Place Blogging: Local Economies of Attention in the Network Author: Timothy Carl Lindgren Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/647 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English PLACE BLOGGING: LOCAL ECONOMIES OF ATTENTION IN THE NETWORK a dissertation by TIMOTHY C. LINDGREN submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 © copyright by TIMOTHY C. LINDGREN 2009 Abstract This study examines the emergence of place blogging as an online genre designed to foster a deeper sense of place and to share local knowledge. Focusing on a period between 2003 and 2006, it spotlights a transitional moment in web culture when the relationship between online life and offline life is undergoing an important shift. The bloggers highlighted in this study offer a ground-level view of how ordinary writers and readers participate in the transition to what Eric Gordon calls “network locality,” a condition in which the experience of place is increasingly mediated by networked technologies. Because networked life creates an information-saturated environment in which place must compete with everything else for an increasingly scarce resource— human attention—place bloggers redefine blogging as a way to more deliberately and regularly invest attention in place. To do so, they remediate older genres to create a blogging style that differs from the political and technology blogs that were popular at the time: some draw on nature writing and diary writing (essayistic place bloggers) while others tend to draw more heavily on genres of local journalism (journalistic place bloggers). A rhetorical analysis reveals how genre remediation offers place bloggers a range of strategies for managing the flow of attention between self, place, and audience as they interact around digital objects in the network. These insights offer important contributions to scholarly conversions interested in examining how online forms of rhetoric continue to evolve and how our ideas about place are adapting to life in a networked society. i Acknowledgments Thanks to Lad Tobin, my committee chair, who played a pivotal role in helping me find the field of composition and rhetoric and who has been a steady supporter of my work from the very beginning. He modeled ways of connecting the personal and academic, and he enlarged my perspective on writing so that I could take student writing seriously and feel comfortable researching a new form like blogging. Thanks to Paula Mathieu, who has help me see the connections between the political and the academic. She modeled how academic work can be informed and enlivened by activism, and her commitment to community issues has give me an example of how to write both about and with places. Thanks to Eric Gordon, who helped deepen my understanding of the connection between place and the network through his scholarship on network locality and through our neighborly chats over coffee in Jamaica Plain. Thanks to my friends and family, who always helped me believe I could finish if I wanted to and also assured me that things would be fine if I didn’t. Thanks to Cathy O’Keefe for her steady love and support over the long haul. Thanks for the weekend hikes, nights out, and days off together that she sacrificed in order for me to write. Her editing effort rose to heroic heights at the end, and I hate to imagine how it would have gone without her expert eyes. Thanks to Instructional Design and eTeaching Services at Boston College for always affirming the value of my studies and for allowing me to start at 10:00 every morning for the last few years so I could get my coffee shop time in. ii Thanks to the coffee shops that kept me well caffeinated and gave me friendly “third places” in which to write: Cafenation in Brighton Center and Ula Café, Sweet Finnish, and JP Licks in Jamaica Plain. Thanks to the place bloggers—Fred, Alison, Allan, Beth, Maria, Chris, Lorianne, Simon, Lisa, and everyone else—for their generous and thoughtful approach towards place and towards me, without which this project would never have happened. Thanks to the places that have shaped me: • To Fargo, just for being home. • To my grandparents’ farm, for giving me childhood memories of living close to land. • To Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado, for rooting the mountains deep in my soul. • To Chicago, for being the first city I fell for. • To Jamaica Plain, for being the Boston neighborhood that finally welcomed me home. iii Table of Contents Preface............................................................................................................................... vi Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Remediating Attention................................................................................................ 32 Evolving Structures of Attention .................................................................................. 38 The Problems of the Political........................................................................................ 42 The Affordances of Time.............................................................................................. 52 The Resources of Nature............................................................................................... 59 2. Inventing the Self-in-Place ......................................................................................... 73 Place as a Digital Object............................................................................................... 76 Importance of Individual Blogs .................................................................................... 82 Writing a Relationship to Place .................................................................................... 87 A Multi-local Sense of Place ........................................................................................ 97 3. Zooming in on Place.................................................................................................. 105 Blog as Place............................................................................................................... 108 Calling Attention to the Physical ................................................................................ 112 Lenses for Seeing........................................................................................................ 118 Assessing the Costs of Audience ................................................................................ 124 4. The Lure of the Local ............................................................................................... 134 Locating Political Discourse....................................................................................... 136 Calling All Local Bloggers ......................................................................................... 142 The Ethos of Attention................................................................................................ 147 Cultivating Local Audiences....................................................................................... 150 iv The Need for Neighbors.............................................................................................. 155 5. Geographies of Audience.......................................................................................... 158 Caveat Emptor. Be a Careful Tourist.......................................................................... 162 Blogging the Gold Rush.............................................................................................. 166 The Rest of the Story .................................................................................................. 170 Write from the Heart................................................................................................... 173 The Desire for Place.................................................................................................... 177 Reasons to be Proud.................................................................................................... 183 Epilogue ......................................................................................................................... 187 Appendix: Ecotone Bi-Weekly Topics......................................................................... 200 Notes............................................................................................................................... 203 Image Credits ................................................................................................................ 207 Works Cited................................................................................................................... 208 v Preface This dissertation on place began with a displacement. In August 1997, I moved from Newgard Avenue in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago to Boston, where I was about to begin a graduate program in English. I didn’t realize it at the time, but every mile that my friend Ken and I drove in our borrowed Chevy van was storing up potential energy for my academic work, creating exigency that would flow into the project that follows. The transition from Chicago to Boston proved to be much more