November 23, 2004

Michelle Gumbrecht: "Blogs as 'Protected Space''"

Gumbrecht, Michelle. 2004. "Blogs as 'Protected Space''" Presented at the Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis, and Dynamics: WWW 2004. New York: ACM Press.

Synopsis:

Introduces via PEW and Herring. Method: interviews with 23 people with blogs hosted by or around Stanford.

This paper is primarily a documentation of Gumbrecht's ethnographic exploration of blogging in the Stanford community, with a focus on people who produce content for personal purposes and those who use blogs in an educational setting. Many great quotes.

Findings:

  • "Despite bloggers' freedom to discuss anything and talk about anyone in their blogs, we found that bloggers imposed constraints on themselves." (2)
  • "Our informants were able to selectively filter their audience by tailoring their posts to them." (2) [note: coded language based on common ground allowing for multiple reads depending on emotional proximity]
  • "Some informants within our sample adopted the practice of forewarning their audience about the contents of their blog. ... "includes as many disclaimers as possible" when he blogs about someone. He added that bloggers' posts can have "an edge" but you should not throw a bomb"." (2)
  • "we found that our informants sometimes preferred communicating through their blogs as opposed to other means. ... We found that the majority of our informants used IM as a means of communication, yet would sometimes shun it in favor of blogging" (3)
  • "In blogging, grounding occurs neither cotemporally nor simultaneously. This turned out to be part of the allure for some of our informants to selectively communicate through their blogs." (3)
  • "responses are not expected immediately in this medium. In face-to-face conversation or IM, responses are expected immediately or close to it. As a result, conversational partners may feel ill at ease when trying to broach a sensitive issue in these media. Lara said she would never tell people, "I'm really sad" in IM, yet she would have no qualms about stating it in her blog." (3)
  • "Jack, an avid contributor to listservs, found that he liked blogs better because they are much less "adversarial" and generally more "reflective"." (3)
  • "However, when conflicts do arise over blog content, they tend to be transferred to other, more interactive media." (3)
  • "We found that limited interactivity is a flexible, context-specific notion. In educational, group, and community settings, our bloggers placed a high value on comments and feedback to "create a dialogue"." (4)
  • "However, blogs created for educational purposes do not abide by the same rules as personal blogs. Educational blogs aren't created to share deep, private revelations about oneself." (4)
  • "comments are "the heart of the blog medium - others would contest this - but I think a big part of making it publicly available is to have responses"." (4)
  • "Katie, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering, didn't like having other people post commentaries on her site because she couldn't control what they would say." ... "On the other hand, Harriet, also a graduate student in Electrical Engineering, believed comments are very important because they "enhance the sense of community that you get...it makes you feel good that people are reading it." (4)

Category: blogging

Posted by zephoria at November 23, 2004 3:37 PM

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