Analytic Reflection - Sci/Tech

When writing this sci/tech blog, my first and main concern was making sure that I understood the concepts that I’d be using to support my personal narrative. If I didn’t comprehend the genre sample, there was no way that I’d be confident enough using it to help support my own interpretation. I also chose a genre sample that actually sparked some interest and that I felt I had some sort of attachment to based upon my experiences. The confidence of writing on a topic that I can relate helps establish my credibility with the audience, which is what I think is most important when writing a sci/tech blog. In Jill Rettberg’s “Blogging,” she says “we trust or distrust bloggers on the basis of our perception of their honesty” (93). If I were an actual sci/tech blogger, it would be my sole responsibility to create a sense of credibility in my writing. Not only can this be accomplished by how I communicate with the audience, but by how my content is represented. The Jonah Lehrer’s scandal was a valuable lesson and I made absolutely certain that any idea that I used from another source, whether it was a direct citation or not, was featured in my post. If I could, I would include hyperlinks to any outside sources that could easily be located on the Internet.

My personal narrative was inspired by a section of Chandler-Olcott and Mahar’s study, “Tech-savviness’ Meets Multiliteracies,” though my aim wasn’t to regurgitate and repurpose the information into a simpler format. In Bazerman’s “Intertexuality,” he outlines six levels or concepts on intertextuality (86-8). I did my best to make use of all six concepts and I feel like I did that. Because my sci/tech blog makes use of citations and sources, my content builds upon a common, current belief regarding what literacy means in this era. Not only did I use text to support my claim that the definition of literacy is expanding and that its expansion is being used to construct identities at an earlier age, but I also took into account a couple of my claims pitfalls. I didn’t want to write in a biased fashion because I feel that injecting my opinions may reduce my credibility, so it was important to me to shed some light onto opposing viewpoints or some of the shortcomings of this issue. On a technical level, to create these six concepts of intertext, I made use of Bazerman’s techniques outlined in his essay (88-9). I featured both direct and indirect quotations in order to support my claims and avoid any misrepresentation of information. I also aimed to use recognizable phrases or terminology, especially within the realm of media literacy and the Internet. Concepts like Facebook are familiar to most users of the Web.

I wanted to write something relevant to my life and relevant to the life of my audience. After all, no one is really going to take the time to read something that doesn’t interest him or her. While issues like health and climate change are important and relatable to some, I feel like new literacies are something on which everyone will have an opinion. Whether an individual uses the Internet or opts to shirk modern technology, he or she possesses some viewpoint. This relevance is described as kairos in Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd’s essay, “Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.” Kairos, while an intimidating term, “describes both the sense in which discourse is understood as fitting and timely – the way it observes propriety or decorum – and the way in which it can seize on the unique opportunity of a fleeting moment to create new rhetorical possibility” (Miller & Shepherd, 2). Since being “timely” is a factor of kairos, I wanted my sources to be as recent as possible because technology is always changing and evolving. What is relevant today in the word of technological advancements may be obsolete within five years. I also wanted make this social issue appealing to a wide range of demographics. College students and parents with children can relate to my anecdotes, my cited research studies, or both.

Overall, I would say that creating the sci/tech blog was relatively painless. Finding the right sources was a bit of a challenge because I didn’t want to choose something that was too dense or wordy. I feared for my own comprehension of the subject the more complicated a source happened to be and I wanted the material to seem approachable instead of off putting. I also didn’t want to bog down my blog with tons of in-text citations because I wanted my claim to be supported by sources, not the other way around. Instead, I chose to hyperlink a few of my sources while paraphrasing some of their concepts. If my audience wants to read more about particular things mentioned, they’re free to do so, but I wanted a majority of my work to be my own.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles. "Intertexuality." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices, Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 83-96.

Miller, Carolyn R., and Dawn Shepherd. "Blogging As Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog." Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and the Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessican Reyman. June 2004.

Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Excerpts from "What Is a Blog?", "Citizen Journalists," and "Blogging as Narrative." 4-30, 84-110, 111-126.