Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

I entered the blogosphere on July 26, 2005, with three posts fueled by my concern about the Patriot Act and what felt like a terrible trade of liberty for security in the face of terrorist threats. Specifically, I was provoked by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian tourist killed by London police in the Underground. Three weeks after terrorists bombed the London subway system, de Menezes had the misfortune of drawing police attention with his bulky coat and nervousness. I could see the same fate befalling myself: stand out in public, look displeased when an armed cop stops me for questioning, and I could be one sudden move away from being tasered or worse. I was alarmed, and I wanted to say something.

I had written online before, posting a small series of essays about political issues, as well as a glowing review of my new recumbent bike. I posted three academic papers from a graduate class in dramatic literature in 2001. Along with this personal writing, I had also created a fair amount of professional content connected with my job as a high school English teacher—e.g., lesson plans, worksheets, lists of classroom and extracurricular rules. I created much more content at school than at home, largely due to the technology available. At work, I could publish directly to the statewide K-12 server via FrontPage and relatively fast network connection. At home, I created webpages with Netscape Communicator (which never worked as well for me as FrontPage), then uploaded them to my personal website via FTP over a non-dedicated dial-up connection.

By 2005, I was aware that there was a great deal of engaging discourse, political and otherwise, taking place online. I entered the blogosphere because I wanted to add my voice to that discourse.

I also entered the blogosphere because I was looking for a cool navigation bar. My understanding of HTML was mostly back-engineered from WYSIWYG design on FrontPage. I had seen tidy navigation bars and content indices on various websites and wanted some similar organization tool to keep track of new essays on my own website, but even simple cascading style sheets were a mystery to me then.

From my reading of various websites, I had the vague understanding that blogging software could help me publish information a little more easily and maybe make sidebars more easily. Without much if any consultation or reading, I opened a Blogspot account and started writing.

..............to be continued............