by jon on
Feb 29, 2008 at 9:50 am
Article: The Blogosophere as a Public Arena, Social Problems, February 2008.
Summary: In an age of mass media and giant corporate news agencies, many optimistically look to the internet as a new venue for non-elites to make their voices heard and push issues into the public discourse.
Ray Maratea analyzes the role blogs play in the competition for public attention and finds that blogs do, in fact, offer many advantages. Thanks to the speed at which blogs can be updated and the ability of blog posts to quickly spread through the internet via hyperlinking, blogs can be an effective means of drawing public attention to issues.
However, in other respects blogs aren’t as revolutionary as they may seem. For example, the blogosophere is very hierarchical, with a small number of blogs drawing most of the traffic. Additionally, blogs tend to use the same criteria as traditional media when deciding what is deserving of attention, such as drama and novelty.
by jon on
Feb 29, 2008 at 9:49 am
Article: Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers, Public Choice, January 2008.
Summary: On the one hand, the internet provides people with access to an extraordinarily diverse range of information and opinions. On the other hand, the internet can also bring like-minded people together into isolated, homogeneous communities devoid of dissent and diversity. Which side wins out?
Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane look at political blogs and examine how frequently conservative bloggers link to liberal bloggers and vice versa. They followed 40 of the top political blogs (20 conservative, 20 liberal) for three week-long periods over the course of ten months. They have several interesting findings:
- In terms of blogroll links, conservatives are more likely to link to liberal blogs than liberal bloggers are to link to conservative blogs.
- Within blog posts, about 12% of outgoing links from conservative blogs went to liberal blogs, and about 16% of outgoing links from liberal blogs went to conservative blogs.
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common format of these cross-ideological links follow a “straw-man” format, simply dismissing the other sides’ views
- However, when blog posts actually engage the substance of the linked article, conservative bloggers were actually more likely to agree (14%) than disagree (12%), while liberal bloggers only expressed substantive agreement 5% of the time.
In short, they found some support for both faces of the internet, and also found some interesting differences between conservative and liberal bloggers.
If this is interesting to you, this article is part of a special issue on blogs and politics.
by meg on
Jan 17, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Article: Diary of a working boy: Creative resistance among anonymous workbloggers Ethnography, Vol. 8, no. 4
Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.
Abstract:
Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.