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?

I listened to this LSE podcast - Happiness around the world by Prof Carol Graham and I asked her whether she had any data on whether (as some media scholars suggest) the increased exposure in poor countries to media depictions of life in rich countries had any effect on happiness (by making them feel impoverished by comparison. She replied:

I have data on internet and media access for Latin America, and there I find that those with internet access are typically happier than the average, but this correlates with an overall income/education effect, even when controlling for these things. We do find, though, that those respondents with greater access to the media are more likely to think that the distribution of income in their country is unfair.

Of course, the direction of causation might be either way - perhaps people who are dissatisfied with income distribution are more likely to consume the media? But interesting nonetheless - and it’s comforting to hear that education makes you happier…

I came across this review of Superfreakonomics and was pleased for a few moments. I learned that the authors had ill-advisedly chosen to use a chapter of their book to call into question the importance of global warming and that an “extensive uproar” ensued online, causing the book’s “public demise” and providing “a huge victory for democracy and common sense”. The article was full of links to the book’s detractors online but I have to say I had not heard of the criticism of the book before now so I checked out Amazon to see how it had fared.

Well if being the sixth most popular book on Amazon makes it a failure I hope my books do as poorly! Perhaps however this reception was in spite of a visible storm of protest and controversy around the book? Well I did find mentions of there being a controversy but when I Googled for “superfreakonomics global warming” I found a sympathetic review by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News, the authors’ own “global warming fact quiz” and only then a short Atlantic Monthly piece which takes a moderately hostile line.

Alas, what Sahil Kapur the author of the piece I found in CampusProgress seems to fail to appreciate is that just because criticism of Superfreakonomics is filling up his RSS reader it doesn’t mean that those views are being encountered directly or indirectly by the public. The power of the mainstream media and of old-fashioned tools to influence public opinion like book promotion tours cannot be easily undermined by blogging alone.

One would like to think that the internet helps the best content reach the attention of the world. Ira Glass was recently interviewed by Jesse Brown who does an internet-centric radio programme called Search Engine. There I learned several interesting things (in no particular order)

• A promo spot to reach 1.8 million radio listeners to This American Life costs advertisers $5-8000. A similar spot to reach just over a half million podcast listeners, many of which may be from overseas and therefore not of interest to a US advertiser, costs $20,000. Is this just the glamour of a new medium in action?
• TAL is America’s most listened-to podcast even though it has not done any significant amount of marketing. (I think this says something about the demographics of public radio listeners as well as about the superb quality of the programming but it is still impressive).
• It follows that even most popular podcast in America is only listened to by .1% of the US population.
• The average listening time to TAL on the radio is 48 minutes - who said that people can’t concentrate in the new media age?
• The US Federal government only covers 4-7 percent of public broadcasting’s costs

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!

Multi-talented scholar Eszter Hargittai has started a column of career advice for academics at Inside Higher Ed - primarily from a US perspective naturally enough but if her first column is any guide it’ll contain plenty that is of wider use.

Meanwhile over at the competition, the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Perlmutter has written two excellent pieces on using social media as an academic - one on how to do it and another on how not to.

I have been re-reading Colette and came upon this passage where she describes her father’s writing desk:

A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colours; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green and violet; a hand blotter, a bottle of liquid glue… a big inkpot flanked by a little inkpot, both in bronze, and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page, another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colours (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams and reams of paper, cream-laid, ruled, watermarked…

And Colette in this passage doesn’t even enter into the seductive smell of a stack of unused paper. I used to love to go into stationers’ shops and prowl around and look at all the paper-related gadgets. Now I fear the magic of such places is being lost or at least is becoming a marginalised luxury for print and writing hobbyists, scrapbookers and the like. I am certainly attached to my computer gadgetry – I delight in the variety of things my iPod Touch enables me to do and enjoy tinkering and adding functionality even when I don’t really need it - but the enchantment is not aesthetic. Compare the passage above with this attempt of mine…

A new MacBook pristinely white with its unblinking webcam eye staring back at me, surrounded by snaking cables bringing power in, trailing out to the superfluous but more convenient mouse and to a colour printer which dwarfs the computer it serves but which languishes days without being used in this increasingly paperless and environmentally conscious world. Invisibly also it connects to the unseen wider world of the internet via WiFi…

No, even had I Colette’s gifts I think I would find it hard to visualise computers and their accessories as comparably aesthetically pleasurable instruments to use. Of course we have gained in efficiency from the change from atoms to bits for communication but every so often I am reminded of what we are slowly losing.

One of the intriguing things about the BBC’s recently broadcast docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is that in order to balance the liberal perspective they invited Slavoj Zizek on as an apologist for Robespierre. It’s not often you find calls for revolution on mainstream TV programming (well OK it is on BBC2 not BBC1 but in a high profile time slot). I wasn’t convinced in the end by Slavoj’s “no omelette without eggs” argument but I was struck that the BBC seemed incapable of leaving the audience in any doubt that the revolutionary terror was a Bad Thing. Why provide the appearance of balance then have a voiceover ending which leaves the viewer with the ‘author’s message’ that the French revolutionary terror was the precursor to bloodthirsty dictators like Pol Pot and Stalin? I suppose the BBC’s explanatory blurb said it all:

during the 365 days that Robespierre sat on the Committee of Public Safety, the French Republic descended into a bloodbath … [this documentary] looks at how Robespierre’s revolutionary idealism so quickly became an excuse for tyranny.

Still the programme is well worth watching if only for the chilling reconstructions of the committee’s own deliberations, based on contemporary sources.