The Facebook group "Rethinking World Literature" hosts a series of interdisciplinary discussions around the topic of what constitutes "world literature."  The Evolving Systems project on Serendip hosts a series of interdisciplinary discussions exploring the common usefulness in a wide array of contexts, academic and otherwise, of emergent and evolving systems ideas.  The conversation documented below is archived from a discussion on the Rethinking World Literature Facebook site and will be added to as that discussion continues. 

Here's a thought: Jane Pinckard asserts that a "journal," rather than a blog, is that a journal requires real consideration before posting. Perhaps that is why blank notebooks, the kind sold at your local bookstore, are usually referred to by the vendors at "journals" rather than "diaries." So, then, what is the significance of the name "LiveJournal?" The well known online diary creation site is very much that - a diary site. LiveJournal is primarily used to create diaries and accounts of events, often dramatic ones, in the lives of individual writers.

As is routine, we began the class by connecting ourselves to one another. Although this time a person would introduce another person and the latter would be the one to explain the connection. It was really interesting to see how at first what people had in common were very general things such as gender but as time went on it became dorms and even languages that linked people. I have to admit that at the start of this course I was not too fond of this exercise due to my horrible memory with names but as the days pass I am not only learning each person's name, but an interesting bit of information as well.

    This class continues to amaze me regarding how much it is related to biology.  The reading about blogging as a genre brought up such terms as "evolution" and "Darwin" and I couldn't help but think to myself "My God. Everything really does come back to everything else."  It's incredible how everything is connected in some way, and I wonder how much is left out there for us human beings to connect the dots.

 "Alice in Bed"

 After the class discussion on Thursday, I found myself thinking about the extent to which I blog and read blogs. In class I shared that I read a couple of my friends blogs and that I don't blog. I found, after some thought, that this is not true. This is my 4th class in which I've been using Serendip, hence I've actually blogged a fair amount through this site. As mentioned in class we all use blogs more so than we think, whether it be blogs about computers or any other research that is being done for classes. There are also a large number of students on this campus (or used to be) that visited sites like CollegeACB. I admit that I have been on this college gossip site and have read the material, though I have never submitted an entry on this site.