Conclusions

I think one of the reasons blogs are so popular is to do with how society has changed in the cyberage. Wherever we go, media of all forms are transmitted to us. I know personally that I often come home after work, turn on the television, turn on the computer and have up to 5 web pages running while simultaneous managing to somehow keep up with the television programme and chat with my flatmates. We are living in an age where media transmitted to us in multiple layers. Blogging is a perfect example of a layer of media that also allows the further dynamic of our own interaction with the sources of knowledge. Blogging, I think, is indicative of the future of media: fast, up-to-date, and interactive. Roberts-Witts, commenting on the ‘cult of blogging’ quotes Merholz as looking forward to a future where blogs may form a ‘digital stream of consciousness’ (2001:78).

Where knowledge is concerned, objectivity has been traditionally valued, but perhaps blogging exemplifies a shift towards valuing subjectivity. Computers in the home could well enough be called HCs – home computers, but they are more commonly referred to as PCs – personal computers. People are becoming cyborgs – intimately connected to their computers and other ICTs such as cellular phones. We feel disconnected from the world without them and they are more and more becoming our portals for communicating and interacting with others. Computers may isolate people from real physical human to human interactions but I think that people are becoming accustomed to and even enjoying personal expression on the internet and ICTs are evolving to adapt to our communication needs. Blogging has become a means for this expression, a way of being seen and heard, and a way of connecting ideas and information in the cyberage.

Blogging and Print versus the WWW

The accessibility of blogging technologies has a significant impact on the burgeoning dominance of internet knowledge over printed texts. I think that a lot of this issue centres around that of authorship, publishing hierarchies, time dynamics, and text lengths.

Blogs as a source of knowledge are both more easily accessible by a wide audience and more easily created. A blogger is not restricted by money or editing (other than his/her own). In an essay about blogging history, Kelly (2004) argues that ‘the blog provides a form of free and instant publication and dissemination that circumnavigates the hierarchies and economics of traditional print publication. What is published is no longer dependant on what is considered valuable or financially viable by publishing organizations and institutions, but solely by what is deemed worthy by the blogger’.

The lack of external editing and censorship, one could argue, is a reason to discredit any knowledge presented in a blog. Heller criticises the authenticity and accountability of design blogs because, he says, bloggers ‘are protected by anonymity and emboldened by a format that allows anyone to say anything, at any time, without mediation or an iota of editing’ (2004:22). There is danger in online content being taken for ‘truth’ when it could be subjective knowledge or even false information. Something about having words typed, similar to that of printed text lends a certain authority to online text that it perhaps doesn’t deserve. Take for example, self-diagnosis of health issues by people simply searching online for their symptoms. This potentially is very harmful to a person. The question is, do blogs also command a certain authority that is undeserved, and if so, what are the implications? One might argue that the subjective voice of blogs may mitigate this by making clear it is one person’s idea(s), but there may still be the temptation to be influenced by this.

However, this lack of censorship is empowering in terms of models of power such as that of Foucault, who questions the absolute truth of knowledge and sees truth as being something constructed to impose ideas of what is right and true (Fillingham 1993:5-7). Blogs ‘take the power back’ by allowing knowledge production that does not come from the usual dominant groups of knowledge production.

Blogs are also a more accessible (technology permitting) form of knowledge. Any information or knowledge based on the internet can be accessed by anyone who has internet access. In terms of research, an unlimited number of students or researchers can access the internet, and so knowledge and ideas, whereas books are scarcer. Your library may have the book that you want but it may have only one copy and that maybe potentially unavailable.

The brevity and frequency of blogging, for many is a much easier form of obtaining information, news, opinion and entertainment than printed media such as books. Technology has sped up the pace of life and our consumption for media reflects this. Mortensen and Walker comment that brevity and word count flexibility of blog posts free bloggers from the necessity of producing only long, thought out ideas so that ‘nuggets of thought’ can be published (2002:265). Mortensen and Walker argue that for this reason blogs ‘elucidate the constant flow of thought and the ever-changing nature of research’ (2002:267). So in a sense, blogging can allow for an organic research course.

