actor-network theory and blogging

I found myself at Patter (Pat Thompson's blog on a post on blogging, and while smarting from a hopeless #acwrimo month where promises made did not get adhered to I found myself writing a response about writng on blogs. Next year I think i will promise to blog in #acwrimo, it might free me from guilt beceause on the blog I write without 'overworking the paint', as it were.

My response to Pat Thompson's account was:

Blogging is not 'one thing'. It's writing and as with any writing, it can serve many purposes.
It may be scholarly, or not. It may be the testing the waters of interest, exemplifying academic literature with local examples.... For myself its a playful space where i do not sweat the small stuff, or if i do, i sweat it less. Writing in a less confining space (than an academic journal or a book chapter) my blogging is a bit like art- its not been overworked. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not.
But i find myself wanting to write here such a long response....i am now going off to my own blog to construct a more fullsome response...
In my doctoral writing it was the thoughtful space somewhere between my data and the word.doc called the thesis, and also somewhere between my exploring how others in my field write and my finding my own voice. In my academic life, it again serves multi purposes: it's the space I can q-code to for conference posters, it's also the space i go to for inspiration and engagement with self and with others.

In noting that for me the blogging intent is about engagement and not habitus I begin to differentiate a theoretical underpinning in how I blog in contrast to Pat Thompson's Bordieu inspired understanding of a Blog.
A space then for a Latourian analysis, because the blogging space has me writing differently than the journal or chapter writing spaces. It also has me writing differently than i would in a notebook. The blog becomes an actor of influence, and when in 'her' presence my writing is engaged with differently.
In the blog space I can try out a new idea (Latour and blogs).
I can connect other actors; and refer the reader to Austin Kleon's book titled "steal like an artist".
(Freeing myself from conventions of propriety, I segue from what Pat has identified with Bourdieu and blogs and align instead my analysis to my own preferred theoretical underpinnings)
Actor-network theory and blogging would have me looking at the social life of the text, how its shaped as well as shaping others; and with my engaging with the medium, how the medium engages with me. The push and the pull of it. And inside of this is the push and pull of identity work- i write differently here than there...I am a different Ailsa here than the one who authors academic journals. (And so the network deepens and broadens, a passing reference to Lucy Suchman (2007), Karen Barad, Judith Butler, and into a more distant past to Simone de Beauvoir - for what I am is made in association). And in referring to these other authors I feel like an alchemist, drawing in the threads both of time and of spaces (networking garlands in time as Latour once beautifully described citing Serres). A blogging space is a space to gather in.