Labor Theories of Blogging

Ah, I'm coming far too late to the left theory blogs' discussion of blogging and/as labor and I'm too feverish to even think about linking to any of the participants' posts or contributing somthing original, but I can point interested people in the direction of Teresa Goddu's essay on Hawthorne and class, an excellent linking of "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and "Ethan Brand" that focuses on Hawthorne's representation and use of laborers in antebellum U.S. fiction. It's in What Democracy Looks Like, ed. Amy Shrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi, and I recommend the entire collection for reasons I will explain later. My basic idea for the connection is that blogging is a form of publishing as emergent as short stories were in the 1830s-1840s U.S. Goddu's analysis of what work Hawthorne's representations and narratives do--for himself, for the emergent middle class--is worth connecting to labor theories of blogging. More on that later--got to get well enough to teach tomorrow!