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!

I was looking through my notes on Bourdieu just now and came across this beauty of a sentence from Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction : a social critique of the judgement of taste. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 172:

As a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses systematically the necessity and freedom inherent in its class condition and the difference constituting that position, the habitus apprehends differences between conditions, which it grasps in the form of differences between classified, classifying practices (products of other habitus), in accordance with principles of differentiation which, being themselves the product of these differences, are objectively attuned to them and therefore tend to perceive them as natural.

Might it have been clearer in the original French? Thankfully Goffman who has replaced Bourdieu as one of the central theorists in my thesis is insightful while remaining one of the more readable sociologists…

I am re-visiting my literature review for my blogging-related thesis and I would like to make sure I have not missed anything important. I have uploaded my weblog-related references to citeulike here. I am particularly interested in qualitative approaches to blogging - especially interview-based work and in the study of personal/journal weblogs - sometimes dubbed “lifelogs” (as opposed to the study of weblogging for political, marketing or educational purposes). There seem to be very few such studies - those I have found I have pasted below.

So can anyone point me to important sources I have missed?

Update: I tried to do this using Citeulike but its importing from Endnote appears to leave something to be desired, so please comment here with your citations instead. I have pasted what I have found so far in the way of interviews with personal webloggers below (Thanks Lori for reminding of your contributions!).

(more…)

This new report surveyed seventeen writers already working in digital media in the UK. It gives an interesting snapshot of the variety of options available for those wanting to be “new media writers” but notwithstanding the optimistic note it sounds, two messages stood out for me - it’s stimulating, but don’t give up your day job because there’s not a stable business model out there, and the money (such that there is) is still in ’selling the shovels’ (training/teaching and consultancy) rather than the actual doing.

The cover alone (below) is reason enough to feature the report!

Hi all,

I am Ranjana, an incoming doctoral student, at the LSE, entering in October 2008. Many thanks to David Brake for introducing me to this group weblog! While my *very* broad interests are around media audiences/users, I am significantly interested in de-Westernizing audience research, political legacies of the field in the age of the internet, and very centrally in bringing literary theories and hermeneutics in conversation with current research around writers and readers in cyber space. Much influenced by Umberto Eco, Wolfgang iser, Hans Robert Jauss, I am interested in working out a comprehensive qualitative empirical framework which shall let me attempt socio-culturally inflected re-readings of text-reader theories in the context of burgeoning work around networkers and ‘participants’. Significant influences apart from the literary theorists, have been Elihu Katz (I am fascinated by the thoughts of using ‘viewers work’ in contemporary contexts) Roger Silverstone, Sonia Livingstone, Ien Ang (in some senses), Arjun Appadurai  amongst others. I am happy to discuss my ideas with anyone who works with reception studies, or is interested in empirical projects that try to carry the audience into the world of ‘users’!

Google’s Book Search gets most of the press but Microsoft has also been active in the large-scale digitization of both in copyright and out of copyright books for their search engine. At least until recently. I hope Microsoft’s short-sighted decision to phase out their book digitization programme does not encourage Google to do likewise. We academics have also lost out - the same decision also put paid to Microsoft’s “Live Search Academic” engine which shadowed Google Scholar.

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

Ofcom (2008) “Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes, Behaviours and Use”

As well as the new UK survey and qualitative information it provides, it contains a review of the literature on the social networking focused on potential harms co-authored by Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Milwood Hargrave with myself contributing. We would be interested to hear any reactions.

Alvi, I., et al. (2007) “Meeting Their Potential: The Role of Education and Technology in Overcoming Disadvantage and Disaffection in Young People” - the 125 page report is free to download from BECTA, which sponsored it - co-authors from Media@LSE include Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Helsper and myself. Comments would be welcome.

I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.