I am pleased to announce that my thesis, ‘As if nobody’s reading’?:Imagined contexts and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK is one of the first to be published in the LSE’s document repository (here) and is (to the best of my knowledge) the one of the first* LSE theses to be published using a creative commons (BY-NC) - something that required a certain amount of prodding of the relevant degree-granting authorities and which I hope will establish a precedent others can follow.

The full abstract follows below - I hope those of you interested in one or more of blogging, privacy, interpersonal interaction using computer mediated communication and the social construction of technology will find it useful and I would welcome comments and thoughts.

This thesis examines the understandings and meanings of personal blogging from the perspective of blog authors. The theoretical framework draws on a symbolic interactionist perspective, focusing on how meaning is constructed through blogging practices, supplemented by theories of mediation and critical technology studies.

The principal evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of in-depth interviews with bloggers selected to maximise their diversity based on the results of an initial survey. This is supplemented by an
analysis of personal blogging’s technical contexts and of various societal influences that appear to influence blogging practices.

Bloggers were found to have limited interest in gathering information about their readers, appearing to rely instead on an assumption that readers are sympathetic. Although personal blogging practices have been framed as being a form of radically free expression, they were also shown to be subject to potential biases including social norms and the technical characteristics of blogging services. Blogs provide a persistent record of a blogger’s practice, but the bloggers in this study did not generally read their archives or expect others to do so, nor did they retrospectively edit their archives to maintain a consistent self-presentation.

The empirical results provide a basis for developing a theoretical perspective to account for blogging practices. This emphasises firstly that a blogger’s construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on aninformed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation. Secondly, blogging practices include a variety of envisaged audience relationships, and some blogging practices appear to be primarily self-directed with potential audiences playing a marginal role. Blogging’s technical characteristics and the social norms surrounding blogging practices appear to enable and reinforce this unanticipated lack of engagement with audiences.

This perspective contrasts with studies of computer mediated communication that suggest bloggers would monitor their audiences and present themselves strategically to ensure interactions are successful in their terms. The study also points the way towards several avenues for further research including a more in-depth consideration of the neglected structural factors (both social and technical) which potentially influence blogging practices, and an examination of socialnetwork site use practices using a similar analytical approach.

* I have since discovered that Podromos Tsiavos managed to get his thesis about CC put through using a CC license in 2007.

It is sometimes claimed that young people today are more inclined to indulge in risky info-sharing behavior online. Well young people are online more certainly but I was also curious about how much of that difference was due to differences in overall online tech adoption and how much due to age-related privacy attitudes. I took Pew’s 2006 Digital Footprints survey and re-analysed it. I found that US people aged 18-24 were the most likely (6.7%) to report having had “bad experiences because embarrassing or inaccurate information was posted about you online” - compared to 3.6% in all age groups.

However, if you just look at bloggers across all age groups (using this as a proxy for overall use of information sharing technology) something interesting seems to emerge. Overall 13.9% of US bloggers surveyed said they had had these bad experiences but 12.8% of bloggers aged 18-24 encountered bad experiences from online revelations compared with 17% of 35-44 year olds and 25% of 55-64 year olds.

This might suggest that as we see more and more people in their 30s and 40s getting comfortable using blogging or Facebook we could see an explosion of embarrassing job or relationship-harming revelations.

Of course there are many flaws with this stat - perhaps older people are more sensitive to harms, and the number of bloggers sampled was small - there were only eight 55-64 year old bloggers for example. And this doesn’t contain stats on under-18s. Has anyone done anything better to examine whether older bloggers and/or social media users are in fact more cautious in their use of these technologies when they use them than younger ones and/or teens?

I came across this review of Superfreakonomics and was pleased for a few moments. I learned that the authors had ill-advisedly chosen to use a chapter of their book to call into question the importance of global warming and that an “extensive uproar” ensued online, causing the book’s “public demise” and providing “a huge victory for democracy and common sense”. The article was full of links to the book’s detractors online but I have to say I had not heard of the criticism of the book before now so I checked out Amazon to see how it had fared.

