Mapping the Norwegian Blogosphere

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is also on mapping the blogosphere. What is its structure, as part of the wider public sphere; where are the borders of its community, and how communal is it -how are its interlinkages distributed?

Studies of the public sphere and online media tend to focus on specific 'noteworthy' forms of public communication and deliberation, but we need a wider definition of public communication than just 'political debate'. Blogs can be organised along a continuum spanned by the three axes of content (from internal to topical), directional (from monological to dialogical) and style (from intimate to objective); public sphere research tends to focus mainly on one point in that continuum, and we need to move beyond this.

Hallvard's work focusses on Norway - a small democratic welfare state of some 5 million people, a constitutional monarchy, currently governed by a Labour government, with advanced use of ICTs; it also constitutes a small, self-contained linguistic area. This makes it an interesting case study for studies of online media.

Hallvard examined discussions in the Norwegian blogosphere around the European data retention directive, and according to that study, the blogosphere is a low-density network which also includes a number of prominent leftist politicians' Websites. The blogosphere is open, free of authoritarian control, moderately networked, with relatively young voices alongside more established perspectives, with low levels of partisanship. A-List bloggers tend to use blogs for dissemination, and dialogue seems to be more prominent among the left than the right.

This may tie in with the overall description of Norway's national politics - and the blogosphere provides an outlet for alternative politicial views. A key blog, for example, is Virrvarr, operated by a young female student; there is no direct distinction between political and more general voices, interestingly. There seems to be little polarisation (there are clear signs of dialogue between left and right), and the blogosphere has low intensity (there is no overcrowding).

This is distinct from blogospheres found in other contexts; blogging as a cultural practice differs in different national environments. However, it is also worth remembering that hyperlink networks cannot show how blogs are actually being used; how blogs matter to their users; and what role they have in the overall mediascape. Also, it is important to recognise that how services like Facebook and Twitter are used alongside blogs is not clear from the network map at all. And some blog hosting sites do not appear quite appropriately in network maps yet: they tend to swamp these maps through their prominence. Finally, not all sites that are called 'blogs' actually operate in that fashion.

A comprehensive and detailed map of the blogosphere, then, requires detailed analysis beyond political blogs themselves, as well as additional content analysis to examine what actual content is interconnected by those hyperlinks.

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