Blogs (and Beyond)

The View from My Room, Complete with CowsI'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of connectivity here. Not only is there no wireless, but there's also no way to plug into the cable-based network; I ended up buying a phone card for £3 in order to be able to connect via dial-up, but that didn't work either… And to make matters worse, now my mobile is on the blink too, and locks up every time I try to do anything. Argh!

Anyway, the penultimate day of AoIR 2004 has started now, and I'm back in the stream of presentations on blogging. We had a bit of a bloggers' lunch and withdrawal support group meeting yesterday, hatching some interesting plans for AoIR 2005 (which will be in Chicago, by the way). Lots of disappointment with the lack of opportunity for bloggers here...

Lena Karlsson is up first, speaking about the reading of online diaries. She points out that there are many forms of and reasons for reading blogs, and that there is a variety of blog genres, and that studies so far have been conducted largely on the 'filter blog' style (what I might call gatewatching). Reading is conceptualised mostly as a cognitive, meaning-producing activity, and the reader of blogs hasn't yet been sufficiently theorised. Genres of blogs signpost how blogs should be used, but other conditions of reading affect how in actuality blogs are read.

Lena has studied a number of specific blogs, especially of Chinese-American blogging sites, whose users she has surveyed: aiyah.net, jaycine.com, luckykat.com, and the Australian-based loobylu.com. Questions here included reasons for reading specific blogs, reading habits, and sense of connection to other readers. Why, for example, do people choose to lurk only, or participate actively, and what sense of impact do they get from their participation. Lena points out that there were some clear thematic patterns in the answers she received, even if those answers of course need to be unpacked and aren't simply objective self-assessments by blog readers. Readership of the sites she studies was mainly female, around 30, US-based (with many of the US-based participants based in California), and the blogs themselves started largely around early 2000, with new entries usually every 2-3 days.

Most readers viewed themselves as lurkers, and there was a considerable threshold to posting a comment; the author of a blog was clearly regarded as such. The main reasons for remaining a lurker were insecurity about what to say, a feeling of not needing to say anything, and the fact that the lurker didn't personally know the blog author. Reading in this respect was largely considered to be an act through which no inscription is made onto the text. Weblogs have been hailed as places for collective creativity, but the material from this study produces conventional writer-reader hierarchies; the audience remains largely passive. The writer who doesn't write with the audience in mind is seen as the more genuine writer, since they reproduce the traditional stance of the author.

An interesting comment from Jill Walker at the end of this presentation, then: 50% of the readers do write their own blogs, so perhaps this is where the interactivity and the responses to the studied blogs take place? Lena suggests that such practices are separate from the focus of her study (on-site interaction), but is this view really sustainable? The very idea of the blogosphere, of the intercast of blogs, is that interaction and conversation between blogs and bloggers across a wide range of sites, after all. (There also is a question about RSS feeds here; how many people read blogs not by going to the site but receiving content via RSS?) Boy, people are really making some very critical comments here…

Carolyn Miller is next, speaking on the ubiquity of the blog: a genre analysis. The idea of the blog has gained a significant level of interest and coverage, of course. What is it that has made blogging so compelling so quickly to so many people? Miller and her co-author Dawn Shepherd suggest that the intersection of public and private realms is probably relevant here. There is a kind of ambivalence about audience - blogs are often fairly confessional, and this might be relevant here as people both want to put their lives into the public domain and don't care so much of this material is every read. The question here is about human motivation for symbolic action - blogging as a rhetorical phenomenon.

These actions are also recurring and repeated, making blogging a genre, and such activities continue to evolve as well, so the historical cultural moment of blogging needs to be considered. Genres are profoundly ideological, providing subject relations, expressing space/time relationships, and constraining intentions and strategies. Genres are also evolutionary, having antecedents, in dynamic adaptive relationships with their cultural context, and as sites of contention between stability and change. The original cultural moment of blogs in the late 1990s is a time of mediated voyeurism, of widely dispersed by relentless celebrity, of unsettled boundaries between public and private, and of new technologies which disseminate such challenges to individuals.

There is a pychology of self-disclosure (following Calvert) which has internal (self-reflection and self-clarification) and external aspects (relationships and social interaction). The study was more interested in an ideal type of blogging rather than a statistically 'average' blog, and more in the aims of bloggers than the actual blogs themselves. The focus is more on the potential of what may occur than what actually occurred, then. In discussions of 'ideal' blogging, there were certain agreements on semantic content, syntactic form, and pragmatic action. Semantic content could be classified in a variety of schemes - the most common blog types are filter and personal types of blogs; 70% of blogs are of the personal type, according to a study by Herring.

Consistent across blogs is the timestamping of entries, the frequency of entries, the brevity, and the provision of external links. Two common themes related to 'typified social action' emerged: self-expression (self-clarification and self-validation), and community development (relationship development and social control). Antecedent genres for blogs might be ship's logs, clipping services, commonplace books, Wunderkammern, and edited anthologies; also pamphlets, broadsides, editorials, essays, opinion columns; and journals, diaries, and home pages - blogs then are hybrids or 'mongrels' of these forms. But what is the sense of social need that blogs are responding to, what is the exigence?

There is a widely shared recurrent need for the cultivation and validation of the self, and this is a counter-movement to the postmodern destabilisation of the self. Of course blogs continue to evolve - the journalism blog, the work blog, the tech support blog, etc., as well as new genres in languages other than English and places other than the U.S. Ultimately, blogs might constitute an 'aesthetic technology' by which one 'composes and cultivates one's being in the world' (Vivian). This paper is also available in an online collection called Into the Blogosphere.

The Four Levels of CybergeographyTroels Johansson is up next, speaking on Internet ubiquity in cybernetic geography. He is interested in the mapping out of visualisation of landscape and urban space by means of cybernetic geography. Ubiquitous computing is against the PC interface, primarily local and indoors networks of 'things that think'; while cybernetic geography is envisioned in terms of the PC interface, and global and primarily outdoors. Cybergeography is a new field of study, a terrain to be mapped by cartographers; a new way of thinking geography and information, a geographical cosmology.

It has four levels: space as the abstraction of place in geography; computer-space or CSpace; cyber-space; and syber-place, 'wired nature', 'place mediated or organised by cyberspace' (Batty) - and the progression through these four levels is iterative. Computer space is an abstraction or representation of space, while cyberplace is mediation or infrastructure. Place is always already mediated or wired; geography is still the primary referent on the general system of geo-data. Michael Goodchild suggested an idea of human-computer-reality interaction (HCRI, instead of good old HCI); an idea of rediscovering the world through GIS, a second age of geographical exploration.

In this, the user is the central and supreme agency, but is also subjected to or forming part of the systems of second-order cybergeography. Cyberspace is now forming part of the urban infrastructure. There are classification levels for cyberplaces: annotated (annotation of information to specific sites in the world; immobile annotation to fixed localities or mobile annotation to moving entities), ambient (site-specific presentation of information to be accessed by means of a mobile location-positioned computer (both in immobile and mobile ambience forms), generally positioned (using positioning systems like GPS, and a cartographic interface), nodally positioned (self-positioning of users by means of a nodal connection between a virtual, or cartographic space and a place in the world), and locally wired cyberplaces (accessibility of roaming networks within a certain area; the user's sense of location is given by the area that is covered by the signal).

Whew - very dense stuff which might need some additional unpacking in a longer and more detailed context - while interesting, I'm not sure what to do with this material yet. Also, I really don't know what this is doing in a session that's billed as 'blogs, journals, and diaries'?