Well if being the sixth most popular book on Amazon makes it a failure I hope my books do as poorly! Perhaps however this reception was in spite of a visible storm of protest and controversy around the book? Well I did find mentions of there being a controversy but when I Googled for “superfreakonomics global warming” I found a sympathetic review by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News, the authors’ own “global warming fact quiz” and only then a short Atlantic Monthly piece which takes a moderately hostile line.

Alas, what Sahil Kapur the author of the piece I found in CampusProgress seems to fail to appreciate is that just because criticism of Superfreakonomics is filling up his RSS reader it doesn’t mean that those views are being encountered directly or indirectly by the public. The power of the mainstream media and of old-fashioned tools to influence public opinion like book promotion tours cannot be easily undermined by blogging alone.

100,000 words summarised at a glance - click to see it full-sized.

I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more published by researchers re-analysing datasets about US Internet use provided by Pew. The reports issued by Pew are great but they don’t always include analyses that I would have made. Here are a few such observations about bloggers which I have made and which will (probably) be in my upcoming thesis:

• 46.4% of bloggers posted every few weeks or less often. 42.1% believed they blogged an hour (or less) a week. (late 2005 survey of bloggers)
• 59% of those who created (self-defined) political blogs in the US were college educated (N=16), no political bloggers had less than a high school education. 63% of blogs that got media attention were by the college educated (N=12), again none were by those with less than a high school education. (Late 2006 survey). Note that 27.7% of the US population had less than a high school education in the 2005 US census.

It’s great that Pew is one of the few organizations that makes its data available in this way, and if anyone else has done interesting re-analyses of Pew survey data please let me know.

Of course we all know that attention is unequally spread among bloggers - now it emerges that people’s blogs are being judged by the platform they choose to use to host them. In the interests of research I joined “PayPerPost” and I discovered that they have recently decided not to offer to pay people whose blogs are on certain services to post about products and services. The blog platforms in question are:

MySpace, Vox, Xanga, BraveJournal, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, and Blogsome

This decision was made based on the usability, navigability and overall quality that we have seen from blogs on these platforms.

Please understand that we do not mean to say that ALL blogs hosted on these platforms are bad blogs. However, the majority of these blogs are just not what the advertisers or our Marketplace are looking for at this time.

Of course some of these users will doubtless be delighted to find out that advertisers don’t think the people they speak to are worth marketing to or (more likely in the case of sites like LJ) that the norms expressed by users of these platforms are strongly anti-commercial.

Typical - you wait ages for good journal articles about political blogging in a UK context and eight come along at once! I still would like to see an article which measures and assesses the (lack of) connection between independent UK political blogs and the UK political scene and explains why the impact of UK political blogs appears to be much less than that of US political blogs…

Unquestionably, blogging has encouraged greater political participation. Nonetheless, it appears that choosing to blog about politics remains socially stratified. I just did a quick and dirty re-analysis on some Pew figures from 2006 and found that not only is blogging in the US already skewed towards the college educated (39% of bloggers contacted had college degrees compared to 28% of the US population 25 and over at the time) but political blogging is even more so - 59% of those sampled who blogged primarily about politics (N=16) have college degrees. I believe the sample size makes it difficult to be definitive about this but the numbers are suggestive. Has anyone written up a ‘proper’ statistical study of how socio-economic status correlates with particular forms of weblogging use?

This week saw the launch of Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media - a collection of ethnographic studies in both white paper (58 pages) and book form - and the release of a draft literature review Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content (87 pages) both of which arrived opportunely as Sonia Livingstone and I are busy trying to finish off a short paper “On the rapid rise of social networking sites: Emerging findings and policy implications”. There goes the day!

Technorati (a service which indexes weblog postings) has produced its latest and most elaborate report to date on bloggers. Notable by its absence is what was a prominent (and dubious) feature of earlier reports - a graph showing a steady rise in the number of blogs and bloggers. Instead they are satisfied to remark that there are “widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Well, mainstream in terms of numbers of people who have ever read a blog perhaps but blog writing is still very much the act of a small minority, at least in the US and UK, according to representative surveys - Pew found in May 08 just 5% of US online users posted to blogs on a given day and 12% had ever done so.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.