For today’s blog class,…

For today's blog class, I had the students read John Scalzi's "Being Poor", along with a good chunk of the comments on that entry. We talked about:

• the politics of the piece
• how John crafted the piece stylistically
• the impact of the ending
• how it related to the Katrina media coverage of the time (what it did, that traditional media didn't or couldn't)
• the fact that this piece was picked up by various newspapers (wider coverage)
• the link to Nick Mamatas's response, and the separate conversation in his blog about relative and absolute poverty
• the way John handled trolls, derailment, and confusion in the comments
• the way his community of readers did the same

There are a couple of excellent examples in the comments to that piece of how one can effectively moderate a comments thread (I particularly liked John's response to Mike Cane at 4:02, and Mike's response back at 4:12), which leads in nicely to a discussion of the role of blogs and their communities in politics, and in our society generally. It was a really effective piece to use, for what I'm trying to teach them right now -- to get a sense of how blogs can function as both art and cultural influence.

They liked the piece and its comments, I think. It's hard not to respond to it. Especially when you read lines like this one:

"Being poor is trying to decide which one of you gets to eat today � the one of you that is pregnant or the one of you that can work." -- Anna, in comments

Gods.