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.