New Perspectives on Blogging and Internet Research

Vancouver.
For the first paper session here at AoIR 2007 I thought I'd go to one of the sessions on blogging, which is opened by Mary-Helen Ward and Sandra West from the University of Sydney. Their paper is on blogging the PhD process, and mary begins by outlining the Australian PhD process itself (highlighting the thesis-based focus of Australian PhDs, the role of supervisors, and the as yet relatively unexamined pedagogy of the process). What has been suggested as pedagogical approaches are apprenticeship models, the idea of the autonomous scholar who needs to be 'discovered within' or at least discovered by the student, a more parental rite of passage model, a poststructural approach of students writing their selves into identity, as well as more recent peer learning or student/supervisor co-production models.

Most published material in Australia in this context is on managerial approaches to the candidature, in part due to the massive increase of student numbers in Australian PhD programmes and the change of funding models to focus on PhD completions within a 3-4 year time limit. Additional new challenges include the increased number in students from English as second language backgrounds. Few of these managerial approaches are based in strong pedagogical backgrounds, then - the pedagogy remains invisible, privileged, and largely unexamined. Blogging, the, can be a tangible record of the becoming of the studen, of the project of the self that students and supervisors are undertaking and which otherwise remains largely invisible; it can form part of the journey of the PhD process. Mary now moves to showcase some of the experiences of bloggers - excerpts from PhD blogs, comments, and other related statements.

Up next are Maria Bakardjieva and Georgia Gaden, who'll describe blogging as a technology of the self (in line with Michel Foucault's work), and work with bloggers in Calgary. Such technologies permit individuals to effect a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being - and historical precedents include the Socratic dialogues of ancient Greece, the writing and meditations of the Roman Stoics, the dramas, visual representations, and hairshirts of early Christians, monastic traditions, the journaling of the Puritans, the shift from God- to human-centred discourse in reformation-time dramatic monologue and soliloquy, the diaries and reconstitution of the self during the enlighenment, and finally Freudian psychoanalysis and the finding of the lost self in modernity.

Following on from this, then, blogging can be understood as a technology of the self belonging to late modernity. This period is characterised by Foucault's deconstruction of the subject, Giddens's idea of the self as a reflexive project, and Beck's concept of individualisation, and this also relates to the rise of neoliberalism, the extreme atomisation of individuals, and the emergence of do-it-yourself biographies in which individuals become managers of their own biographies and identities as well as of their own social links and networks. This also requires an understanding of subject positions, then - another concept emerging from Foucault, which points to interpellation in and identification with subject positions as well as a subject/subjectification dialectic. Discourses here can play anything from macro- (media as such) to micro-roles (interpersonal communication); blogging, then, can be seen as occupying an in-between, meso-role.

Blogging as a mesodiscourse plays back macrodiscourses as well as simulating microdiscourses, and the self is constructed in the process. This touches on questions of content (and omissions), audiences, associations, and transformations, and (appropriated, improvised, and negotiated) subject positions of bloggers which Maria and Georgia identified in their research include those of consumer (or perhaps a more Tofflerian prosumer), producer/creator (perhaps what I'd call a produser), worker (describing current workplace experiences), political citizen, cultural citizen, community member, and in-group member. Additionally, many bloggers were also acutely aware of their popularity as measured by hit counters, indicating a popularity cult(ure). Some of these experiences are also transformatory, as some bloggers have started to change their lifestyles specifically to seek out bloggable experiences - blogging itself, in the process, becomes a newly available subject position as as result.

On now to Denise Rall, focussing on Internet scholarship as playing with the Internet. In fact, she desacribes Internet scholarship as a field of play, in which scholars' purposive activities, their home academic disciplines, and their encounters with Internet phenomena generate a process of scholarly engagement - a mechanism for creating scholarly work in unfamiliar terrain. Academic research becomes a personal adventure (opposed to the authority of print). Instructional and didactic pathways in this context may include professionally informed, peripatetic, research-based, and digitally immersed approaches for negotiating academic disciplinary backgrounds and unfamiliar scholarly terrain - and Denise now presents a few case studies of researchers representing these archetypes.

Play impacts on each of these models of Internet scholarship; play is a way of learning and manoeuvring, and a process as instinctive as breathing. Internet scholarship can be described, then, as a field of play; academic biographical narratives record academics at play, and play is required for the future of Internet scholarship.

The final paper in this session is by Ulla Bunz and Kristin Carlton, who have examined AoIR itself by analysing presentation titles at past conferences (2000-2005 - abstracts weren't available for all of these years, hence the focus on titles). Over this period, 1054 authors from 52 countries presented 1539 papers, and Ulla and Kristin divided these papers into 16 technology and 41 content categories. Most popular amongst these were categories such as relationships (127 papers), theory (100), and politics (92); less popular were areas such as gender, ethics, news, IT literacy, surveillance, non-news mass media, technical networks, sexuality, pop culture, publishing and writing, playing, mobility, source credibility, religion, the scholarship of a specific person, knowledge, race, crisis, source and URL reliability, searching, and information seeking (ranging from 23 to 3 papers in these categories).

Some of this may point to shortcomings of AoIR, but it may also indicate that other, more specific conferences exist in many of these less well-represented fields (such as mobility or searching, for example). Ulla and Kristin also found very limited gender differences, but did see geographic differences (mainly between scholars in North America and Europe, and scholars in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central America), differences by year (driven in part also by international events), and differences by technology descriptors (but here, generic descriptors such as 'Internet' and 'Web' dominated even though the papers themselves may well have been far more specific in their focus).

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