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?

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!

Multi-talented scholar Eszter Hargittai has started a column of career advice for academics at Inside Higher Ed - primarily from a US perspective naturally enough but if her first column is any guide it’ll contain plenty that is of wider use.

Meanwhile over at the competition, the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Perlmutter has written two excellent pieces on using social media as an academic - one on how to do it and another on how not to.

Robert Darnton is just the latest scholar to suggest this - this time in the NY Review of Books. But there’s a key assertion made which I don’t quite follow:

Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

How is the position of a potential digitizer of orphaned copyright works (whether a commercial or not for profit venture) worse than before the Google suit? Google has set up a third party body that potential future entrants to the market can work with and has shown that it is possible to reach an agreement with publishers, at least in the US (something that was hitherto supposed to be entirely impractical). So if Google is successful they will encourage others to enter the market and if they are not commercially successful someone else may take up the challenge. Perhaps if it isn’t a commercial proposition Google could even be persuaded to hand over Google Books to a non-profit?

As I understand it nothing in the existing ruling gives Google a perpetual exclusive right to do what they are doing - they are just the only people to have tried (and they may be the only organization with the vision, the money and the technological skills to succeed).

Am I missing something?

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…

I would have loved to have shared more about my thesis findings here (and even make sample chapters available online as others have done, but was afraid of two things: first that a potential external examiner would read one or more chapters and then be ineligible for invitation to my viva and second that when I started to pitch a book based loosely on my thesis research the publishers would say “you’ve already given away the best bits online so we won’t take it”.

It turns out, however that I needn’t have worried, at least about the second point. I attended a “how to get your book published” workshop where about 8 publishers were on a panel and when I asked about this issue all of those who replied said they would be happy to publish a book where the thesis was available free electronically. Several went further and said that they felt that authors having a blog or a site about the book ahead of launch - even one that gave away some of the content pre-publication - would probably be a net benefit.

So once my thesis is complete (I hope as early as Monday if my viva committee don’t recommend corrections) I will let you all know where to download it and hope to engage in a conversation around its contents here and elsewhere. While you wait, I have linked to the abstract for my thesis, ‘As if nobody’s reading’: The imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK - I will link to the full text there as well when it is available. Enjoy!

The BBC has been working with the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council on a number of research projects as a pilot project and this has been documented on the Knowledge Exchange blog. Now no fewer than 9 papers have been made available via the latest blog posting - really interesting!

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