Back in Blog

Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.

Common discourses around blogs include the idea of an emergence of public spheres, but also a conceptualisation of blogs as symptoms of fragmentation. They are an important addition to news media, and for some commentators are even their heirs apparent. The blogs Karen has analysed are Instapundit (Glen Reynolds), Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo (Joshua Micah Marshall), and Eschaton (Atrios/Duncan Black). Most of these are sole-authored, and a number of the authors concerned here are professional journalists. Eschaton is perhaps the most activist, and was written anonymously by 'Atrios' for a long time before the author Duncan Black 'outed' himself and his activist affiliation. He also invites guest authors at times.

Arguments for the idea of community on blogs are that they enable democratic collective consensus, community identity (blogspeak), and that the linked nature of blogosphere allows memes to spread. Such conceptualisations build on the Habermasian idea of the public sphere.

On to Instapundit: it has a strong univocal tendency with little evidence or opportunity for direct reader participation. Talking Points Memo has an email link but little more; Andrew Sullivan has letters of the day and therefore offers a kind of managed interaction Eschaton has activist opportunities for links, offers comment functions, but there is a problem with the organisation of commentary on the site.

Discursive communities exist around these sites. Despite the different ideological perspectives there is a shared set of premises and a number of common themes. Meta-blogging, criticism of mainstream coverage, a discourse of authenticity, and blogging's place in the media ecosystem are all important topics here. Blogging has been conceived as offering synergistic relationships between blogs and traditional news media, as genuine, and as trustworthy for its non-objectivity which clearly outlines biases; 'big media' criticisms are that journalists are lazy, there is snotty incoherency in their work, and a lot of venom in their coverage. Such issues came out especially in the RatherGate case, which discussed George W. Bush's supposed preferential treatment in the army: blogs questioned Dan Rather's research, and there were accusations of forgery, and the issue shifted from blogs to mainstream media

Next is Paul Hodkinson, who speaks on subcultural blogging and its impact on identity and community. He outlines a number of perspectives, including the postmodern ones of Turkle and Poster which focus on individualisation and fragmentation; the views of Wellman and Giulia which apply these perspectives to social software and discussion groups (an idea of 'networked individuality' at the centres of partial, personal communities which shift rapidly over time); and the networked individualism of Castells, Wellman, and Haythornthwaite which sees the Internet as a catalyst in this. On the other hand (and this is not a complete opposition to the other perspectives) there are also a number of studies of virtual communities (e.g. Watson, Peterson and Lee) which see discussion groups as potentially strengthening social groupings rather than leading to fragmentation.

Personal blogging might be seen as more in favour of the individualisation theory, more so than discussion groups since personal blogs are centred around individuals not groups. This centredness on the individual is inherited from personal homepages, but blogs are increasingly also used for personal interaction and social communication, so in a sense there is here an individualised mode of social interaction rather than a group-based mode.

A case study to explore this possibility is the development of UK-based goth sites on LiveJournal. Previous use of discussion groups was encouraging the development of an insular, distinctive subcultural space, maintaining and defending collective norms, and dominated the Net use of goths; the more recent use of LiveJournal, however, changed this significantly, and Paul analyses this through his own LiveJournal and personal interviews with fellow goths.

His findings: the content of goth LiveJournals was clearly individualistic, and going beyond purely 'goth' concerns (news, media, etc.), much of it was also in the traditional blog-diary style which is markedly different from material posted to mailing-lists and discussion groups. People's LiveJournals were clearly seen as their own territory, with readers conceptualised as visitors; there was little flaming or disagreement expressed in reader comments (unlike discussion groups). LiveJournal was also a space for individual-centred conversation - usually between the author and one reader only, not amongst larger groups. Individualised social networks also emerged from this, especially also through the LiveJournal 'friends' page, which displays a community, but a community defined by the LiveJournal author only, not a socially constructed one. In practice there was a significant overlap amongst these lists as well, though.

Jill Walker now takes over, talking about distributed narratives. She's begun by passing around print-outs of bits of a distributed narrative called Implementation, on stickers which the authors want their readers to be placed all around the world. She points out that we are used to having boundaries around our stories, both physically and generically; even some hypertext fictions get sold as books. But what if new kinds of narrative might be able to break such narrative conventions?

Aristotle suggested three unities for Greek drama: unity of time (between sunrise and sunset), unity of space (all in the one spot), and unity of action (single theme or idea), and this has been used ever since. Narrative disunities, against this, might be distribution in time (stories can't be experienced in a single session) or distribution in space (stories cannot be experienced in a single location or medium), and perhaps also a distribution of authorship which replaces single authors with collective and emergent authorship. Distribution in time might not be so rare (e.g. TV shows, or email narratives), distribution in space is rarer (again, Implementation is a key example here, and there are other sticker-based narrative projects), distribution in space and time is somewhat rarer still (Jill notes Justin's Links as an example).

The point is that fragmented narratives pull in the reader through their intimation that there is more to the story than is directly visible. Bloggers' stories also cross several blogs, of course, as does immersive gaming, and there is then finally distribution of authorship (Flickr.com as an online social photo-sharing space allows the emergence of new stories through the pulling together of photos from all over the Net).

Sarah Ford is next, speaking on the question of public and private on LiveJournal. She makes two basic observations: the gap between public and private spaces is narrowing, and ICTs and other media are tied up with these changes in some way. Blogs are a particularly useful site for studying these changes. Sarah suggests two basic types of public and private: access to information about an individual, with privacy where this information is protected and publicity where it is commonly known; spatiality, which is based around the idea of home, where home is private and 'not home' is public. Conventional definitions make these two out to be dichotomous, and many other binaries map on to them (economy/family, civil society/economy, government/non-government functions).

More recent theories of the public and the private are non-dichotomous, proposing either a continuum between these or a social space - or multiple publics - which sits between the two and consists of groups of individuals (e.g. Hannah Arendt, Alan Wolfe). This non-dichotomous idea is well suited to the study of the blogosphere, and Sarah has studied LiveJournal as a case study for this.

LiveJournal begun in May 1999 and had some 2 million users by September 2004, it is free and includes reader comments and communities, friends lists, and custom friends groups. Every post made to LiveJournal has an assigned security level. Posts may be public, friends-only (or 'friends-locked'), custom (only for the custom friends group), or private. In this, custom-only posts are posts which are available only for a custom group of friends which the poster has created - i.e., subgroups of friends who are defined as appropriate audiences for specific posting topics (personal relationships, professional life, etc.).

Such level assignations can also be changed after publication, however, so this is not a one-time decision and is more malleable than that. Some users even keep separate LiveJournals at these various levels. Comments can also be configured flexibly - users can disallow comments altogether or allow comments only from specific groups, and comments can again be made visible only to specific groups as well. There is clearly a non-dichotomous idea of public/private here, and the Woolfean idea of multiple publics plays out clearly here through the definition of specific custom friends groups.

An interesting comment following on from this discussion: Lilia Efimova mentions the idea that there might be additional levels of privacy - public, private, and secret; in this, private would be limited to a non-public audience, but not as restricted as truly secret information. Again, we appear to be dealing with a continuum here, rather than distinct states, and we may yet need to define where this continuum stops and starts.