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.

The clash between rhetorics of the internet as a dangerous place or as a waste of time and as a space for education for young people is illustrated pretty starkly by the results of a survey of American school administrators conducted by the Consortium of School Networking. This found:

Nearly three-quarters of respondents (superintendents and curriculum directors) said that Web 2.0 technologies had been a positive or highly positive force in students’ communication skills
and the quality of their schoolwork.

but

The majority of school districts ban social networking (70%) and chatrooms (72%)… and over 60% of district administrators polled believe that student use of Web 2.0 should be limited to approved educational sites.

It would be interesting to see what a similar survey of university educators would say.

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!

A journal article I recently wrote with Sonia Livingstone appeared early this month on “early view”. It’s in Children and Society (which is not, alas, an open access journal) but here’s the address and abstract to give you a flavour of it:

On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications

Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in this area.

We encourage comment and queries…

Dr Aric Sigman’s recent comments have had wide media play - the BBC has interviewed him and some of the wilder reaches of the media have produced alarmist headlines like “Does Facebook Cause Cancer?“. Dr Sigman told the BBC:

interacting “in person” has an effect on the body that is not seen when e-mails are written. When we are ‘really’ with people different things happen,” he said.

“It’s probably an evolutionary mechanism that recognises the benefits of us being together geographically.

“Much of it isn’t understood, but there does seem to be a difference between ‘real presence’ and the virtual variety.”

All very interesting, so I got ahold of the paper in The Biologist he wrote that caused all the fuss (Sigman, A. (2009) “Well Connected? The Biological Implications of Social Networking”, Biologist, 56 (1), pp. 14-20.)

He starts by noting that most of us in the developed world are spending more time in front of screens. He mentions an editorial of the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine saying social network site use

encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. The time we spend socialising electronically separates us from our physical networks.

He then provides a great deal of evidence whose persuasiveness I cannot assess that social isolation, lack of social support and loneliness are bad for your health. Where, though, is the evidence presented for a biological difference between face to face and online communication? Nowhere.

He does cite one piece of social psychological evidence - Kraut, R., et al. (1998) “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?”, American Psychologist, 53 (9), pp. 1017-1031. This study concluded internet use correlated with negative effects on social involvement and wellbeing. However this study while widely cited is now very controversial - indeed its lead author produced a followup Kraut, R., et al. (2002) “Internet Paradox Revisited”, Journal of Social Issues, 58 (1), pp. 49-74 which concludes that the opposite applies. More recently, studies are beginning to suggest that the use of Facebook helps people “maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection” Ellison, N., C. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2007) “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4).

There are of course different biologically-related points that can be made about excessive screen time being correlated with lack of exercise (which is bad for you) but that doesn’t enter into Sigman’s analysis. So until we can analyse some of the evidence that Sigman alludes to in his interview of a different biological response to face to face vs virtual contact I would suggest that his work can be used to assert that Facebook use (insofar as it may reduce loneliness) can be good for your health.

The New York Times summarises its findings and legislator reactions though the NYT’s summary of its summary rather overstates matters - the report does not say, “the sexual solicitation of children online is not a significant problem” but it does conclude it is a problem for a small minority of children who are likely already to be exhibiting other risky behaviours.

The full text of the report (and the executive summary etc) is here.

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.

Sonia Livingstone and I have just finished our draft of:

Livingstone, S., & Brake, D. (in prep). On the rapid rise of social networking sites: New findings and policy implications. Children and Society.

If you’re a policy-maker or educator and would like to see it before publication, please email me (dbrake {at} gmail.com).

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!

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…