Stern's article discusses how youth negotiate identity and audience as part of the process of blogging. Her article is completely in line with my findings on youth and SNS identity and audience negotiation. The article is extremely well-written with lots of good quotes.

For example, in her discussion of how blogs are announced, she points out that some teens promote while others feel that's arrogant or don't want people that they know to find them so that they have freedom. Yet, even those who promote often have people that they intentionally don't tell (p. 12). "Authors reconcile this apparent inconsistency by acknowledging their desire for their sites to be visited by others, but not at the risk of damaging their image or inviting trouble" (p. 12). Still, most see themselves as their primary audience, perhaps for self-reflection and perhaps for modesty.

Youth have strategic negotiations of audience, impression, self image, and content. (In other words, they're negotiating the same practices through their blogs that they do through embodied activity with friends and strangers.)

Quotes:

• p. 1: A curious mix of intrigue, disdain and apprehension continues to characterize many adults' sentiments about the creations young people place into the public eye on the Internet. Indeed, it is common to see journalists, educators and parents oscillate between promoting youth Internet expression and denouncing it in practically the same breath.
• p. 1: At least part of the general bewilderment about youth online expression stems from the fact that public attention is disproportionately paid to what teens disclose and produce online, such as the words, text, images and sounds that can be observed on the screen. Yet little consideration is typically given to understanding why young people express themselves in these ways or how their authorial experiences are meaningful to them.
• p. 7: A trend consultant recently quoted in the New York Times proclaimed that young people these days are "fabulous self-marketers... They see celebrities expressing their self-worth and want to join the party." Indeed, mainstream media (e.g. Entertainment Tonight, Us, People) divulge ever more detail about the lives of pop stars, and some ordinary people are elevated to the status of celebrity simply by their apparent willingness to provide such details about themselves (as seen on, for example, The Real World and Laguna Beach). Virtually all "real" and "wanna-be" stars have web pages and blogs, not to mention that many have fan sites devoted to them as well. In this context, some young people view personal sites as avenues to participate in, or respond to, a culture that valorizes publicity as an end in itself. Indeed, they feel that personal sites can serve as symbols to others and themselves that they belong to and in the public culture. This does not mean that young authors uncritically buy into the dominant messages about celebrity and pop culture that persist in mainstream media, but rather that many have recognized the cultural value of self-promotion and are motivated to publish online in consequence.
• p. 8: Despite the various reasons that motivate young people to create a personal site, it is only after having done so that many teens deliberate whether or not online expression is particularly valuable or potentially functional for them. This sequence of events appears to be different for adults, who generally reflect on the expected utility of online expression before commencing to author a personal site... In particular, nearly all of those who sustain these works for any length of time identify their utility for self-reflection, releasing pent-up feelings, and witnessing personal growth.
• p. 8: These [formal operational] skills allow individuals to "construct more abstract self-portraits, to distinguish between their real and ideal selves, and to begin the process of resolving discrepancies between multiple aspects of themselves."
• p. 10: Knowing -- and hoping -- that others will encounter their online expression is the fundamental appeal of publishing (literally "making public") personal sites for young authors... Adolescents have historically had few opportunities for public address, and, like other disenfranchised groups, they have received little encouragement toward this end. In fact, young people recognize from an early age that adults' voices are more culturally valued than their own. This uncomfortable reality is evidenced by the paucity of widely disseminated or published works authored by young people, by the adult designation of "appropriate" youth expression venues (e.g., diaries and bedrooms), and the stigmatization of many public youth expression practices (e.g., body art, graffiti).
• p. 11: Of course, many young authors today have never known a time when it was not possible to address potentially vast numbers of people online. Consequently, they rarely view their personal home pages and blogs as rebellious attempts to claim space in the way that, for example, urban graffiti artists did in the 1970s... Youth authors are distinctly aware of the relative shortage of spaces for them to publicize their thoughts and lives amidst an increasingly mediated culture. Yet simultaneously, they feel entitled to engage in public address... Youth authors' desire to address the public is not simply about actually being heard (or read) by many people, but also about feeling empowered by the mere prospect of mass reception.
• p. 11: Much has been made of the "blurring boundaries" between conceptions of public and private in the digital age. And young authors do, in fact, seem to have reconfigured these concepts in ways that pre-Internet folk find confusing. For example, people have traditionally considered their communication to be private when it is encountered exclusively by a limited and targeted individual or individuals. But some youth authors think of their communication as private when the people they know in real life do not see, hear, or read it, regardless of who else does.
• p. 11: But knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envision a broad audience for their online works. And, despite their recognition that virtually anyone with Internet access can pore over their sites, most adolescents, by and large, cannot imagine why "some random stranger" would be interested in doing so (unless, of course, he is a "creeper" – a stalker or paedophile – about whom most young authors tend to demonstrate awareness and dismissal in equal measure).
• p. 14: Adolescents of both sexes lament their inability to broach these kinds of issues [- homosexuality, violence, fear, and rejection -] in offline conversations with friends and family for fear of social or parental reprisals, and, given their age and relatively limited ability to travel freely, they can rarely locate many physical places where encounters with strangers regarding these topics would be possible or safe. Consequently, they are grateful that the Internet provides at least one non-private space to explore these personal issues.
• p. 15: These types of self-presentational practices might be described as "identity experimentations" in the sense that young people use their personal sites to test out different versions of their current and possible identities. Youth authors are, in fact, the first to acknowledge how they use their personal sites to broadcast aspects of themselves in order to see what kind of reception they receive.
• p. 16: One of the main reasons young people concern themselves so much with authenticity in their self-presentations on their personal sites is because, ultimately, they seek social validation from their audience.
• p. 19: We view our bodies as private space in public, just as we view our blogs. And yet, the relationship between private and public is quite blurred, particularly considering that the public square of the blogosphere is not ephemeral, but across space and time.

