the activity may just keep me from getting past yet another set of gate-keepers. Gah!
Maybe I should just change my name and start over? ;)
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