This is not a paper

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THREE SHADES OF GREY…

I blog.  The tag line of one of my blogs reads “exploring my personal and professional relationship with technology.”  This blog was prompted by my interest in studying relationships between readers and writers in the blogosphere. If I wanted to study others, how could I understand them if I didn’t blog myself? With this understanding (and help from some theoretical constructs) I set out to analyze three blogs on LiveJournal.com (LJ.) Before sharing my story and findings (along with some theory) let me present you with three short vignettes of the blogs and bloggers we will be investigating: Σ, Φ, and Ω.

 

SOMETHING TO PROTECT….

I have taken great care in protecting the anonymity of the bloggers. Even though the blogs are in a public sphere and require no password to access, due to the sensitive nature of the blogs, I believe it would be unethical to provide the URL, username, images or direct quotes from the blog. With blog specific search engines like Google Blogsearch and Technorati, the blogs were easily findable with any of these keywords. If you were to categorize this style of research, it could be labeled a passive analysis, where the investigator is not actively involved with the community. Strict guidelines for passive analysis of Internet communities have not been established in the field of qualitative research. The American Sociological Association code of ethics states that: “Confidentiality is not required with respect to observations in public places, activities conducted in public, or other settings where no rules of privacy are provided by law or custom. Similarly, confidentiality is not required in the case of information available from public records.”

I also felt that if I participated with the bloggers through their LJ (by email, IM or comments) I would be interrupting and invading their privacy, potentially altering their blogging behavior. This is something that I learned from my first expedition into the blogosphere. When I first began blogging, an ex-boyfriend began harassing me via email. This harassment (which referenced postings in my blog) made me stop posting. When I returned to blogging, this incident was in the back of my mind and impacts the discourse and types of subjects that I post to my blog. I am trying to understand blogging through reading these blogs, I do not want to interact or interfere with them.

AND SO IT BEGINS…

In order to understand the world, or worlds around us, we must actively participate in them. In 1930 Vygotsky examined the question: What is the relation between human beings and their environment, both physical and social? Vygotsky raised this question to understand the development and use of language. He hypothesized that the development of higher order thinking was a long series of developmental events which move from interpersonal into intrapersonal. The dialectical relationship between human beings and the physical world was integral to Vygotsky’s work (i.e. the way we shape the world, and the way in which the world shapes us.) Knowledge is situated or distributed among people and their environments, including objects, artifacts, tools, books and the communities of which they are a part. (Download Greeno1996.pdf) This perspective allows the researcher to view the subject in context rather than in a laboratory or simulated situation. Working within this framework allows us to study not only the cognitive processes of the learner or subject but also the cultural context in which learning and activity takes place. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz indicates “there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture.” Kincheloe, has operationalized these notions into what he calls “researcher-as-bricoleur.” Appreciating research as a power-driven act, the researcher-as-bricoleur abandons the quest for some naïve concept of realism, focusing instead on the clarification of his or her position in the web of reality and the social locations of other researchers and the ways they shape the production and interpretation of knowledge. (Download bricolage.pdf)

THE SPACE BETWEEN…

The intent of this investigation is to understand what it means to blog, to find out where I fit in “the web of reality.” The goal is not to generalize, or produce statistically significant findings about blogging behaviors. There are studies like the Pew Internet in American Life series which shed light on these topics on a large (statistically significant) scale. What these studies leave out however is a granular description or understanding of what it means to blog. The intent of this inspection is to provide an understanding of one person’s (my) relationship between technologies, (in this case, blogs.) Originally I had conceptualized this relationship as:

INSTANT AUTOBIOGRAPHY…

So, what is going on in-between? The role of narrative is significant in attempting to understanding this relationship, particularly in a cultural setting (the blogosphere) that is primarily text based. Bruner said: “The very shape of our lives – the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds – is understandable to us and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation.” Oliver Sacks goes as far as to proclaim that “It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities.”   In an essay on writing autobiography entitled “The Art of Self,” author William Gass states “I am a fiction; do not rely on my accuracy, not because I am untrustworthy but because I am engaged not in replication but in construction.”(Download gass_artofself.pdf) The construction and negotiation of identity via the Internet has been studied most prominently by Sherry Turkle. Turkle studied the varied aspects of identity formation in the early days of the Internet. She spoke of how the anonymity of the Internet allowed people to play with multiple identities within virtual environments.

Though the boundary between real and virtual may still be blurred, contrary to Turkle’s findings, in preliminary analyses of blogs, researchers have found that the majority of bloggers (94%) do not appear to hide their identities and more than half (54%) of bloggers provide explicit demographic information in their personal profiles. (Download herring_blogs.pdf)

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT…

The Internet can promote an increased focus on the self and a heightened and perhaps exaggerated sense that others are watching us with interest.   Goffman says the formation of identity is “an information game – a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery.” In each of the LiveJournals studied, the narratives presented reflected these hypotheses (allowing me to create the individual vignettes.)

Cognitive psychologist David Elkind extends Jean Piaget’s developmental theory into the adolescent years by proposing that “from the strictly cognitive point of view, the major task of early adolescence can be regarded as having to do with the conquest of thought. In a sense, the adolescent is continually constructing, or reacting to, an imaginary audience.” Elkind says that egocentrism is overcome by gradual cognitive differentiation between ones own preoccupations and the thoughts of others, and affectively by a gradual integration of the feelings of others with his own emotions. “Learning to be requires more than just information. It requires the ability to engage in the practice in question.” Blogs allow teenagers the opportunity to engage in this practice.

