Quote
How do you handle the negative response?” asks Penny.
“I want my stories to generate conversation, so I tell myself that any response is a good thing. You learn about others from it, and about yourself from how you take it in. It’s hard to do sometimes, but if you can’t get outside your experience to get into others’ experience of your experience, then you’re too self-absorbed.”,
“I’m always scared readers will think I’m too self-absorbed,” says Laura. “How do you respond to that issue?”
“I respond by saying that it’s self-absorbed to pretend that you are somehow outside of what you study and not impacted by the same forces as others. It’s self-absorbed to mistakenly think that your actions and relationships need no reflexive thought. To write about the self is to write about social experience. argues Mykhalovskiy. If culture circulates through all of us, then how can autoethnography not connect to a world beyond the self? That doesn’t mean that autoethnography is never overly self-indulgent; it can be self-adoring or self-hating without being sufficiently self-aware or self-critical, and without taking into account cultural constraints and possibilities. When that happens, what gets written is not that useful to anybody, not even yourself.
“I want my stories to generate conversation, so I tell myself that any response is a good thing. You learn about others from it, and about yourself from how you take it in. It’s hard to do sometimes, but if you can’t get outside your experience to get into others’ experience of your experience, then you’re too self-absorbed.”,
“I’m always scared readers will think I’m too self-absorbed,” says Laura. “How do you respond to that issue?”
“I respond by saying that it’s self-absorbed to pretend that you are somehow outside of what you study and not impacted by the same forces as others. It’s self-absorbed to mistakenly think that your actions and relationships need no reflexive thought. To write about the self is to write about social experience. argues Mykhalovskiy. If culture circulates through all of us, then how can autoethnography not connect to a world beyond the self? That doesn’t mean that autoethnography is never overly self-indulgent; it can be self-adoring or self-hating without being sufficiently self-aware or self-critical, and without taking into account cultural constraints and possibilities. When that happens, what gets written is not that useful to anybody, not even yourself.
— Carolyn Ellis, “Ethnographic I.” (Replace “autoethnography” with “blogging,” and this is a very effective response to why I don’t write more often at my actual website.)
(Source: amazon.com)