The brevity and frequency of blogging posts is of course also characteristic of the cyberage speed in which we conduct our lives. The small bite/byte size pieces of information, delivered frequently, are more consumable that an entire book or published article. Furthermore they can often be more up to date. Polynor notes that after the terrorist events in New York of September 11, 2001, bloggers often got information posted on the net before journalists could even report (2004:38).

Blogging may not supercede printed text or other forms of journalism, but may offer an alternate channel to information – one which is easily accessible, free, easy to read, and up-to-the minute.

Politics of Representation

An after-note to my last post: I have since found a really interesting webpage written by Daniel Chandler on ‘Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web’. That would have been helpful a few days ago, but I am fast running out of space for the rest of the topics I had hoped to cover!

I read a funny blog post the other day about how everyone just wants their 15 megabytes of fame. This fits in well with some of the ideas about authorship of blogging that I have been exploring in my own research. However, visibility and voice in blogging need not only be about narcissism, but can also have political implications.

Lennon (2003:77) posits that ‘[t]he important point is that widely available, inexpensive Web publishing lets anyone get out his or her story and perspective. Bloggers then link to it and thereby spread the word’. Blogging can be seen as inclusive, as technologies have advanced so that it is very easy to set up and maintain a blog. It is, however, important to note that it is only inclusive for those who have internet access, some internet knowledge/ability, and who have the time involved in maintaining a blog.

Roberts-Witt (2003:78) notes the discourse of the ‘democratization of information and individual empowerment’ that was bandied about in the early days of the internet and Slevin argues that the internet has created ‘a new dialectic of empowerment and powerlessness’ (2000:4). In terms of empowerment, as with other forms of internet expression, blogging is a way that people can be heard. As one blogger puts it, in the title of his political blog, the ‘smallest minority on earth is the individual’. The smallest minority can have a voice on the internet through the form of blogging and this voice can be heard by a potentially unlimited audience. The dialectic of powerlessness is evident in the cyberage as those without access to the internet may potentially be left behind and lose the empowered foothold that the internet active world can take advantage of.

Of course, as with any expressions of opinions, blogging raises issues of the freedom of speech on the internet. While some blogs may advocate peaceful political causes, such as blogging for Nepalese democracy, others may blog hate, racism, and violence. Luckily, I suppose, these latter blogs are harder to find - I did not manage to find any!

Subjectivity and Identity

One of the things I find most fascinating about blogging is the personality of them. Of all the sources of information, news, and tidbits of opinion on the internet, blogging is one form that has as its very spirit a personal touch. Bloggers post in the first person. Their opinion is evident in everything presented and the language is often colloquial and appeals to a sense of familiarity with its readers despite being not only publicly accessibly but also targeted to reach a wide public audience that the author cannot expect to know personally.

Blogging can be seen as symptomatic of post-modernity, as it is highly subjective and attempts to connect with the wider world of the “information superhighway”. In contradiction to Gray and Driscoll’s comment that modern communication technologies will ‘destroy subjectivity’ (Gray and Driscoll 1992:39 in Escobar 94:216), blogging has become a way for people to have an individual voice, express it through modern technologies, and have these expressions received by audiences that they would not have been able to connect with previous to such technology. Similarly, blogging goes against Roland Barthes’ (1974) postmodern predictions of the death of the author as the text of blogs retain the personal touch of authorship.

I think this subjectivity and familiarity is the very reason that blogs have become so popular in internet culture. It is the human voice which lends authority to these blogs. Sheila Lennon (2003:77) argues that to be interesting, ‘the blog must have a discernible human voice. A blog with just links is a portal’. Blogs show that peoples participating in internet culture do not want objectivity in information or news; people want opinions, views, preferences and even biases. Information Week quotes Adam L. Penenberg, a New York University journalism professor:

‘I think the public's appetite for consumer-created content on the Web (like blogs) mirrors its taste for reality shows, celebrity gossip magazines, talk radio, and cable TV shows… The public craves intimacy. We want to feel like we know the people we read and read about, listen to on the radio, watch on TV, and click to on the Net.’

