Média et sens critique

Bon, puisque mes commentaires sont toujours refusés… Ma réponse à un billet de cos.

Pour une raison ou une autre, quelques-uns de tes billets apparaissent dans mon Tag Surfer. Donc on doit avoir des intérêts communs.
Avec les média indépendants, espérons que les gens ne commencent pas à les prendre trop au pied de la lettre. D’après moi, ça reste important de garder un sens critique. D’ailleurs, certains lecteurs de DN parmi mes amis font un peu comme les lecteurs du NYT: ils se limitent à une source et ne cherchent pas ce qui se cache derrière cette source. Pour ceux d’entre nous dans le domaine académique, c’est une stratégie assez dangereuse en ce qu’elle encourage la pensée unique.
D’un autre côté, il y a un mouvement très sérieux (bien que très minoritaire) vers une réflexion plus poussée sur le statut de «l’information». Garder son sens critique par rapport à ce qu’on lit. Les blogues font parfois partie.de ce mouvement, mais il y a plus que ça.
Mon espoir, personnellement, c’est qu’une grande proportion des gens en viennent à penser de la façon la plus large possible. Qu’ils apprennent à comprendre comment les autres pensent.
Mais ça, c’est ma déformation professionnelle en tant qu’anthropologue.

Blogging Spree

Weeeeee!

My, oh my!

It might be the Back to School mood, or it might be something (I was advised to write more, for personal reasons) but it seems like I’m going through an intense blogging phase!

Man!

You know what? It feels gooood!

Several of my latest entries were in fact drafted a while ago.

And this one is a collection of short entries that could have been expanded entries.
Late August Quickies

So, all of these aren’t new entries. But publishing them helps me in many ways. As silly as it may sound, these drafted entries were starting to become a burden on me. So, publishing them feels like lifting that burden. This feeling is behind many people’s “to do” lists. My mother talks about that feeling you get when you cross out an item in your “to do” list. It’s hard to describe but it’s easy to understand if you’ve ever felt it. In my family, “to do” lists are called “vélo (faire du),” an example of our oikolect. It comes from the French “bike (to do).” My older brother noticed that item on one of my mother’s “to do” lists lying around and found it pretty funny. It stuck. My family also has a term for the opposite of procrastination, “fullfur” (/fUlfyr/ in IPA). It comes from English “full,” which has been used by young French-speakers in Eastern Quebec to mean pretty much the same thing as “totally” as used by U.S. youths, and “au fur et à mesure” in French, which means pretty much the same thing as English “as you go.” Both of these terms go well with my family’s ideas about time-management. Not that we all follow these ideas. But I have been enculturated into these ideas.

Anyhoo (!), back to blogging sprees.

They’re quite therapeutic. Maybe because they stimulate da buh-rain.

And I notice a number of things about writing and blogging strategies. Seems like blogging really works best if it’s kept spontaneous. But going back to previous entries can be pretty satisfying too.

There’s pretty much no reason to wait before posting an entry. RERO!

As I expected, writing a lot without too much self-censorship really helps to develop writing abilities. Not I’m necessarily that proud of my writing but I do write a lot and some people have complimented me for my writing style. Especially as a non-native speaker of N-guh-lish.

Editing can be easy and fun if enough time has passed since the last revision. It can be a b*tch when it’s done right away.

The entries I’m most proud of (yes, there are some) don’t tend to be the most read ones or the ones garnering comments. But they feel really good to write. In a way, the fact that they’re not read so much encourages me to stay humble, which is helpful to any writer.

Linking is fun. So is playing with categories/labels/tags. Actually, it’s quite likely that nobody notices my use of categories as counterpoint to my entries, but I do it for fun anyway.

My growing obsession with getting more comments might die out pretty soon. And as soon as it does, I will be getting so many comments that I’ll have to moderate my blogs!

There’s a chain reaction or domino effect to blogging. You write about one thing which makes you want to blog about another thing, etc.  So you go on a blogging spree during which you want to post 25 entries a day. Eventually, your blogging fervor peters out and you only blog a few times a month. It’s quite likely that getting comments has a large influence on whether you’re on a blogging spree or not.

Given the way blog entries are read, it doesn’t seem to matter much if an entry’s structure is tidy or “chevelue.” Good thing too as my thoughts tend to be pretty scattered. (Yes, really!)

Erm, and, it’s actually hard to press that publish button, sometimes.

Oikolect!

Got it! The term for a family’s linguistic idiosyncrasies is oikolect:

oikolect@Everything2.com

Don’t you love it when you find the Right Term(tm)?
The reason I’m excited is that I found it in a neat way. Went to Babelfish to find the Greek prefix for family. Though I can’t read Greek, the prefix looked like “oiko” so I did a search for “oikolect” (using the logic behind “idiolect“) and it just so happen that the word has in fact been used in exactly the sense I was thinking about.

Man are those Internets great!

Will eventually need to look into published research about oikolect. Come to think of it, the term might have been mentioned in one of my course in linguistic anthropology. So I should probably feel bad about not remembering it. But one of my most recent resolutions is to not feel too bad about my limits. And it’s working!

Memes and Brights

[Drafted this a while ago. Seems like The Brights are becoming quite active these days.]

A critique of the “meme coining” centred on the negative connotations of the “bright” adjective:

Brights: Not Too “Bright” (Doubt and About)

A few scattered thoughts.

Continue reading Memes and Brights