Finally news on my blogging chapter, and identity projects more genrally

Quick burst of good news: finally I've heard from the editor of International Blogging; it's coming out from Peter Lang in 2008 and my chapter will be the conclusion. :-) A draft of the intro is here.

It's weird; I wrote this so long ago and now that it's appearing, my work has moved on in another direction, focusing much more on participation, subversive cultures, and on the institutionalization of discourse around new media. I still work on identity, just not so much national identity by itself. I look at it in other contexts, like in comics, or genre fiction, or video games. Just recently I was searching for articles on this, and found some entries in Henry Jenkins' blog that discuss comics and games and national identity in Poland, which he visited in 2006.

He goes on in later entries to also talk about Russia, Japan, and globalization, but I haven't gotten to those yet. But anyway, he mentions a series generally referred to as the "Witcher" books that sound like I might like them, but they don't seem to be out in English or maybe just not in the US. I'd really like to see what reviewers mean about the stories incorporating national characteristics. The author, Andrzej Sapkowski, seems cool; he even has links to fanfiction--one of the few words I could decipher, since the site is in Polish. But here's another page with some info in English.

Where was I? Oh yeah, identity in genre fiction. Right, so I think I will have to take that up pretty soon.