This paper responds to Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd’s proposal (2004) that the personal blog acts upon an exigence of self-cultivation and validation. I turn to situational rhetoric (Bitzer 1968; 1980) to further contextualize bloggers’ motives and illustrate how the blog’s presentation of self is constituted rhetorically. Engaging Michael Warner’s theory of publics (2002) and Anne Freadman’s concept of uptake (2002), I argue that bloggers who write public posts about a public event, Canada Reads, participate in two situations—the blog and the event—and their resulting social actions accommodate exigencies belonging to both. By directing attention to the post, we glimpse the intentionality of each mediated self, seen in the varying publics engaged, situations defined, interpretants selected, and exigencies affected.

In this paper, we take a rhetorical approach to weblogs, examining two sets of blogs: blogs responding to a national literary event called Canada Reads and ‘homeless blogs.’ Taking up Miller and Shepherd’s proposal (2004) that the exigence of the blog is self cultivation and validation, we examine how such an exigence may be met, not through entering and building community, but engaging with and arranging for recognition in what Michael Warner calls ‘discursive publics’ (2002:121). By focusing on uptake (Freadman 2002) as a public dynamic, we suggest how features of the blog such as blog posts and ‘meta-generic’ commentary (Giltrow 2002:192) about antecedent genres may enable a blogger to legitimate the self as an integral part and perpetuator of publics: a blogger’s uptake both actualizes a public (declaring membership), and imagines it anew (envisioning subsequent uptakes).

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