flu almost gone; Habermas ringing the doorbell

I gave up and spent the last several days in bed, me, the computer, and the cat, with soup supplied by the sweet one. I got the Instructor's Manual for the textbook edited, following the proofreader's comments. I reviewed the index for the textbook and dealt with three different permissions issues with the textbook (there's only one left, but we're working with people in London on this one, people whose sense of timing is not just other coastal but other continental). I wrote three recommendation letters. I've written letters to friends and those nieces. And I've played a lot of MasterMind. And now I have to review the final pdf of the textbook by Monday (while waiting on those few pages that might need to be edited depending on the permissions from London.) So maybe just maybe this tenacious flu will finally float away and die.

I've also been thinking ahead to the writing I want to accomplish this semester. I have 2 conference presentations, 1 conference workshop, and four presentations at other campuses. Should I turn the MLA presentation into a paper? I'm not sure it has legs, but it was fun to put together, to play off the comparison of these current years to the Gilded Age, to think about the conditions for working, writing, and civic participation in these two different eras that many writers compare. (And upon which Karl Rove modelled the 2000 election.) But all it got me was paranoia: if the late 19th century was initially full of promise -- based on its communication technologies and worker practices -- for invigorated citizen civic participation but then went down in flames because of the turning of private potential toward corporate ends, the lesson for now would be that any communication technology that enables the conditions that lead to developed participation are going to be shut down (or regulated out of their raucous potential).

I was thinking specifically of blogs, and of the messy and enlivening openings they provide for citizens to develop a sense of self and connection. (In the talk I looked not just to 19th century communication and work practices -- quickly -- but also to 19th century theories of how political participation requires first the development of sense of self with agency and then development of self as communicator with others).

But all of this reinforced for me why I may not want to use blogs in teaching. Or, rather, if I use them, I know that I am using them in a very limited way, as a technology that can lend itself well to very focused directed reflection and highly useful record-keeping; I know that others use them very well as development writing spaces. But where I see blogs being most useful, politically, is in their potential to excite participation, to support us in reading and responding to each other's musings and rantings, and to provide wider perspective on events than we get in traditionally reported news media. And I know from experience that the fastest way to cool off a potentially hot medium (I am using the temperatures not per McLuhan) is to assign it as homework.

If I were to develop this presentation into an article, I think I would want to focus on that quandary, and how it relates to the relations between the public and the private Habermas argues are necessary for there to be a public. If a public can only happen because the private (for Habermas, the realms of drawing room and diary) is at least in part a nursery for a sense of self, then one way to diffuse the public, should you so want, is to break the possibility of the private opening into the public; at the end of the 19th century, that meant diffusing private potential within corporate-provided structures. And a classroom can so easily be that, no matter what we attempt otherwise.