In this essay, Matsuda draws on survey and interview data concerning how Japanese youth and others use keitai (mobile phones). Of particular note, she points out that youth use this technology to help support a "full-time intimate community" of friends. She situates her findings in a discussion of home life, parent-child relations, and the fears vs. realities of how keitai are shifting social relations. She examines how keitai are used for maintaining connections, how address book size does not match calling practices, how people use screening, and how this form of connectivity affects social network structure (drawing on the likes of Fischer and work on homophily). She points out that the tool is used differently depending on social position. For example, the keitai is a "personal phone" for single people, a "mobile phone" for married men, and a "private phone" for married women. While pagers initially supported friend maintenance over long distances, allowing for ongoing relationships with "former friends" after a move, keitai are much more about supporting pre-existing ties: scheduling rendezvous, calling the family, and making appointments are common uses of keitai.

Quotes:

• p. 123: As Leopolinda Fortunati (2002:51) points out, using the keitai "is to be reachable not by everyone, but only by those with whom we want to communicate—intimate friends or selected others whom we want contact." In theory, the keitai can be used anytime anywhere, but people are actually fostering relationships with those who they choose to contact.
• p. 126: Even though the Internet can be accessed with the keitai, most users are merely exchanging messages as they did with text pagers. Hence we can say that the keitai Internet is substantially different from that accessed by personal computers; it is an extension of individual ownership and personal uses of a youth mobile communication medium which has transitioned from pagers to keitai.
• p. 133-134: Most of the utterances were "yeah" or "uh huh" and other such responses or acknowledgements (Kato 1958). Kato concludes that "small groups of people bound together in the intimacy of family or village didn't require those interactions that we now glorify as 'conversations'" (2002: 176).
• p. 138: On its own, this data would give the impression that there are extremely large numbers of people with whom youths contact through keitai, but many say they do so regularly with approximately 10 people. The number of registered keitai numbers decreases with age, but there is little variation in the numbers of people contacted on a regular basis (Matsuda 2001a). This suggests that youths have large amounts of "superfluous numbers" in their keitai. Though there is the appearance that youth have expanded their circle of acquaintances with the keitai, judged by their communication patterns, they are mostly making frequent contact with a select few. Upon returning home, they make calls and exchange emails with the same friends that they just saw at school. This round-the-clock set of relationships with an exclusive group of friends is what Ichiro Nakajima, Keiichi Himeno and Hiroaki Yoshii (1999) characterize as a "full-time intimate community."
• p. 139: As soon as class ends, students pull out their keitai and begin to make calls, contacting those friends who are part of their everyday friendship network.
• p. 147: Beginning with work on Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (Association/Community), the contrast between flexible interpersonal relationships, which people can enter and leave as they please, and binding relationships, which are often systemized and organized, has been studied by many researchers. For example, Chizuko Ueno (1994) characterizes ketsu-en (kinship), chi-en (community), and sha-en (sodality) as "obligatory relationships" and the flexible and pluralistic interpersonal relationships in which people choose their friends as "sentaku-en (selective relationships)." What is important here is her characterization of sentaku-en as "relationships born from urbanization."
• p. 148: In this vein, youths' keitai-supported selective interpersonal relationships illustrate an intersection of the theories of Fischer and Matsumoto. It is not so much that the growth of youths' selective interpersonal relationships are a result of keitai ownership or their identity as youth, but rather that growth is the result more generally of an expanded social network, or growth in the number of people with whom contact can be made.

Overview:

Gaines starts out as a reporter for the Village Voice sent to investigate Bergenfield, New Jersey where four kids in 1987 committed suicide together followed by another pair the following night. Copycats spiraled around the nation and a class moral panic broke out. Upon entering the town, she realized that it would be a challenge to get the kids to talk - media had been hounding them continuously. In building their trust, she became more curious about what was actually going on. She left the Voice and started her sociology PhD. This book is her dissertation, a brilliant ethnography of working class kids in this town.

The style and writing are unbelievable. She juxtaposes her own experiences growing up 15 years earlier in a similar working class suburb on top of the stories of the Bergenfield kids, brilliantly placing herself in the narrative and showing the ways in which she is interpreting what is actually happening.

The ethnographic account reveals a critical shift in America. Traditionally, working class kids had a potential notion of success - working class jobs that were valued - unions, high end factory work, opportunities for advancement. Sure, it was never as well-paid as white collar work but that was OK. In the late 80s, those jobs were disappearing. Most of these kids' parents were out of work. Where on earth were they going to get work when they grew up?

"Working-class kids have learned patterns of coping with an educational system originally designed by middle-class reformers to elevate the masses. It is generally agreed that the values and 'cultural capital' needed to survive and thrive in this environment has given middle-class kids a bigger advantages... But if the (working-class) parent culture itself is dying out, the strategies learned from it have no value. They won't lead to reproducing one's parents' lives in industrial labor. They'll lead to nowhere" (156).

These burnouts were being pushed out of mainstream education in order to raise the perceived value of the schools as college feeders. These kids were being shipped to alternative institutions, vo-tech programs. Yet, the vo-tech programs were educating the kids for jobs that no longer existed. Furthermore, many of these kids resented the system because they felt as though they were being discriminated against based on their musical tastes, smoking and other burnout behavior. In short, the kids felt completely marginalized and out of the system. The system resented them and they resented the system.