Lennon argues that ‘[e]ven when bloggers don’t editorialize much, their interests and bias will be evident in what they choose to point to’ (2003:77). So it is not just familiarity that is being created or fabricated. Identities of bloggers are being created, constructed, and perhaps even contrived.

By expressing their voice in the content of blogs, bloggers are also creating an identity and an online presence. Mortensen and Walker describe blogs as existing on the border of public and private (2002:256). So is a blogger’s ‘virtual’ identity different from their ‘real life’ identity when it is both private and public? The subjective voice of the blogger in fact creates a new subjectivity of the blogger. The blogger creates his/her subjectivity and identity through blogging, so that their online or ‘virtual’ identity is an aggregate of all of the personal information, world views, and experiences that they present in their blogs. Miller and Slater (2000:4) argue that the ‘notion of ‘virtuality’ … suggests that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to ‘spaces’ or ‘places’ that participants can treat as if they were real.... But by focusing on ‘virtuality’ as the defining feature of the many Internet media and then moving on to notions such as ‘cyberspace’, we start from an assumption that it is opposed to and disembedded from the real’. Miller and Slater go on to add that ‘We need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces … that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness’ (2000:5)

However, the question remains of to what extent is the virtual identity of bloggers embedded with their ‘real life’ identity. The ‘real life’ identity of the blogger can sometimes be anonymous. It can also be purposely made apparent. If the identity is made known to the blog’s audience, then there are possible implications for contortions of that ‘real life’ identity through the medium of the blog. In the electronic panopticon of the blogosphere, bloggers are aware of their own visibility and even encourage surveillance of themselves through choosing to expose something of them selves to a public audience.

The Journey So Far

Now that I look back on the previous post, it actually covered a lot of the ground that I had hoped to explore in my research, rather than being a "quick note before I launch into the main body of my research". In my next post I am going to look at some of the issues of subjectivity and authorship which ties into some of the issues of the interactive nature of blogging.

This post is really primarily an update on the progress of my research.

It seems to me that there is almost as much written about blogs as there are blogs themselves. The interest in them is amazing to me as it seems that those who are 'in the know' in the blogosphere know a lot, link a lot, and talk about blogging a lot. And those that don't... don't know anything of this world. One blogger was even quoted as saying "Blogging is my golf game", meaning that it is his way of networking and conversing with others. The term 'blogosphere' therefore accurately represents the sense that this is a whole other world with communities and interactivity.

Even if there is an iceberg of inactive blogs out there, it seems I have only touched upon the iceberg of online information and blogs about blogging. It's overwhelming! Kairosnews, for example, has 'Weblog Webliography' with 188 entries for online articles about blogging. I have my work cut out for me.

Rebecca Blood (2000) has commented that the first bloggers were "created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts." Nowadays, there are numerous free blog hosting sites such as Typepad, LiveJournal, Blogger, Xanga, and BlogEasy who allow for easy set up of blogs without their users needing to have any programming knowledge at all.

Although I consider myself relatively internet and technologically savvy, html programming is one thing that is definitely beyond me. Despite this, however, in the past week or so of research I have learnt how to set up a blog, post on my blog, make hypertext links within my posts to other sites, upload pictures into my post and blogger profile, how to add a 'site hit' counter for the number of pages visits, and how to add a 'Google' search feature to my blog.

These last two features were actually aided by online programmes that allow you to fill in the details and specifications you want and it will create the exact html codes to add to the html template of your blog. People often comment that future generations will need to be increasingly adaptable to new technology, however with online programmes such as these it may be possible for us to still let the computers do the thinking for us! It is aspects of technology like this that support the idea that technology is evolving to adapt to human needs, rather than the other way around.

