Blogging an Event at Custard In The Ether

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Blogging an Event

By Custard | November 16, 2007

The experience of participating in an event, whilst drafting a blog post about it, was an interesting one. In many ways, I wish I had done it at some of the various events I have attended over the last year of studying New Media as well, but in other ways I found it a difficult thing to do whilst being actively involved. There is also something that feels very rude about typing whilst someone is talking – no matter how discretely one can do so.

The recent posts detailing the events of the CWNM Creative Retreat were written live, as it were, during proceedings. I started out on the Friday making hand written notes throughout Professor Leahy’s lecture, but ran into difficulties when writing these notes up into cohesive prose. My scribblings never quite make sense afterwards and my memory for the details of the convoluted arguments and discussions that evolve amongst this particular group of people is not great. Therefore constructing a blog post as a running commentary as such discussions develop seemed like an obvious way of ensuring that I can capture more detail. Throughout the remainder of the weekend I was therefore attached to my Mac, clicking away…

Summarising key points of discussion into sentences instead of note points whilst people were talking involved starting the sentences, then revising them as my understanding of the point clarified. Using a computer to do this – with the flexibility to delete and re-jig – made this easier and less destructive in a way than using a note book – where crossings out (and the doodling temptations these inevitably lead to) can be quite an obstruction when reassembling notes in a logical format at a later stage.

Generally I stuck to recording turns in the discussions and any key points/quotes made by specific participants – with very little reference to my personal views or interpretations. The only account that differed from this method was my account of Christine’s talk, where she showed us a lot of her work. This was a far more subjective talk to start with (being geared towards viewing art), so my own take on what was going on formed the bulk of this account, as I could hardly interpret it in any other way. One method is obviously better than the other from an impartial, journalistic point of view, but that raises the question as to whether I was blogging about events at the retreat from a purely journalistic stance to provide information to those unable to participate, or whether I was blogging with more discursive intentions.

As for feeling rude? Well, I found myself consciously typing very lightly and looking up at the speaker far more than I would normally do whilst sitting with a paper notebook. There was no doodling to be done. There also appears to be a culture of multi-tasking with laptops during events surrounding New Media (as was apparent at the Women, Business & Blogging conference in the summer), which seems to be accepted by speakers and other participants without question. Maybe we all just understand each other’s need to be plugged in? Anyway, seeing others around who were far less visually engaged with the speaking event at the front (although obviously engaged in terms of content, as they were googling and following links through that were directly related) made me feel a little better about occasionally bashing out a quick sentence, then sitting back to listen again.

Maybe this means I am now firmly pacing the road towards becoming a conscious blogger? Awareness of the process when writing any thing is usually the first step to acquiring the genre’s ice-skakes…

Topics: DMU, blogs, new media |

One Response to “Blogging an Event”

Half Thoughts and Twitter Notes at Custard In The Ether Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
[…] have previously blogged about the experience of writing blog posts as a form of note taking as a talk or session […]

Blogging an Event

One Response to “Blogging an Event”

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