The burnout kids had a different language and value system than the educators and they spoke past each other. "The 'burnouts,' as a clique, as carriers of a highly visible 'peer-regulated' subculture, posed threat to the hegemony of parents, teachers and other mandated 'agents of socialization" (37). The schools created programs to make it look like they were dealing with the problem, but they never understood the burnouts or what they were going through.

Music became the religion of these youth as their experiences were told through Metallica and other hard rock bands. "It's a sad irony - because the only place where taboo subjects like sex, death, suicide, loneliness, and terror are discussed is in their music" (208).

Hanging out is the primary pastime, with kids meeting in the parking lots of 7/11 and finding hide outs to get away from the surveillance of the police. "This constant threat of the police always intruding upon anything that was going on was a source of chronic anxiety" (82). Sex and drinking are a given. Cutting is common.

Boredom ran deeply in this culture and the suicides made it clear that "the kids' complaint of 'no place to go' had to be taken seriously" (86). It was no longer just a complaint, but a death wish. "There was perpetually no place to go and nothing to do" (80). "It was taken for granted that if you refused to be colonized, if you ventured beyond the boundaries circumscribed by adults, you were 'looking for trouble.' But in reality, it was adult organization of young people's social reality over the last few hundred years that had created this miserable situation: one's youth as wasted years" (86).

"Kids understand their right to party as their right to create, express, and commune. It is a crucial political question for young people. The right to produce and to express yourself through culture is essentially a First Amendment issue" (206).

There's also extensive conversations about the increase in generational divide and how organized sports are one of the few places where people hang out across the generations - to watch, play and talk about sports (92). With that gone, everything became about peers. "If you were falling, your friends, peers, scene brothers, your generation, would be there to catch you, pick you up, and push you forward" (214).

"Families are falling apart, and the papers are full of atrocities perpetrated by adults on kids. You can't trust anyone. The school bus driver, your pastor, the babysitter, even your dad could rape you or beat you or lock you up and no one would even care!" (187).

"Adults worried about protecting kids' 'morals' but were completely unconcerned that the minimum wage hadn't gone up once during the whole decade. Since the 1960s kids have lost power in leaps and bounds; but when they turned to 'Satan' or to other youth culture traditions for help, for comfort, for support, adults complained that the kids were being seduced by evil. Everything kids did to empower or protect themselves in recent years, any refuge they created from adult indifference and brutality was turned around and used against them" (192).

Military used to be a road out but any kid who goes through detox is exempt from the military (172). "Waste-disposal problems in Bergenfield were getting worse. For as long as anyone can remember, the armed forces were the last shot. But for some kids, even that was moving out of reach... Garage #74 had served as the last available dump site in Bergenfield - the final solution to the town's teenage waste-disposal problem. A place for expendable youth" (173).

"Responsibility for containing young people, for prolonging their entry into the work force, is now shared among families, school, the military and juvenile jails" (157). [This is deeply connected to "Learning to Labor"] "Kids don't see the point of going to school when it didn't lead to anything" (155).

The only way out was through fame - sports, music, etc. Thus, those who won that lottery became the idols of that generation. "In the scheme of things average American kids who don't have rich or well-connected parents have had these choices: Play the game and try to get ahead. Do what your parents did - work yourself to death at a menial job and find solace in beer, God or family. Or take risks, cut deals, or break the law. The Reagan years made it hard for kids to 'put their noses to the grindstone' as their parents had. Like everyone, these people hoped for better lives. But they lived in an age of inflated expectations and diminishing returns" (151). It's no wonder that the 80s were filled with cocaine and dreams of being spectacular.

"Their way of fighting back is to have enough fun to kill themselves before everything else does" (103). "Sometimes the only control over life kids feel they have is starting it (pregnancy) or ending it (homicide, suicide)" (242).

"The importance youth once held in the social order declined and their civil rights have eroded with it" (237). "We consistently doubt kids' ability to make important decisions, but we will punish them for what they decide just the same" (238). "Young people are the only minority without formal self-representation" (239). "As the 'minority of minorities', young people get the lowest pay, have fewer rights, and suffer more absolute structural regulation than anyone. Under control, they are encouraged and coerced to defer to adult authority. Kids are taught to mistrust their own instincts as 'immature' and 'inexperienced'" (239).

Questions that this sparked:

How does contemporary curfew affect things now? Are there latch-key kids these days?

Who has the right to "hang out"? What are the limitations? It used to be the police.. now what? Burnouts dominate the classic hang out locations - malls, skating rinks, railroads, parking lots, woods... were they once mainstream hang out locations? Where do jocks hang out?

Is surveillance about making sure your kid doesn't become a burnout because there's no way out? Is this the reason for activities? Does MySpace reveal the burnout side of everyone? Is that why we fear it?

Did the late 90s boom temporarily hold back the decline of opportunities? Are we facing a whole new level of doubt?

What are the opportunities for working class suburban and rural youth?

Notes: Introduction

de Certeau's introduction lays out the theoretical framework he uses in the study of everyday life. Yet, it also brings together a set of frames necessary for analyzing remix culture, amateur production and active consumption. "Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others." (xii)

He uses three different frames for laying out the practice of everyday life: usage/consumption, process/power involved in creativity, formal structures of practice.

He looks at how consumption is actually production ("consumer production"), but a hidden one "because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order" (xiii). The process of consumption has agency and it is inherently resistant to the formalized production of the relevant culture.