Interactive Post-Modern Media and Blogging

Well, it has taken me a lot longer to get my third post up due to the veritable oceans of information out there in cyberspace about blogging. And I thought my idea was novel…

Before I launch into the main body of my research I’d like to make a note about commenting on blogs. One of the features which makes blogging an interesting medium is the interactive nature of them. Readers can comment to the posts instantaneously, meaning that author and reader interact with each other in a way and in a speed unmatched by any other form of media. For this reason, readers themselves become authors, as they add to or comment on the text of the blogs. Hypertexts documents such as blogs have an electronic ‘fluidity’ that allows for a new type of post-modern literacy. Snyder describes a hypertext document as, “constructed in part by the authors who create and place the links and in part by the readers who decide what threads to follow” (1995:28). Gallo, discussing blog journalism, describes how the “real-time virtual feed-back loop” of blogging and commenting demands a higher level of accountability and ‘the reflexivity of Weblogs also opens the respondent to the feedback and criticism of other users, allowing every claim to be examined and vetted, leading in turn to increased openness and transparency of dialogue’ (Gallo 2004). Gallo also describes how comments can function in place of the “Letter to the Editor” in an instantaneous way that also allows readers to bypass the editorial intermediary review (Gallo 2004).

Furthermore, an interesting feature of the interactive nature of blogging journalism is that it can reverse the usual order of media – that is the flow of information from press to public (Rosen 2003). This means that knowledge is not static phenomena gifted from the powerful or authoritarian sources, but can also be affected, altered, censored, and even written and re-written by a wider reader and writer audience. In this way blogging, and other hypertext media, can be seen as a kind of ‘historicity’ of the present, or immediate past.

So why am I making this point? I am certainly not by any means claiming to be a journalist, however, this issue does have has relevance for anyone who is attempting to put information, knowledge or even opinion onto the internet. My first post has four comments to date. All of them are generally encouraging messages from, admittedly, people whom I already know who I have given this link to. Although I appreciate the sentiment, and humour, in these comments I was a little perplexed as to why I received an email forwarded from one commenter asking about my use of the word “reflexive”. Of course any form feedback or questions are great, but I would love even more to have them comment on my blog itself so as to exemplify this interactivity of blogging.

In response to the question: Yes, I did mean ‘reflexive’, not ‘reflective’. In anthropology, reflexivity involves acknowledging the subjectivity of the researcher in one’s own research and taking that into account when presenting the research material. The Journal of Neoscience has an interesting and very thorough philosophical approach to exploring reflexivity, but for simpler and more anthropological definitions of ‘reflexivity’ try WebRef, Anthrobase, and this anthropology dictionary.

What is a blog?

I guess the simplest and most obvious launching point for my research is to ask the question ‘what is a blog?’. Tim Jarrett (2003) provides a comprehensive definition of a weblog:

“Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.”

In simple terms it is a web log – an online log of events or points of interest concerning the individual or group who authors the blog. Blogs are not simply diaries; they are interactive logs with links, communities, audiences who can interact with the blogs through commenting and cross-referencing in their own blogs. Blogs are a form of media that are at once personal and public. There are blogs for corporations’ news, for advertising, for snippets of entertainment information, for journalism… and the list of uses continues to grow.

Blogs allow for a new type of media that does not leave the audience passive, but allows response and voice to those who might otherwise not be heard in public.

The history of weblogging is surprisingly well documented, with a number of sites (often blogs!) referencing some of the earliest instances of blogs and their rise to popularity. Some of the authors of such histories are Dave Winer and Rebecca Blood and a good comprehensive history of blogs can be found at wikipedia, which acknowledges a number of different influences and pioneers, and also provides a good general overview of what blogs are and some of the jargon used in and about blogs and blogging. One independent filmmaker has even made a ‘blogumentry’ – a documentary about blogging history and the ‘blogosphere’.

