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!

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?

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!

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.

We invite contributions to the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series.

This series is intended to:

• Present high quality research and writing (including research in-progress) to a wide audience of academics, policy-makers and commercial/media organizations.
• Set the agenda in the broad field of media and communication studies.
• Stimulate and inform debate and policy.

Please read the guidelines at the website before you submit a paper for consideration.

Please email your paper to Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor b.cammaerts [at] lse.ac.uk

Series Editor: Professor Robin Mansell

Series Deputy Editor: Dr. Bart Cammaerts

The Editorial Board is comprised of LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in information and communication technologies, the media and communications. They come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and information systems, cultural, gender and development studies.

The Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series aims to achieve a quick turn-around of papers from submission to online publication. Rights are retained by the author.

We look forward to receiving a paper from you.

Having just about finished a literature review for a report on ICT and disadvantage (I’ll provide a link when it becomes available) can I plead with other authors to be specific in their abstracts? Here’s a (suitably anonymised) example of how not to do it…

“… The study investigates the links between [X, Y, and Z] and reveals the changing situation experienced by [people].”

OK so what was the nature of the links?! How has the situation changed? I know an abstract is necessarily of limited length and it can be hard to summarise months of research in a few sentences but abstracts are is meant to enable the reader to quickly get a sense of whether the paper or report itself will be of use. With abstracts like these the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing or discard it.

PS To make matters worse the report in question was divided into sections but the version I downloaded didn’t come with a table of contents or endnotes!

David Brake