Blogs and Bughouse Square
Posted on June 5, 2008
Filed under Uncategorized
So, we just finished watching Pixar’s Ratatouille last weekend, and in reflection about blogging, I’m reminded of the famous chef’s philosophy, “Anyone can cook.” Similarly and snidely in a blog,, “Anyone can have an audience.” This can be wonderful, and it can be weird. When I was a girl growing up in Chicago, my dad’s office at one point was right next to Bughouse Square, across from the Newberry Library, where, before it was gentrified and cleaned up, the park was home to any manner of speaker. The speakers would stand up in various parts of the park and create as much noise and as wide a circle of audience as possible. I remember being particularly interested in a man who was dressed in a cocktail dress with a flamboyant feather boa and admirers trailing behind. Anyway, blogs remind me of Bughouse Square.
What I do like about reading blogs is the hyper text. I find myself clicking here and there and reading more and more in a dizzying fashion about a wide variety of things. (By the way, I couldn’t get the video to work on how to link in a blog, so I gave up trying to do that in tonight’s blog.) I do think that the hypertext in blogs does make it different than reading black and white text. The reading becomes less focused and linear, in a way, but also rather tantalizingly like peeling an onion and finding more layers and layers of things to read.
I’m not certain about the uses of blogs in learning, or the business of meaning making. The only thing I know for sure is that blogs have given anyone, anywhere, the possibility of an audience, for better or for worse.
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