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…

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.

I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more published by researchers re-analysing datasets about US Internet use provided by Pew. The reports issued by Pew are great but they don’t always include analyses that I would have made. Here are a few such observations about bloggers which I have made and which will (probably) be in my upcoming thesis:

• 46.4% of bloggers posted every few weeks or less often. 42.1% believed they blogged an hour (or less) a week. (late 2005 survey of bloggers)
• 59% of those who created (self-defined) political blogs in the US were college educated (N=16), no political bloggers had less than a high school education. 63% of blogs that got media attention were by the college educated (N=12), again none were by those with less than a high school education. (Late 2006 survey). Note that 27.7% of the US population had less than a high school education in the 2005 US census.

It’s great that Pew is one of the few organizations that makes its data available in this way, and if anyone else has done interesting re-analyses of Pew survey data please let me know.

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).

Technorati (a service which indexes weblog postings) has produced its latest and most elaborate report to date on bloggers. Notable by its absence is what was a prominent (and dubious) feature of earlier reports - a graph showing a steady rise in the number of blogs and bloggers. Instead they are satisfied to remark that there are “widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Well, mainstream in terms of numbers of people who have ever read a blog perhaps but blog writing is still very much the act of a small minority, at least in the US and UK, according to representative surveys - Pew found in May 08 just 5% of US online users posted to blogs on a given day and 12% had ever done so.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.

At last an edited collection of articles about different aspects of digital storytelling has arrived at Amazon US and on the publisher’s site, Peter Lang (it will doubtless be available at Amazon UK soon).

Table of contents follows:
Knut Lundby: Introduction: Digital storytelling, mediatized stories
Ola Erstad/James V. Wertsch: Tales of mediation: Narrative and digital media as cultural tools
Nick Couldry: Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: Conceptual choices and alternative futures
Kirsten Drotner: Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies
Nancy Thumim: ‘It’s good for them to know my story’: Cultural mediation as tension
Birgit Hertzberg Kaare/Knut Lundby: Mediatized lives: Autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling
Mark Evan Nelson/Glynda A. Hull: Self-presentation through multimedia: A Bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling
Kelly McWilliam: Digital storytelling as a ‘discursively ordered domain’
Lotte Nyboe/Kirsten Drotner: Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration
Larry Friedlander: Narrative strategies in a digital age: Authorship and authority
John Hartley: Problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media
Ola Erstad/Kenneth Silseth: Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context
Elisabeth Staksrud: Fairytale parenting: Contextual factors influencing children’s online self-representation
David Gauntlett: Creative brainwork: Building metaphors of identity for social science research
Tone Bratteteig: Does it matter that it is digital?
David Brake: Shaping the ‘me’ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site.

Comments on the book would be welcome - particularly on the last chapter mentioned which is my own!