I knew this would happen sooner or later. I have a fairly unusual name and nobody with any online prominence who is anything like me has popped up online. Until now. I therefore would like it to be on the record that I have nothing to do with The Social Media Bible (even though I have been studying social media for the last 6 years). The David Brake who is co-authoring that book is David Kendrick Brake - I am David Russell Brake (and I am starting to think that it might be expedient to use that middle name for my publications). Not that I would want you to get the impresson I don’t like the book - I haven’t seen it and don’t know the authors (though I had swapped emails with my namesake briefly earlier when I noticed his/our name online).

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’!

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a mainstream UK TV series about a personal weblogger until now. Does the first screen outing have to be for ‘Belle Du Jour‘ - on TV as The Secret Diary of a Call Girl?

David Brake

My first degree back in the 80s was in English so from time to time I enjoy dipping back into literature. In this case I combined my interest in social Internet applications with literature by listening to Conrad’s Lord Jim as an audiobook thanks to a reading by a volunteer at Librivox (which recruits volunteers to read public domain books).

I am obviously moving away from the literary criticism of my first degree towards a more sociological mindset - I found myself thinking “Conrad’s minute observation of the way people interact and behave is so impressive. It reminds me of Erving Goffman“. I wonder what my favourite English prof Sandy Leggatt would think of me now…
David Brake

Today I finally got down to work on writing up my first sketchy analysis of the interviews with personal webloggers which are at the heart of my thesis. My personal pattern with writing usually follows a fairly predictable path:

Stage 1: Avoidance
Just read one more book, brew one more cup of tea or, if necessary play a few more hours of the latest game before starting.
Stage 2: Paralysis
It’s all in my head - ish - but where do I begin?
Stage 3: Sketchy outline
A vague idea of how the piece might fit together - a few lines of text in outline form in Word.
Stage 4: Paralysis again
Hmm… This writing business is harder than I thought. Maybe I should try a little Stage 1 for a while longer. Eventually I progress to…
Stage 5: Write first draft
This I tend to do in a few long bursts of effort - at this point I become anti-social and absorbed until it is all written out.
Stage 6: Read it over
I’m not good at this - I can’t seem to spot the flaws even though they are obvious to anyone else (like most people…). So therefore…
Stage 7: Circulate to friends and unfortunate wife
A vital stage where they spot all the obvious flaws and infelicities. I really like getting feedback - even negative feedback. I think this is where my journalistic background helps - I’m used to being edited and recognise it normally improves my work.
Sage 8: Incorporate feedback.
Done!

At the moment I am at about stage 4.5 (as the chart below indicates)

177 / 3,000 (5.9%)

Update: Two days (and one bout of gastroenteritis) later

442 / 3,000 (13.0%)

Thanks to Prolurkr for using and thereby telling me about that little graphy-thing. Hopefully I will be driven to write in order to be able to show off my progress on it.

I have to have something put together by Monday. Please cheer me on! And please add yourselves to our world map so we can feel as if the whole world is watching.

I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!

Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…

It has been a little frustrating to spend days at AoIR6 meeting all kinds of interesting people but not being able to tell them much about my own research because I had not yet done any analysis.

Well, I spent a good year and a half narrowing down my question and theoretical framework (Stage I) and several months doing data collection (Stage II) - today I ‘officially’ start analysing my fieldwork (Stage III)! In this case, this means producing a rough coding frame for my 24 interviews (so far) with London-based personal webloggers.

Don’t get too impatient to see my results yet - I don’t expect to have produced anything for Stage IV (writing up) until next year but I feel like I’m moving along at last. This is certainly a different rate of progress than I had in journalism when a month seemed like forever to produce something - but of course I hope to dig a whole lot deeper in to my subject…

P.S. I was wondering why my posts about AoIR weren’t appearing in the AoIR6 feed - I had mis-written the tag. Oh well.

To my mind the scary PhD moment #1 has to be the moment when you think "my research doesn’t add up to anything". I think I am past that - but closely following behind it has to be what I am facing at the moment - "my research was going to show something really interesting… but I just read this article which covers the ground already."

Fortunately, in the social sciences rather than the hard sciences you are unlikely to get a situation where your research has been completely superseded by someone else’s findings, but one of the things that can keep you going through the PhD process is the feeling that you have found some aspect of your field that nobody else has spotted.

In my case, my qualitative examination of weblogging has in part been motivated by a desire to problematise the early essentialist conceptions of weblogging that suggested "weblogs are all…" X, Y or Z. Then I finally got around to reading some of the articles in my ‘to read’ list - particularly Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog - part of the excellent Into the Blogosphere collection - and Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs, both written last year and both providing just the kind of nuanced treatment of blogging and its motivations that I had immodestly hoped to pioneer. Oh well - back to standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward a few inches at a time…

I just heard about the Blogathon. On August 6th, bloggers will participate in a 24 hour marathon of posting for charity - one post every half hour. I think this is a nifty idea and there are some good charities on their suggested list (though in fact you can blog for any charity you like). I encourage anyone reading to participate themselves. I might do so myself on my (not very) personal blog but I am not sure there are enough people out there who would be willing to sponsor it to make it worthwhile. However if I get ?100/$175 of sponsorship I will go ahead, so please visit my blog and pledge!

P.S. If there is anyone out there with detailed knowledge of development charities I would welcome some help in choosing one to support. I normally give money to Oxfam or Unicef - I did a little research a while ago and it appeared they were doing good work and had a good income to administration/marketing ratio. But one hears so much criticism of aid agencies and it makes me a little worried. Can you either reassure me that one of these would be a good destination for my own money and others’ funds or suggest another better development charity?

Dear All,

Some of us in the 1st year had an idea of going out at a ‘group event’.. which looks like it will take form of some wild fun this in Brixton this Saturday.

Please, come and join!

The approximate plan is to start at the every-so cheap and ever-so yummy noodle house on coldharbour lane for a pre-party feed and then move on to a pub - there are plenty and one or two good ones as well - and then strolling up brixton hill to the windmill.

The ultimate destination is something called The People’s republic of Disco http://peoplesrepublicofdis.co.uk/

Bring two of your own records/cds/whatever and they play ‘em. what’s more it’s full of very unpretentious people drinking (fairly) cheap beer and generally having a good time. night goes from 9p, until 2am and there are more than enough night buses going from brixton to wherever to get you home in time for breakfast.

Brixton tube 20:00…

See you there?

Any questions please contact k.glushkova@lse.ac.uk /07817820744

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