Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication Timothy Recuber recently presented “Blogging the End: A Discourse Analysis of Blogs of the Terminally Ill” at the Annual Meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). The paper was presented in a mini-conference on Digital Sociology.
Recuber analyzed the text left behind by terminally ill bloggers after their death. Through his analysis, he made an argument about the social construction of wisdom.
Recuber said, “Handing down wisdom to their audiences of family, friends, and even distant well-wishers was an important function of the blogs, but wisdom in this context was not about the messages themselves.”
Instead, he contended, it referred to knowledge generated from real-life suffering. “This tells us something about the nature of wisdom as a sociological concept,” he suggested.
