Blog 3

Autoethnographic Post

Unit 3 has been dedicated to thinking about how the Internet has changed the way we write, even when not writing for online media outlets. We’ve seen how poets Tommy Pico and Sophia Le Fraga have incorporated Internet slang as well as online experiences into their poetry. We’ve also seen how novelist Takatsu used his cellphone to write a novel very different in style than most novels. The third blog post asks you to reflect on how the Internet has changed your own writing.

This assignment requires you to practice ethnographic observation to document—not speculate—about your writing on and offline. Let’s start with ethnography: it’s a systematic way to study cultural phenomena from the perspective of the people under study. Ethnographers participate in a society, take notes, and reflect on how normally unobserved social patterns work. Autoethnography does the same thing, but the person under observation is the writer herself. That means you will observe your own writing practices, document them, and explain their cultural significance.

To do that successfully you will need to make explicit connections between your own writing practices and broader cultural trends. You should be thinking about your day-to-day writing, with emphasis on writing in online contexts (although you should reflect on how that context influences others). Pay attention your own writing goals, habits, styles, as well as written interactions. Also pay attention to how your writing changes when you move from one device to another. Does hardware make any difference? Or is software (i.e. platform context) most important?

To enrich the documentary aspect of your autoethnography, use at least one image or video that you make yourself. You can use camera images or screen captures, but of course do not reveal anything too personal. This will go online.