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?