He compares the agency of consumer production to the position of Indians during colonization who "made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to the ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept" (xiii). In other words, there is agency in reinterpretation, appropriation. (This connects deeply with theories of subalterns.)

de Certeau argues that in order to investigate everyday life "we must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization" (xiii).

Using Foucault's notion of power, he talks about how people engage with creativity as part of being embedded in "discipline" (xiv). He also considers the role of bricolage and the use of language, pointing to numerous theories that he intends to build off of.

He then moves on to lay a foundation for thinking about the majority as being in the margins. "Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture... Marginality is becoming universal" (xvii). In thinking about this, de Certeau suggests that in order to understand "the relation of procedures to the fields of force in which they act" requires a "polemological analysis of culture" (xvii).

In the second half of the preface, de Certeau turns to discussing tactics vs. strategies and the issues of trajectories.

"As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own path in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the 'wandering lines' drawn by the autistic children studied by F. Deligny: 'indirect' or 'errant' trajectories obeying their own logic" (xviii).

Strategy: a formalized, proper relationship in which a subject can be separated from their environment (xix). Think: politics, economics, science, ...

Tactic: an ad-hoc, unorganized relationship that is contextualized by the environment (xiv). Think: everyday practices

He finishes the intro by laying the framework for the sites that intends to analyze (talking, dwelling, grocery shopping, cooking, etc.)

Rashmi Sinha: A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular) (September 27, 2005)

Rashmi looks at tagging as a 2-stage cognitive practice. There are great visuals about the cognitive process.

Step 1: "Related Category Activation. The first stage is the computation of similarity between the item and candidate concepts." --> concepts get activated because one is familiar with an object and can connect it to terms. Free association-esque.

Step 2: "Stage 2: The decision. Now that we have candidate categories, we need to make the DECISION. What category is the right one?" This is where we choose the best one, something we do regularly.

Rashmi talks about the "post-activation analysis paralysis" that people go through online when faced with putting something in the right bucket. Online, there's less cultural consensus in the categorization process. We're trying to optimize for future findability (i.e. where we'll look next). We don't just categorize at random - we try to consider the overall categorical scheme.

Normally, we're ok with local categorization schemes, but not online. There's also a huge cost to having to recategorize online. And fear that if we do it wrong, we'll never find it again.

Tagging eliminates the decision and thus the paralysis. And there's immediate self and social feedback.

Ian Davis: Why Tagging is Expensive (September 7, 2005)

"Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and piles it onto the price of discovery." Formal classification takes a lot of time - tagging overrides that, but there's still a cost to tagging. There's a savings of cost to others' discovery, but the cost is on the tagger to save others.

"In the formal classification world you have a very small number of people incurring a high cost in order to reduce the costs incurred by a very large number of people. In contrast the tagging world has the unit costs reversed: it's cheap to classify, expensive to find. But the numbers of people involved are large in both cases so you end up with a lot of people paying a tiny cost to classify added to a lot of people paying a high price to discover. I think it's pretty likely that the total cost is going to end up much higher than in the classification scenario."

Davis is concerned that tagging will not persist in the long-run because it costs too much and it will be hobbled by this expense.

Adam Weinroth: Tag Team (July 28, 2005)

This post is an interview with Jon Lebkowsky and Clay Shirky about tags. The most important contribution of this post is Clay harping on how tags are not equivalent to folders and should not be treated as such - this makes a poor evaluative framework. He also talks about different processes for find and re-find. Clay also points out that "The context of a tag is critical -- users tag differently on del.icio.us than on Flickr, so treating tags as purely atomic elements strips them of much of their value."

Tom Coates: Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (June 4, 2005)

"What do changes in a tag-cloud mean?"

• The site has changed?
  
• There's a cultural change in vocabulary (homosexual->gay->queer)? (Vocabulary of post doesn't change, but the conversations around the posts do.)
  
• People approach the act of tagging differently? (filing vs. description)
  

Tom realized that tagging on Flickr is about tagging for any words that make sense while on del.icio.us it's about filing. Two very different paradigms. He shows a shift in del.icio.us on the way people tagged his own blog. And then invites people to test this more broadly.

Pietro Speroni: Tagclouds and Cultural Changes (May 28, 2005)

This post looks at how you can measure the importance of tags by calculating their weight as number of people using a tag / total number of people. He shows various graphs of changes in terms, focusing heavily on the geek community because of its coherence. He does not that "Culture are a decentralised process, and there is no central repository of it. Some group of people might be done with a change, while others are still in the middle of the process." In other words, changes within a culture take time and show segmentations in the culture.

Michael Wexler: I hate tags (February 4, 2005), I still hate tagging (April 13, 2005), I continue to despise tagging (August 1, 2005)

Wexler's posts are critical and skeptical of the tagging hype (which is good). It's a bit hard to read the posts because they are also quite antagonistic (mostly towards Shirky). Still, there are some valuable points in here, particularly to help understand how tagging is being perceived outside of the hype and what problems people are having with it.

He sees tagging as "lazy ontologies" (and takes issue with the way a lot of things are termed in what he sees as crazy unreal terms). [danah note: his frustration over "social software" actually lays the framework for his inability to see that collective terminology has value, even if it is not descriptive.] His problem is that the variations people use are fine on the personal level, but they don't help the "shared social structure."

