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.

Last year I published Shaping the ‘me’ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site, a chapter in Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media. It was one of an interdisciplinary collection of essays “aiming to understand the transformations in the age-old practice of storytelling that have become possible with the new, digital media” edited by Knut Lundby. A preprint of that chapter is now downloadable.

It contrasts informal digital storytelling with digital storytelling in institutional contexts, uses Jan Schmidt’s Blogging Practices: an Analytical Framework as a starting point to discuss some of the social and technological contexts of the MySpace practices of ten young British users interviewed and discusses the limited extent to which MySpace profile creation and maintenance appeared to act as a tool for self-reflection among those users.

As usual comments and questions are welcomed!

I have been re-reading Colette and came upon this passage where she describes her father’s writing desk:

A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colours; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green and violet; a hand blotter, a bottle of liquid glue… a big inkpot flanked by a little inkpot, both in bronze, and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page, another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colours (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams and reams of paper, cream-laid, ruled, watermarked…

And Colette in this passage doesn’t even enter into the seductive smell of a stack of unused paper. I used to love to go into stationers’ shops and prowl around and look at all the paper-related gadgets. Now I fear the magic of such places is being lost or at least is becoming a marginalised luxury for print and writing hobbyists, scrapbookers and the like. I am certainly attached to my computer gadgetry – I delight in the variety of things my iPod Touch enables me to do and enjoy tinkering and adding functionality even when I don’t really need it - but the enchantment is not aesthetic. Compare the passage above with this attempt of mine…

A new MacBook pristinely white with its unblinking webcam eye staring back at me, surrounded by snaking cables bringing power in, trailing out to the superfluous but more convenient mouse and to a colour printer which dwarfs the computer it serves but which languishes days without being used in this increasingly paperless and environmentally conscious world. Invisibly also it connects to the unseen wider world of the internet via WiFi…

No, even had I Colette’s gifts I think I would find it hard to visualise computers and their accessories as comparably aesthetically pleasurable instruments to use. Of course we have gained in efficiency from the change from atoms to bits for communication but every so often I am reminded of what we are slowly losing.

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

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.

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!

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

If I were to be really cool I would say that I was among the first to join Friendster but moved to Myspace fairly early on when most of my friends-in-bands were totally ‘in’ to it (and ‘I’m here to help’). I would also say that I was invited to Joost beta (because I like to download stuff). I would also say that I’ve been ripping & burning lots of music and films from p2p’s early hay days (you have to get real about what you can take with you on the road). And although I brushed elbows with some big name record companies on this topic it didn’t refrain me from, all lovey dovey, r&b-ing. I would also say that I flirted with AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger but when a deceased friend kept reappearing on AIM it was time to go. I forgot my password for MSN (and gosh, I get fairly upset about Microsoft’s passport thing, so MSN got abandoned very fast) and Yahoo meant a blast from the past who kept on sending offline messages (’next!’ as they say in sheaux biz). I would also say that from the mid-1990s I taught myself some basic programming mambo jumbo and toyed with the idea of becoming a digital architect. It turned out that I had a short attention span. Never got into the hang of BBS. Yes, I do remember BBS. As a matter of fact, I stem from that period, from before when terms like ‘being networked’ and ‘digital’ seemed to become the norm for a lot of us; I know that there was no internet and no email for instance (well, for the common peeps like me). I guess these statements date me so to speak.

John Palfrey’s blog post on the Berkman Center’s project on Digital Natives raises the question who are actually these so-called Digital Natives? In his and Urs Gasser’s upcoming book ‘Born Digital’ (Basic Books, 2008) they explore and address an emerging global culture of connectivity, communication and content. Where the world is the network and the people the content… Where multi presence no longer differentiates between analogue players and the digital world. Are we then all Digital Natives? No. Are we all Born Digital? Heck, I’m not and even if I were, there would be no guarantee that I would be a Digital Native.

So, this is a discussion we’re having at the Berkman. What are the attributes? Age, culture, economics, etc. All of them? Who do they represent? What is its place in our day-to-day activities? I guess the main claim explored is the idea that connectivity and communal activities seems to be defining how people will live and work in times to come (a claim I’m critically assessing but will write about in due course). What are the implications for privacy? Safety? IP? Information quality? etc. And looking at sites like Google and Facebook where platforms are provided for us to connect (and create) we should ask ourselves how commonality here is really governed… And what that actually means from both user- and firm-centric perspectives.

So to tell you the truth: I have pimped my ‘all-features’ cell phone (truth be told that we usually lead separate lives). I would also say that I love taking pictures so possess more cameras than one might consider healthy, so transgressed into the bits & bytes of it (oftentimes end up with tears in my eyes and my good ol’ camera with real film in my hands). Aw my gawd. I’m an old fart (thank you, David Weinberger ;-).