"Undergraduate Self-study: Discourse Analysis of Imagesets on Student Blogs "

Abstract

"Undergraduate Self-study: Discourse Analysis of Imagesets on Student Blogs. Student writers’ relationship to the screen is initially grounded in their writing experiences in social media, but they come to view their course blog as a connecting space between themselves and their readership, a space which becomes one on which they self-destruct and reconstruct their identity as they learn to write (Serfaty 2004). By asking students to post a digital image of themselves, Ethna Lay initiates an important dataset, one which suggests a great deal about their relationship to writing. Through these images, students construct their independent writerly identities and simultaneously express membership in the class as a discrete discourse community. Students work collaboratively on a discourse analysis of the imageset, categorizing the class’s images as data about its relationship to writing. These imagesets are an opportunity for student writers to stage themselves; they perform how they would like to be seen (or not seen). This performing of the self is at once a private act as well as a communal and public activity (Tifentale and Manovich 2015; Rettberg 2005). The screen then has a dual nature, functioning as either a veil or mirror for student writers (Serfaty 2004). Students classify the imagesets into categories or types, which are fairly consistent across classes. Oftentimes students acknowledge the class had become its own discourse community, its deixis enabled by blogging together and by investigating their blogs, and decide that this result is only possible given the nature of the blog. The students become participant-observers in this respect, and the end result is an auto-ethnography of the pictured self in a social and academic setting. Keywords: blogging, discourse community, images, self-study, writerly self "