James Gee’s concept of “Borderland Discourse” is ideal for LiveJournal. He says “students must, at times, interact with each other outside the influence of school-based Discourses ‘between’ and outside their own home and community Discourses. That is, in a sense, they must communicate between home and school. To do this, they engage in what Gee calls “a peer-based borderland Discourse, a creation of their own.” LiveJournals offer teenagers a harbor for borderland Discourse. In the case of the three journals I analyzed, each presented different forms of discourse which conveyed multiple meanings. Σ’s discourse was created to exclude a mainstream audience. Φ discourse was what one may consider a more mainstream teenage dialogue, though it is used as mediator of friendships. It also interestingly crossed with school based discourse by posting essays. Ω discourse was visual, leaving geared toward a reader who is familiar with aesthetic understanding.

LIVEJOURNAL DECONSTRUCTED….

LiveJournal is a free blogging tool that was introduced in March of 1999. To start a LiveJournal (LJ) you simply need to sign up, create a username and password and you receive your own little (or big) space. LJ offers paid accounts which offer more features than a basic free account. Unlike other free blog sites, LJ does not impose banner-ads or pop-ups on their users. Currently, over 3 million people between the ages 13-25 have blogs on LiveJournal (out of the almost 9 million total users.) Recently, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 19% of all online teens keep a blog and 38% read them. A typical blog post on LiveJournal consists of five elements: 1. Timestamp/title, 2. blog entry, 3. Current mood/music, 4. Permalink, 5. commenting section:

 

DANCE OF THE NETWORKERS…

PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS AND STUFF…

At the turn of the century, John Dewey said “Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.” The Industrial Revolution mobilized societies, made interaction with new cultures a more likely possibility. The Internet is a materialization of liquid knowledge, a place where information literally moves across the globe. Some wise men once said “the best way to come to understand a given landscape is to explore it from many directions, to traverse it first this way then that.” They also said “the strength of connection derives from partial overlapping of many different strands of connectedness across cases rather than from any single strand running through a large number of the cases.” By zooming in and investigating spaces (even as minute as molecules in the blogosphere) on the Internet, we can get a better picture and begin to understand the whole.

 

I FOUND OUT THE HARD WAY…

I think that Barthes would classify blogs as a writerly text. (A writerly text is ourselves writing. A readerly text is a product.)Anyone who can access the Internet can start a blog. It is not necessary to have a computer to blog; it is entirely possible to maintain one from a cellular phone. Just as there are different genres of traditional text: fiction, non-fiction, and the like, different blog genres have emerged: political, news, gossip, collaborative, the list continues to grow. And unlike traditional text, blogs provide a multimodal container for content, allowing the mixing of audio, video, images and text. Initially I began blogging because my students were blogging. I wanted to “stay connected” with this emerging technology and explore its potential application in my classes. From the beginning, I found it difficult to put any personal information on my blog. Not personal in the sense of demographic information, but personal details about my life. I was (and still am) very conscious of a potential audience.  If it’s posted to the Internet, it can be found. I’m not necessarily creating an alternate persona online, just “teasing out” parts of my life and revealing pieces that (in my mind) aren’t too revealing. As I read the LiveJournals of others, I began to understand my behavior in relation to others. Through this imposition I found that at the core of my relationship with technology is the dotted-line.

The potential for interaction is what mediates my relationship with technology. Sometimes the line may solidify, and sometimes it may not. Once my thoughts are on the web, on a blog, a wiki, a podcast, whatever the medium, the potential for others to interact with or through the “text” is always present.

IT NEVER ENDS…

In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.

Roland Barthes, S/Z

LIKE, SO WHAT???

By observing and studying other discourse communities, we begin to understand our own discourse. I am not a teenager, why try to understand my discourse/behavior through theirs? In my work, I interact with teenagers, entering their discourse community gives me insight into their forms of writing and language. I am also trying to find and understand myself in the discourse community of research. My research is distributed across these networks and communities and escapes traditional boundaries. This is not the end of my journey, this type of intro and intraspection can be replicated on, with and through other blogs, wikis or yet-to-be introduced social technology. It’s the process of exploration which allows me to understand and construct meaning.

THIS IS NOT A PAPER…

In the essay Blurred Genres, Clifford Geertz talks of the trend of genre mixing in intellectual life. He says “the properties connecting texts with one another, that put them, ontologically anyway, on the same level, are coming to seem as important in characterizing them as those dividing them; …we more and more see ourselves surrounded by a vast, almost continuous field of variously intended and diversely constructed works we can order only practically, relationally, and as our purposes prompt us.”

To understand blogs, we must blog. Writing in this genre allows for work to continue, change, evolve, and connect. The potential for this type of interaction is less likely in printed form. A blog allows the reader the opportunity to interact with the writer, and to enter the text at any point and to assemble meaning from their point-of-view, rather than the linear form presented in a traditional paper. Here is an attempt at a linear representation of this blog >

Download wolf_practicum_v12.pdf