The bulk of the first post is in objection to Shirky's attitude that folksonomy is the end-all-be-all because it does what controlled vocabularies cannot. Some great quotes:

• "doing the wrong thing is better than nothing?"
• "We don't like taxonomies because they get misused?"
• "Because that what it comes down to: either learn the proper use of a shared taxonomy, or try to figure out how each person chose to organize their content."
• "Basically, he's transferring the cost away from the tagger… and onto the user. Actually, the best bet is simplicity x utility. Ease of use is not the same as utility: folksonomies will stay only as long as good terms are chosen that others can 'grasp'. Once we recognize that we are all using 20 different terms for the same thing, and that's making info hard to access... then we recognize (sigh, yet again) why an organized typology makes sense."

In the second post, he begins by pointing out that tagging is not designed to share, but to create walled gardens. You have to know what you're looking for to find anything. Tagging has been for consumer fun, not for serious knowledge management.

He talks about why searches on tagging systems like del.icio.us are not nearly as fruitful as on Google, focusing on keyword searches. He then points out that entries that he is interested in are in del.icio.us but coded under very obscure tags. He also points out how much specific knowledge you need to know for it to be valuable (like GTD means Getting Things Done).

The comments discuss how his approach is problematic because he equates tagging with search engines rather than thinking about discovery.

The third post returns to a critique of Shirky and related bits. He notes that "the social connected model implies that the connections are the important part." "What tagging does is attempt to recreate the flow of discovery. That's fine… but what taxonomy does is recreate the structure of knowledge that you’ve already discovered." He talks about the conflict between tagging for self and tagging for others.

Thomas Van Der Wal: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies (February 21, 2005)

Broad folksonomy: "many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags in their own vocabulary" (lends to power law curve); del.icio.us is a good example.

Narrow folksonomy: "one or a few people providing tags that the person uses to get back to that information" (creates narrowing and focus, "provides benefit in tagging objects that are not easily searchable or have no other means of using text to describe or find the object") - can't tell how the tags are consumed or produced because it's many-to-one instead of many-to-many.

"Not all tagging is a folksonomy." Folksonomy is about creating missing terms to connect words and objects and help the search process.

Tom has visuals to show the narrow/broad distinction.

Abstract:

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Notes:

This article looks at the relationship between tagging and taxonomy, with an emphasis on collaborative tagging (i.e. anyone can add a tag, not just the person creating the text or saving it). They argue that collaborative tagging is more non-hierarchical and inclusive.

They also address the relationship of power and authority to tagging. Categorizing or indexing has been around for quite some time, but only authorities like librarians or the author get to add keywords to documents. Collaborative tagging changes that. "Collaborative tagging is the practice of allowing anyone - especially consumers - to freely attach keywords or tags to content."

The next section is devoted to the cognitive and classification issues of hierarchies, polysemous words, synonymy.

The bulk of the paper looks at del.icio.us - stability in tags across users, across individual items, trends in bookmarking. There's a fantastic section on the different types of tags that were observed in del.icio.us:

1. Identifying what (or who) it is about
2. Identifying what it is (article, blog, book)
3. Identifying who owns it
4. Refining categories (numbers)
5. Identifying qualities or characteristics (scary, funny)
6. Self reference (mystuff, mycomments)
7. Task organizing (toread, jobsearch)

Basically, the article is not that deep but given how little work on tagging there is, it's a great first start.

Grudin comments on the publishing protocols for academia, specifically HCI. The article discusses the three different levels of conferences (workshop, medium, large) and the ways journals work in relation to conference. There's a discussion of different relevant actors (authors, editors, publishers, community, libraries, etc.) and bits about how online access to publications is altering the publishing protocols. Basically, it's a fantastic overview article of academic publishing, the pros and cons and issues that multidisciplinary communities will face.

Abstract:

The small-world phenomenon formalized in this article as the coincidence of high local clustering and short global separation, is shown to be a general feature of sparse, decentralized networks that are neither completely ordered nor completely random. Networks of this kind have received little attention, yet they appear to be widespread in the social and natural sciences, as is indicated here by three distinct examples. Furthermore, small admixtures of randomness to an otherwise ordered network can have a dramatic impact on its dynamical, as well as structural, properties - a feature illustrated by a simple model of disease transmission.

Overview:

Watts begins by offering a historical overview of studies seeking to understand the small-world phenomenon. In defining the phenomenon, he articulates four axioms:

• The network is numerically large in the sense that the world contains n people. In the real world, n is on the order of billions.
• The network is sparse in the sense that each person is connected to an average of only k other people, which is, at most, on the order of thousands (Kochen 1989) - hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the population of the planet.
• The network is decentralized in that there is no dominant central vertex to which most other vertices are directly connected. This implies a stronger condition than sparseness: not only must the average degree k be much less than n, but the maximal degree k max over all vertices must also be much less than n.
• The network is highly clustered, in that most friendship circles are strongly overlapping. That is, we expect that many of our friends are friends also of each other.

From the axioms, Watts lays out a model for the small-world problem in a theoretical investigation of the structure that would allow for comparisons between actual and modeled. He constrains his model dependent on assumptions necessary to make it work (i.e. everyone has to be connected, ties are mutual). He offers different types of topologies that might emerge. The small-world comes about as a coincidence of high local clustering and short global separation.

After laying out this model, he refers back to case studies from network analysis for comparison (movie actors, power grids, neural networks, disease spread).

Commentary:

This is a theoretical structural paper; it is building models based on mathematic assumptions connected at some level to social occurrences but the model is not based on them. More than anything, the value of this paper is in defining the constraints that must be considered when reflecting on small-world problems. I'm not sure what these models or their miniature tests on closed systems can tell us about global networks.

