I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

I just know there must be something out there in the HCI literature on how computer users are influenced by things like the size and position of buttons, or (of specific interest to me) by the size of text entry boxes. If you have a text entry box 6 lines long on a page and an otherwise identical page but with a 12 line long text entry box wouldn’t you expect the person writing in the bigger box to write more? (Even though in both cases the writer can in principle write as long as they like, with the text box developing scroll bars if they reach the end of the box)? I know that there is an interesting literature on the effect of defaults - I am hoping there is some similar research on this topic.

If you happen to know of evidence for this (or someone else at least asserting the same) either in the academic literature (preferably) or in the practitioner literature please comment…

I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.

Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this

Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)

(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)

Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?

David Brake

I have been thinking about a methodological issue - online interviewing vs face to face. One issue is simply the likely amount of data one can reasonably get from an interviewee in a given time. If the average Internet user’s typing speed is 30-40 words per minute (based entirely arbitrarily on what Microsoft seems to think an “average user” might achieve) while the average speed of normal speech is 280 word per minute (again only rather loosely sourced) then given the same time commitment from your interviewee you’ll only get about 15% as much typed info as you would get face to face. Of course there are a lot of other variables in there to help you decide what method to use but I would still be interested to know if anyone can provide proper citeable estimates of typical typing and speaking speeds to use as rules of thumb. It strikes me that differential typing speed might be an under-measured index of the digital divide as well…

David Brake

I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.

I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases – the Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).

Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.

Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).

It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed – Web of Knowledge’s can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations don’t give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.

Is there a trick I have missed?

David Brake

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

Who are the scholars who have written most about the social function of phatic speech? (For example, “turned out rainy again today” - a favourite British expression). I have a feeling it’s something Goffman or Garfinkel or Harvey Sacks might have studied but I am not sure which texts to look in. I am not so much interested in the structure of such speech but why people do it, what they expect from people who they talk to and perhaps something about the power relations implied.

Yes I am unable to resist posting on yet another weblog - Writing and the Digital Life - a group blog this time “about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience”. Please look at the post linked above and if you can help answer the question it poses please make some suggestions.

To save you the click what I am trying to find is if there is any literature about the social or psychological significance of being able to express the creative urge (or not being able to). Not as a means to an end (group membership, education, counter-hegemony) but as an end in itself.

I was down to the University of Surrey today, for a presentation to the new Department of Political, International and Policy Studies.

At the lunch break there was time to comment (among other things) on the large supply but relatively scarce demand for political science /
studies PhD graduates, recently. The large supply, I would have thought, depends on the capacity of the British PhD machine to train increasing numbers of national and interntional students(who are fleeing crumbling, underfunded or clientelar academic machines
elsewhere). And this I see as a big plus. And from the increasing prevalence of English as a second language in many European and non European countries (as Chris Flood noted). A plus of sorts, as foreign language teachers are not too happy. The scarce demand is more tricky to explain: too many ‘Associate Lecturers’ and TAs? Too long a time between one’s PhD and the first lecturing post (Post-docs, and post-post-docs) Low demand from students for Politics degree (not, it seems)? Open to debate.

The truly unexpected event of the day was my use of the word ’synergy’ which until today was in my index verborum proibitorum. It just came out. I should have swallowed my tougue instead. But alas, there’s worse words. Uhm, such as?

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My site now has a short summary of my planned PhD research: Private Lives Lived in Public: Weblogs and Self Performance. I would be interested in what people think of it and I am particularly interested in hearing more about:

• Theories of how producers of alternative media - particularly earlier ones - benefit from being able to perform aspects of themselves hitherto denied them (Clemencia Rodr?guez is my only non-new media source so far).
• Sociological literatures on reflexive self performance (particularly autobiography) Where would be a good place to start with Judith Butler?
• Methodologically, in principle any communication is arguably a form of self performance but some are more clearly self-performative than others. For example I would argue Justin’s video below is intensely self-performative while “I ate corn flakes this morning - I like corn flakes” is less so. Would concentrating on the authors of weblogs at the ‘highly performative’ end of this continuum be a defensible research practice and if so how can I choose them in a consistent fashion?

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I tend to get a lot of student papers (and a fair amount of class discussion) where students seem to have simply swallowed hegemonic theories of the media uncritically. What widely available texts should I suggest students read that engage critically with the hegemony theorists so at least their papers will contain a balanced perspective taking into account countervailing influences like the journalists’ own reflexivity, the (contested but still marginally existent) power of non-commercial mainstream media outlets like the BBC, the ability of people to produce their own alternative media and the classical liberal argument that the market provides sufficient pluralism through competition?

I found Lichtenberg, J. (2000) “In Defence of Objectivity, Revisited” in Mass Media and Society, (Gurevitch, M. and J. Curran eds) (3rd) Arnold, London, pp. 238-254. to be a good start - anything else?

Update: A colleague suggested

• Klaehn, J. (2002) “A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’”, European Journal of Communication, 17 (2), pp. 147-182
• Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility
• Curran, “Rethinking Media and Democracy” in Mass Media and Society (Gurevitch, M. and J. Curran eds)

All of them good choices. Other ideas would still be welcome though.

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So, I’m reading Vince Mosco’s book on political economy of communication (again). He talks about feminism in relation to political economy in general (specifically about Marilyn Waring). But he doesn’t talk much about feminism in relation to the political economy of communication. So I wondered, what would that look like?

Here’s my first guess:

• It would investigate how women are involved in the cycle of production, distribution, and consumption of media products;
• It would investigate, particularly, how gender relations are entwined with power relations within production, distribution, and consumption of media products.
• It might continue to ask how women?s and children?s lives are being transformed by new information flows differently to men?s lives.

Haraway argues that it should go further; that feminist theory should also hold together race, sex/gender, and class together analytically (1991:129, cited in Mosco p239). Mosco suggests this might be done through an analysis of social movements. Taking Mosco’s framework, how are the processes of commodification, spatialisation, and structuration affecting women and children as contrasted to men?

I haven’t seen any real theoretical work on this but I can believe it’s out there. Otherwise a literature review of empirical studies might be very interesting!

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