Hmmm...

I've been thinking the last couple of days about what I want this blog to be. I think the sentiment has been weaving itself in and around the things I've been posting. But, getting to that later...

Right now I'm sort of looking at both what I want it to be and how it can be that. Lately (again) I've been reading a lot of people's blogs who turn out to be English and media faculty at various colleges and universities... and I really like them. And my first instinct is for my blog to be like theirs, and I want to be able to do everything they can do, i.e. they can write intelligently and interestingly about blogs/ the media/ different media/ etc.... and then I almost start to feel hopeless because I will never be able to do that, and my blog will never be that, I'd get overwhelmed, and the self-doubt song and dance starts again. I mean, I am graduating and I obviously must know everything that those people know, those people with years of experience in the world of the academy, who have been trained to take media and absorb it in a certain way. Right?

Uh, no.

Right now I have (will soon have, same diff) an undergraduate degree. And I am sure this project, and this process would have gone a whole lot differently for me had I been a big blogger during my four years here, or paid attention to blogs at all, but I wasn't and I didn't. Where does that leave me in the face of these academic bigwigs? Just because I am about to graduate doesn't mean that I expect that I am now at the level where I could write a scholarly article for a journal... why do I expect that my blog can be at the "level" of their blogs? Is it partially to do with the democratization of publishing? Because it is true, even if my blog looks sparser and no one reads it... my textual endeavor is inhabiting the same space as theirs. It isn't a school paper that is only for my professor to their Jstor criticism for their colleagues and peers... our publishing is a theoretical one to one. At this point, I am looking at what they are doing, and trying to see how it can be imitated, because that is partially how I learned to write for school:
1. read a LOT. (Somehow without getting overwhelmed. That still seems like a key step I'm missing. Do I just not care, and read what I can, or what I think is interesting?) Reading and responding seems like a preferred method: they are all in dialogue.
2. post more. That kind of goes without saying, but alas... how to respond if you don't post?
3. Being self-aware and a little meta about things: acknowledging the things you're doing and why you're doing and what you think is interesting and why also seems like a running theme, which I think I am covering to a degree, if ever so less eloquently.
4. Though posting more is good, sometimes per post less is more. A few sentences of commentary sometimes will suffice, especially if it looks like it is between that and writing nothing.
5. Editing your writing (I think this might become a future goal, because right now that's too much stuff to think about. Who cares if the writing is bad if no one is reading it anyway?)

While I feel that these are all good things for me to think about, I definitely don't want to get too wrapped up in thinking that this pseudo- intellectual wannabe academic blog writing is the only way to go. While immediately it looks like that is the kind of thing I find most interesting and close to what I'd like to be doing, or at least what I'd be wanting to aim for, I know I'm not at all quite there yet, and I want to experiment with other kinds of writing, layout, and ways of thinking in terms of HOW I can get there, without purely imitating... because I know that will only take me so far (just as it did in school).