Overview:

In this chapter, Turkle discusses how adolescents relate to the computer in the process of finding a sense of self. She uses examples from her field studies.

In her opening, she argues that children are reflective, constantly interested in philosophical possibilities such as the personalities of machines. As they get older, their interests with technology are preoccupied by action - what can be done. In adolescence, there is a return to the reflective, only this time it concerns reflections about the self not the outside world.

The computer allowed Deborah and Ethan to finally have control over some part of their lives. For Bruce, it allowed him to engage with something that was ordered and predictable. Carla found that the computer had the same sort of organizing principles as her own life.

As Turkle weaves together the stories of different adolescents, she points out how young people use technology as a mirror to their lives, giving them the perspective necessary to make sense of out everyday situations or develop new strategies for handling situations. Her argument aligns with the ideas that technology enables people to make sense of the physical world by acting it out in the digital. In each case, there is discussion about how the lessons learned through technology can be applied to everyday life.

Questions:

Turkle's narrative is fantastic but i'm concerned about the implicit model. Are lessons learned through technology really applicable to other environments? Does engagement give us a mirror stage? If so, is the mirror altered by the environment?

How are things changing now that technology is a given? What other tools have been used for mirror stages?

How can we actually test the effectiveness of technology as a mirror? I'm having a hard time buying into this and i'm not sure why, but i'm recoiling into desiring more conclusive evidence.

Overview:

This manuscript introduces the concept of situated learning. It really is a book about a concept and a framework for analyzing learning with little analysis itself.

In Chapter 1, they traverse the history of their thinking while at IRL, discussing how they went from apprenticeship to situated learning by really thinking through what legitimate peripheral participation is about. The bulk of this chapter consists of word games, focusing on why certain words were chosen and how they cannot be decoupled from one another.

At the core, Lave & Wenger are interested in how newcomers become part of a community of practice through engagement with the practices themselves. Moving away from theories of "receiving" knowledge, they focus on how people's activities with the world allow them access to knowledge that is fundamentally different than observing or being spoon-fed. In other words, learning is a whole-body activity. They see their approach as Marxist in nature, where the goal is to "ascend (from both the particular and the abstract) to the concrete" (38).

In learning, one must be engaged in practice but also in the social world. Learning is very much about internalizing the surrounding culture and becoming an active participant in the practice of learning.

[There is reference to a Russian named Vygotsky and his work on "zone" which appears to be assumed knowledge that i don't have.]

Questions:

• What is the role of activity theory in situated learning?
• What is the significance of situated learning in the educational sphere?

Abstract:

Subculture, despite the term's wide usage in sociology, has not proved to be a very satisfactory explanatory concept. Several problems in previous subculture research are discussed: (1) the confusion between subculture and subsociety, (2) the lack of a meaningful referent for subcultures, (3) the homogeneity and stasis associated with the concept, and (4) the emphasis on defining subcultures in terms of values and central themes. It is argued that for the subculture construct to be of maximal usefulness it needs to be linked to processes of interaction. Subculture is re-conceptualized in terms of cultural spread occurring through an interlocking group network characterized by multiple group membership, weak ties, structural roles conducive to information spread between groups, and media diffusion. Identification with the referent group serves to motivate the potential member to adopt the artifacts, behaviors, norms, and values characteristic of the subculture. Youth subcultures are presented as illustrations of these processes operate.

Meta-Notes:

This is a great essay looking at how sociology must reframe subcultural studies. It is even more relevant today because of the post-BCCCS work. There is an extensive bibliography in this article that is quite relevant to anyone interested in the history of these ides.

Notes:

Intro: Society is heterogeneous and culture is not spread out evenly. It is from here that ideas of subcultures/subsocieties emerge. Subcultures are linked to the deviance literature and some sociologists have focused on subsociety to avoid the culture issue altogether.

They go through each of the four problems referenced in the abstract.

1) Subculture has often been treated as synonymous with the population comprising the subsociety. 2) Subculture has been examined without sufficient concern for delineating the groups of individuals serving as its referent. 3) The subcultural system is pictured as homogeneous, static and closed. 4) Subculture is depicted as consisting in its entirety of values, norms and central themes. (2)

Issue #1.

Where subsociety should be used, not subculture:
- aggregate of persons or a collectivity (i.e. gang)
- membership category that is structural or network based rather than dependent on a system of beliefs and practices

"The confusion between these terms arises when it is assumed that a person can 'enter into' a subculture" (3).
- membership in subsociety is defined structurally, not culturally

Issue #2.

Studies in subcultures often assume that the population can be defined through demographic features. (community dependent)

no referent: "a clearly defined population which shares cultural knowledge" (4)... thus, vague and imprecise
- boundaries of the subsociety and thus subculture are usually assumed
- it's also assumed that group culture is derived from the subculture

"presence of a subculture cannot be inferred from relative agreement on a set of attitudes, behaviors, or values within a population" (5)

Issue #3.

ethnographic accounts only show a slice of things because subcultures are changing so quickly. "Cultural traditions ill spread across the targeted group at various rates, with the traditions of one segment of the referent population becoming part of the designated subculture, but only at a later time" (6).

- ongoing negotiation of meaning of symbols, socially constructed realities
- "culture of the group" is always in flux

"Sociologists should not allow themselves to be trapped into reifying subculture so that it seems like a material thing" (6).

Issue #4.

