Blogging Pedagogy

It's funny to me that the first 110 congresses did not feel the need to declare writing important, but that the 111th Congress did. I wasn't exactly sure what this meant, so I decided to look at the actual language of the S. RES. 310 Expressing support for the designation of October 20, 2009, as the National Day on Writing. We are clearly in the realm of the epideictic here. There are several phrases that could have been written by any of the other 110 congresses:

• "people in the 21 st century are writing more than ever,"
• people are writing "to create meaning through composing,"
• "more and more people in every occupation deem writing as essential and influential in their work," and
• "writers continue to learn how to write for different purposes, audiences, and occasions throughout their lifetimes."

But there are a few points that should jump out at those of us theorizing so-called new media:

• Whereas developing digital technologies expand the possibilities for composing in multiple media at a faster pace than ever before;
• Whereas young people are leading the way in developing new forms of composing by using different forms of digital media;
• Whereas the National Day on Writing honors the use of the full range of media for composing, from traditional tools like print, audio, and video, to Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts;

First off, I'm not so sure that the age of people really matters. As a recent article in The New York Times pointed out, even though Twitter has been, for years, hailed as the hottest social media app around, teens don't appear to be using it (yet). Access and free time seem like more important factors in the creation of emerging leaders in new media. Access to new media resources and time for free play create environments that lead to discoveries that lead to new forms of composing. Maybe I'm just feeling like an aging Gen Xer sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, but breakdown by generation just seems so stale.

What is more interesting to me are these words: "expand" and "faster" and "different" and "full range of media." Rather than using old demographic categories like age to put people and writing in boxes, these words signal the true significance of the National Day on Writing. These are category bending words. And, as writing expands its territory like a rhizome, we begin to realize that even the rhizome has become—like a lawn—institutionalized. (This isn't the House we're talking about, people. This is the Senate.) We all now know, apparently, that writing is getting faster and expanding in multiple directions.

Whereas "whereas" is not likely to appear in a text or tweet, we should also consider how speed and expansion rewrite writing. R we prepared to deal w/ the changes of teh tech? R we ready to see speling as a fad? that U can't pin down grammar? Can we pin ABCDF on stuff we can't pin down?