[ neoblogical ]

This is Your Brain

This is Your Brain on a Summer Thesis

I am sitting here VERY late on turning in my M.A. thesis for the Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Kennesaw State U in Kennesaw, GA, right outside Atlanta. I have to get this thing done in order to begin my doctoral studies at Georgia State U next month where I’ll be studying Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical and Professional Writing (or where I won’t be starting until next fall if I don’t get this done).

So, you might ask, what the heck are you doing blogging when you are supposed to be writing your thesis? Good question. Not sure I know. I guess I needed a brain break.

Ironically, my thesis is about blogging. It is a rhetorical and genre analysis of the subgenre of Frontline Milblogging (blogging from the front lines by active duty military personnel). Currently my brain is saturated, or should I say marinated, in works by Jay Bolter, Anna Munster, James O’Donnell, Leon Breure, Carolyn Miller, Tim Lindgren,
Christine Hine, Richard Grusin, Susan Herring, Marc Prensky, et al. And the “et al” is a pretty long list. So I guess I needed a moment of distraction.

I look forward to talking about some of the ideas in my thesis soon, and some of the ideas I came across in my research that didn’t make into my thesis.

Back to the writing cave.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, PhD Studies, Doctoral Studies, RhetComp, Rhetoric

I’m finally here in the blogosphere. Well, sort of. I am really in my study typing on my computer. Yet as soon as I click publish, I will somehow “inhabit” the online world of blogging.

As a writer - as a consultant in web design, communications, networking, and computing - as a student of rhetoric and composition with an intense interest in emerging forms of digital media - and as a future college teacher - I have hesitated (procrastinated?) in adding my voice to the increasing online cacophony of noise and voices. Will I simply add to the noise? Will my voice blend into the background, adding incrementally to the oppressive weight of information overload?

I hope not.

I want to offer something new, something useful - thus the name… NeoBlogical.com. “Neology” refers to a new word or phrase, or the act of inventing one. In this sense the word is synonymous with “coinage,” and is linked to ideas of creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to be a pathfinder. (The term has also been used several times in the past few centuries to refer to new theologies in Christian and Jewish tradition, especially a German rationalist approach to Christianity.)

So here begins my offering. We’ll be considering many subjects here: rhetoric, film, fiction, poetry, popular culture, religion, music, art, family, parenting… you name it. If I am interested in it, or living it, I’m going to eventually have something to say about it, and a desire to get my readers to see, as I try to, old things in a new light.

Maybe this will come from finding new ways to say old things, or maybe it will come from finding new things to say. However it happens, we need to always be becoming new. In this sense, each day we should get newer rather than older. We should always live with the realization that we are on our way to infinity, and perhaps beyond. Otherwise we will wake up one morning entangled in our finite, stagnant lives, and we will look around at the greyness of it all, and we will wonder, “How did I get here?” Or we might never wake up wondering anything, never taste the infinite, swallowed by the grayness of ignorance and stagnance.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Digital Culture, Online Life, RhetComp, Rhetoric