Why Blog? A direction.

So, why blog?  I guess that is the question.  Why are these groups spreading advocacy by advocating blogging?  This is not questioning citizen media or advocacy in and of itself.  I want to know why blogging is so important to these groups in this context in this discourse.  This analysis will require identifying blogging as a genre and identifying its conventions and analyzing the way in which meaning is created and presented in this form.  I guess part of this question has to ask if blogging in these colonial / post-colonial geographies.  This a geographically situated question as well.  But, what study about colonialism is not geographically situated?  So where does blogging fit in to those geographic regions, in these local discourse communities?  What is it doing to their agency in that community, in the larger region, and in the globalized colonial discourse?

Now, I need to come up with a proposal and analyze the relationship between these texts and these communities?  These communities are now producing these texts but is that because the text as a genre leads them to some sense of power, or is the power in the people and the text is merely a product of the discourse created by the community?  

I have mentioned Rising Voices on my blog before, but I now plan to make them a greater part of my research into the communication portals used to build global agency among previously silenced populations.  This is how they describe themselves:  "Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities" (http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/about/).  Literally, the voice of the internet is changing, and Rising Voices (child organization of Global Voices) is an agent of this change.  They work to spread multi-media literacy to communities who have had no control over their own digital, global identities.   They refer to this type of work that they are promoting and teaching as citizen media (not their term of course).  

Interestingly enough to technical communication, one of the biggest problems that they cite on their site is the lack of documentation in other languages besides English that explains how to create podcasts, start a blog, or create a wiki.  In response to this, Rising Voices has created a series of six guides, of which only first is currently available on the website, in six different languages.  "The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and differing languages."