I am going into this with blog prejudice. I am an inexperienced blogger who essentializes blogs as a medium that is less formal than WebCT, printed pages, critical responses, and even writing journals. The bloggles I wear allow me to see blogs as a form of weblishing (web-publishing) diaries where bloggers create stream of consciousness products for their own pleasure. It is a medium centered on the writer and what pleases him or herself where meaning, like audience, is secondary. It is a place profound thoughts have been thinked before and where colonies of rants infest as though digital was sugar.
In more of my words, I know I do not yet understand the nuanced intricacies of the True blog medium. As I stumble and crash around in this culture, I hope to move past the neophyte position called blahgger and become a seasoned veteran—a blogger with a black-belt if you will—whose bloggles adjust and allow me to see acronyms and ☺ ☹ as subtle strokes in the creation of high art.
At any rate, here I go messing around with rhetorical freedom trying to get down from my high horse.
Definitions I need (Please define as you see fit):
Culture
Rhetoric of Authenticity
Confusions:
intercultural communications
They say, “…the aim is not to describe what someone from a particular culture is like and then suggest how to communicate with them” (2). And then they say, “The purpose of this book is to engage in a dialogue with the reader. We do not believe there is only one route to intercultural communication” (3). And after that they say “1.Take what people say…”, “2.Avoid…”, and “3.Understand…” So how should I read this book? Isn’t it a guide? They are describing situations where particular someones from different cultures are meeting in contact zones. And they are explaining what can be done to avoid essentialism and misunnoncommunication.
Also, for a text which discusses the pitfalls regarding essentializing, I was surprised to read the following positivistic statement, “However, Units A2.1, A2.2 will look more deeply at the forces prevent us all from seeing people as they really are” (21). As if it is possible to “see” people as they really are. My question, which I put to you: What would be a better way to say this? What would be constructivist? I refuse to write the refuse I created to answer this question because it is clunky and ugly and I am embarrassed—alright here is an example (it is a blog after all), “…prevent us from seeing people as they appear to be using stereotypes.” Now that I re-read this, I have to say my initial inclination was correct. Help.
Arts of the Contact Zone
Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (2). Sounds good except—and this is not fully developed especially after reading about the love that was lost in intercultural communications’ cultural dealing section (25-29)—that I want to add something about cultural creation. Unless there is a temporal and numerical clause regarding the establishment of a culture, I think the middle culture described in intercultural communications regardless of how long it exists or how many people are a part of it constitutes the creation of culture through the “meet, clash, and grapple…” But now that I metathink my metathoughts, I wonder if it is worth it to include creation. Maybe contact zone implies creation. What do you think?
