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Weblogs as small worlds
Ultimately, I want to argue that weblogs encourage the creation of the kind of small-world networks that I am discussing here, that they allow us to engage in both centripetal and centrifugal gestures, thereby enabling both the structure and dynamics of such networks. As a way of making this series of claims more concrete, I turn in this section specifically to the blogroll.
The blogroll is one of the core features of the weblog, one that hearkens back to the earliest stages of weblogs in their incarnation as filter or link logs. At its simplest, the blogroll is simply a list of those people and/or sites that a given blogger chooses to acknowledge. There are any number of possible motives for inclusion: reciprocity, admiration, identification, etc. It may serve a practical purpose as well; it is often easier for me to use my blogroll as a set of bookmarks to take me to a particular site.
As a system, the blogroll bears a synecdochic relationship to weblogs in general, and as such, provides a perfect example of the larger claim with which I want to end this essay. My own blogroll contains a broad cross-section of people and motives: in this list, I include people I consider close friends, my faculty and student colleagues here at Syracuse, colleagues who were once students at SU, friends of friends, acquaintances (academic and otherwise), and even people with whom I have little to no connection whatsoever, but whose writing I value. In many cases, the only thing that some of these people have in common with others of them is that they're all on my blogroll. Many of these links are centripetal in that they reinforce friendships that pre-date my blogroll, but there are plenty that are centrifugal as well. And the status of any given link can change over time--I may lose touch with someone I once saw almost every day and someone I knew only through my computer screen may become a colleague. The link may stay the same, but my investment in each of those links fluctuates.
In other words, the blogroll, even one as static as mine tends to be, functions as a deictic system, a space with a certain amount of stability and centripetal force which nonetheless makes room for centrifugal gestures as well. And just as I check my friends' blogrolls to see if there are new sites that I might want to add to my own, I assume that at least some of them do the same for me. Blogrolls strengthen the ties among those in a particular neighborhood of weblogs, but they also serve as intelligent agents, tipping me off to other resources or sites that I'll investigate because I trust the person doing the linking.
Are these kinds of activities social? Collaborative? Interactive? Dynamic? Of course they are. Will they show up in a way that allows them to become part of the economy of the writing classroom? That's a trickier question. Blogrolls, and blogs more generally, provide a relatively stable space for variation, a deictic system for writing, that only partly overlaps with the expectations typically found in the writing classroom. Blogs allow for a proliferation of discursive gestures, both centripetal and centrifugal, both inward and outward, but these various gestures aren't all equally valued in pedagogical contexts.