- subcultures are typically limited to: "basic value orientations, publicly proclaimed attitudes, or reports of stereotypical behavior" - becomes a caricature

- all subcultures have ranges

Re-conceptualization:
- interlocking group culture
- multiple group membership
- weak ties
- structural roles
- media diffusion
- identification
- community/outsiders' response

Becker (1961): shared definition of the situation
Spector (1973): effective interaction in a group

"culture is meaningful only when it is activated in interaction" (8).

"the social network serves as the referent of the subculture" (8).

Multiple group membership is fine - overlapping memberships allows spread of information (10).

Weak ties are maintained outside of any major group, thus nothing is ever bounded or finite (10).

Some people perform particular structural roles which affects how cultural info spreads (11).

media diffusion (when a speaker addresses multiple groups simultaneously) increases cultural flow (11-12)

Identification. "Selves are acquired through self-indication (Blumer 1969), whereby individuals can view themselves as members of a group, as marginal to a group, or as outsiders" (12)

"cultural usage consists of chosen behaviors" (12).

Identification can be analyzed using centrality ("member's degree of commitment to the population segment") and salience ("frequency of the identification").

Outsiders are involved the development of subcultures. Outsiders often label groups and then one can identify with that or not. Media portrayal helps solidify groups and the outsider is constantly a factor in the development of a subculture by affecting the centrality of identification.

Finally, they argue that research must take into account both identification and social networks and the evershifting elements.

Overview (Introduction):

When i first picked up this book, i crinkled my nose at the terms "jocks" and "burnouts" and made a rash judgment that the author was clueless - those terms are so outdated, so binary, so limited. But as i dove into her Introduction, i actually got where she was going with this and began to really appreciate her structure. I still loathe the terms but i appreciate what she did with it.

Eckert offers two categories to frame all of American high school life (although her ethnography is based on one school in Michigan): jocks and burnouts. She makes it very clear that jocks don't just refer to the sporty kids but the embodiment of "an attitude - an acceptance of the school and its institutions as an all-encompassing social context, an unflagging enthusiasm and energy for working within those institutions" (3). In other words, these are the goodie-tooshoes, the popular kids, the hall monitors, the band geeks, and anyone who collects activities like baseball cards. Burnouts are, not surprisingly, not just the drug crowd, but all of those burnt-out of the system "from long years of frustration encountered in an institution that rejects and stigmatizes them as it fails to recognize and meet their needs" (4). This includes the art kids, the ones sleeping through all classes, the ones who are always tardy, the ones with their headphones on between classes, etc.

My next self-focused !but! concerns the binarism. I collected activities while dating the town's drug dealer and skipping over 1/3 of the school year; i had straight A's but my teachers preferred if i slept because i was less disruptive. What about me? is not the way to read a book but i can't help it. Luckily, Eckert addresses this by saying that many kids fit somewhere in-between but recognize the existence of these categories in the process of trying to place themselves in-between. While you can break down each category even more, the binarism still stands and the desire to move between them is significant in the social life of teens.

The significance of these two camps is that, together, they achieve "hegemony in the social structure of the school... It is not the categories themselves, but the opposition between them that is hegemonic" (5). The reason for this is startling - it helps replicate the class system that exists throughout adult society. You cannot have mainstream without having resistant; both create hegemony, not simply the mainstream.

With hegemony being constructed by oppositional forces, Eckert moves on to deconstruct an prevalent assumption - "Jocks become involved in school because their families have instilled in them confidence, ambition, and academic skills, while Burnouts become alienated from school because their families have failed them. Burnouts' rebelliousness is seen as resulting from problems at home and from frustration at their lack of academic ability" (a.k.a. "theory of cultural deprivation") (7). "In actuality, the years that lead up to secondary school withness a multifaceted process of separation of children on the basis of class and (in many schools) ethnicity, in which children's beliefs are built on adults' beliefs and in which individual beliefs are built into group beliefs" (7). In other words, by middle school, we replicate the adult values in our schools and children are positioned in relation to their parents' positions - "the perpetuation of class inequalities through the funneling of children into their parents' place in society, and the enculturation of children into hierarchical social forms through explicit and implicit educational practices" (7).

Eckert shares Shirley Brice Heath's definition of mainstream - "literate, school-oriented, aspiring to upward mobility through success in formal institutions and looking beyond the primary networks of family and community for behavioral models and value orientations" (8).

In elementary schools, there is no educational differentiation for kids - everyone is in the same class. By the time kids hit middle/high school, those who have been primed for leadership roles get to take their places. In middle/high schools, kids are split based on their "skills" which are usually marked by what mainstream parents/teachers think are generalizable values. Of course, this means that kids who come from non-mainstream communities are immediately placed in "lower" classes. Of course disdain for school will come out of this. "It is no wonder that those who stand to lose power in this new comprehensive school context react swiftly to reject the context itself" (13).

Talcott Parsons (1942) introduced the term "youth culture" but all of this early work concerned a classless, homogenous adolescent culture.

Eckert uses Michael Brake's (1985) definition of subculture: "meaning systems, modes of expression or life styles developed by groups in subordinate structural positions in response to dominant meaning systems, and which reflect their attempt to solve structural contradictions arising from the wider societal context" (14).

Jocks and Burnouts are very much overlapping subcultures which, to Eckert, "weakens the notion of culture intended in the term" (16). She talks about different approaches to subcultures, include a differentiation between 'fun' and 'delinquent' subcultures. She then introduces "progressive" subcultures (i.e. those who have access to social contexts outside of the school like the Punks, Beatniks and Freaks) - they "pose a treat to the Jock-Burnout hegemony, not only because of their 'unpredictable' style but because of their opposition to the category system itself" (18).

