Right from the beginning of Harris’s ‘Forwarding’ chapter I like his general concept of adding to a conversation. I never really realized it but the reason you talk to other people is to add knowledge or wisdom to the discussion. Of course there are times where the sole goal of making a comment is to end a conversation—but for the most part Harris says it is to push the conversation forward, “to say something new, something that seem to call for further talk and writing” (35-36). That really is the perfect way to describe blogs. The blog I’ve been following—Business Insider is made for people to add to the conversation, maybe not in the traditional sense but there is still that response to forward the conversation. While browsing through Business Insider’s website you can find multiple ways to ‘forward’ the conversation. Harris describes forwarding by using email as an example, “In the email program I use, these two functions are illustrated by opposing arrows: reply (ß) send your comment back to the sender; forward (à) directs them outward to other readers. And these forwards can themselves be forwarded, to sometimes unexpected sites and publics—as anyone who has ever written an email post that seemed to take on a life of its own, found its way to unintended readers, can testify” (37). Even I can testify to this type of treatment of my writing, aka Facebook. There are tons of times where something posted on Facebook gets commented on and then reposted and added to and revised. The same happens with Business Insider’s website, as far as I can tell the articles don’t get revised but they do get commented on often reposted on other websites. I think this is exactly what Harris is referring to—in someway contributing to the conversation. Recently I’ve been reading some of the comments posted on the main articles on BI and there are some very interesting comments that actually add to the conversation. However on the other hand there are comments such as, “@BI all over the plase: Or in other words...The Cancer otherwise called OBAMA” Or sarcastic rhetorical comments that really have no place in the conversation. That is one of Harris’s worries about forwarding, “In forwarding text, you begin to shift the focus of your readers away from what its author has to say and toward your own project” (38). Honestly that really is an increasing problem—there often becomes a lot of opinion thrown into the conversation and thus it is altered. Now in some aspect I’m sure that shifting the conversation can be beneficial, but I’m not entirely convinced that forwarding is all good.
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