Interestingly, perhaps the first blog appeared at the dawn of the cyberage, with CERN and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) both logging new internet sites as they appeared in the early 1990s. Archives for these first web logs can be found here and here respectively. Perhaps one of the earliest personal web pages was created by Justin Hall, who began blogging about his life in 1994.

In 1999, a number of sites including Pitas, Blogger, and LiveJournal began offering free weblog hosting which was a major catalyst in the explosion of blogging popularity. The popularity of this medium of information posting has exploded in the last couple of years, and continues to be seen as a viable medium of expression both for personal and commercial purposes. Pew Internet (2005) conducted a study that showed that 8 million American adults say they have created blogs and that blog readership in America has jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users. However, 62% of American do not know what a blog is.

Despite the millions of blogs existent on the internet, only a fraction of these are actually regularly updated. A survey undertaken by Perseus Development Company in 2003 suggested that two-thirds of blogs had been updated in the previous two months, and there are 1.09 million blogs which have never updated past the first blog.

I find it very interesting that blogging has even developed to the point where it has a history/histories, considering a few months ago I wasn’t even aware of their existence, beyond a general idea that people are writing online journals out there in cyberspace. There is clearly something appealing about blogging and reading blogs which has catapulted its popularity in internet culture. I will look in further detail in later posts about why blogs are becoming popular and how they function in internet culture.

Baby's First Blog

I have just set up my own blog. The time taken: about five minutes, max. My own apprehension about putting out any sort of information about myself, especially with my name attached to it, on the internet was by far the greatest hindrance in this blog’s set up.

So why am I blogging? I am an anthropology student at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In my paper at the University of Auckland entitled 'Anthropology Today: Debates in Culture' we have the opportunity to undertake research of our own design about the anthropology of the internet and cyberculture. I have chosen to present my research in a blog.

This is a self reflexive blog: a blog about blogs, bloggers, and blog culture. My aim is to log my own research into the social implications of blogging and present the findings of this research in a blog, so that my research's form matches its content. I will first look briefly at the question: ‘What is a blog?’ and explore its origins and rising popularity. Some of my next questions will move onto my primary aim of how blogs raise issues of representation, authorship, visibility, expression, blog culture and web communities, identity, modernity, the appeals of blogging in the cyberage, and the burgeoning dominance of the internet over printed textual sources of knowledge. The questions I will use to guide me will include 'who blogs?', 'why blog?', 'how do individuals and groups represent themselves on blogs?', 'what is the social function of blogs?', and 'what is the appeal of blogs?'.

I hope to undertake this research largely through the means of the internet: looking at blogs, researching internet information and opinion about blogs, and conducting online database searching for scholarly articles on blogging and similar research on the social phenomena of the internet. My hope is to publish posts on my blog site, with each post focusing on one or two issues that I will explore in my research. I will post on my blog using in-text referencing in the form as it appears in blogs, which is links to other websites of note or relevance. I will also submit a paper document of the content of my blog, along with a bibliography in the traditional academic form.

I will attempt to make some conclusions on the social phenomena of blogging, and how it impacts society and how we, as humans, in turn impact technology. I think one of the most important questions of the implications of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is the relationship of human interactions with technology. ICTs are a man-made phenomena, however I think they have in return impacted greatly on human society. ICTs are not simply a tool or resource used by humans and adapted to existing human behavioural patterns. Humans now adapt themselves and their actions around ICTs, creating new social dynamics and social spheres. It can even be argued that ICTs have changed the pace of life, and how we view and interact with the world in general.

Blogs, I believe are representative of this peculiar interaction of humans with technology, as they appeal to audiences who are increasingly looking for up-to-the-minute, news, information, entertainment, and even opinion. Blogs allow for a high-speed satisfaction of these created needs, in small easily consumable bites of knowledge and can therefore be helpful in anthropological studies of mainstream, modern societies.