Abstract:

Web logs, or blogs, challenge the notion of authorship. Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author’s writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not but strive to create new content, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents. Results also show that Instant Messaging is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

Notes:

Method: quant analysis of posts, diary study, interviews
Restricted subjects to 8 US bloggers that concentrate on IP issues.

Findings: 1) authors of topical blogs often do not but strive to create new content, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents; 2) that Instant Messaging (IM) is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

The analysis tool that Carter reports on looks at data like word length, average external links, percent of post quoted, etc. Carter positions his data against Herring's.

Subjects defined a good post as one that "contributes new information or, to a lesser extent, extensive commentary about some issue on which the participant is an expert" (3). Some also thought timeliness mattered.
- Best to link to completely new information or at least source info (court decisions, laws).

"Participants reported judging the quality of a post primarily by trackbacks (links from other blogs to their post) or by their own analysis of server traffic. Another metric that most participants used was links from blogs with a much larger perceived audience than their own. Participants did not attribute much value to the size and quality of comments left on the blog" (3).

6 of the participants kept journalistic conventions when updating - marking changes with things like bold, colored text, etc. 2 modeled it after a wiki.

- blog is "reference archive" - connected to work (but also limited by); each other helps keep on top of new material
- concerns over voice (academic talk vs. layperson)
- everyone analyzed their traffic (many said that others didn't matter)

There is nothing shocking about this study, but it is a clean reminder of what is going on in topical blogosphere. Simple and well done. It is also an interesting encouragement to think about how to do a diary study with bloggers.

Review:

published in New Media and Society, February 2005

Since the onset of cyberculture studies, researchers have sought to understand how postmodern conceptions of identity emerge online, often through discussions of (dis)embodiment. Much of the early work focused on the utopian visions of what could be, eschewing the social reality of digital experience for the myth of a virtual life free from the constraints of bodies and materiality.

In "Material Virtualities," Sunden challenges the arguments that emerge from this postmodern utopianism while simultaneously problematizing the conceptions stemming from the opposing camp, which espouses realistic determinism ("the online world is a copy of the 'real'"), arguing instead for a viewpoint that is positioned between these two whereby "a text-based virtual world might be an extension of the corporeal, as well as the physical a refiguration or perhaps rather an incarnation of the textual" (p. 109). In challenging these dichotomous discourses, Sunden seeks to "engage in a discussion of how cyberspace and similar concepts might have been 'embodied' all along – the virtual does not automatically equate disembodiment" (p. 5).

Sunden's arguments are grounded by her two-year ethnographic exploration of WaterMOO, a 1500-person MOO that was originally a text-based version of the San Francisco Bay Area. Transcripts of her interactions with MOO participants are presented and analyzed in order to highlight the materiality of textual bodies. In structuring her arguments around these examples, Sunden focuses on the process of writing and reading bodies, place, and sexual desire in the entirely written culture of MOOs. She explores the tensions that emerge when boundaries are not defined because inhabiting a MOO means grappling with being "both outside and inside, here and there, visible and hidden, text and body" (p. 99). Emerging from this is a discussion of the importance of materiality and coded culture in the virtual worlds.

The theoretical framework employed in "Material Virtualities" draws heavily from contemporary feminist and queer theory, explicitly examining the approaches of other feminist cyberculture work. First challenging and then building from ideas such as Haraway's, Sunden argues for a she-borg that is not dependent on a dislocated utopian view of the virtual. Instead, she argues for a "cyborgfeminist perspective that problematizes every separation of the imaginary from the political, and does so in a sense that does not erase the material from the virtual" (p. 188). Sunden properly recognizes the contributions of these utopian views, as well as their weaknesses, and uses both to solidify her approach.

The challenges presented in this book are key for researchers invested in issues of identity, embodiment and mediated sociability in virtual culture. As this book is clearly situated in and reacting to earlier theories of cyberculture, familiarity with those arguments is essential for grasping the significance of this work. By deconstructing the utopian ideals that color canonical texts, Sunden rightfully challenges the authority and accuracy of the dominant views espoused by cybercultural studies. In doing so, she breaks down the divide between the theories of cyberspace and the experiences of participants. Her contribution paves the way for new approaches that grapple with the complexities of a virtuality that cannot simply be understood as either mirroring or eliminating the physical and corporeal.

The most significant limitation of this book results from Sunden speaking broadly about textual bodies, but only addressing those in WaterMoo. While WaterMOO makes a great case study, MUDs are a particular and narrow form of digital textual identity production and only a fraction of those engaged in digital textual identity production use them. The reader would benefit from seeing how the theoretical arguments presented here apply to other digital textual environments such as blogs/online journals or to mixed textual/avatar environments such as MMORPGs.

Consider, for example, the performativity differences between MUDs and blogs/online journals. Sunden describes MUDs as an "ongoing, collaboratively written, online performance" (p. 21). While blogs/online journals can certainly be read as textual performance, their writers have a different investment in the textual production than those writing in MUDs, in part because of the intentional persistence of the text. How does the role of the body in textual production shift when the text is expected to stand on its own, separated from the presence of its author? Sunden's discussion of 'home sweet home' suggests the significance of an architecture that provides for 'private' spaces (p. 96). How might this discussion of place apply to blogs/online journals where there are owners who are able to post entries and everyone else is relegated to express themselves through the comments? By addressing other forms of digital textual cultures, Sunden could expose the nuances of her arguments, revealing how diverse mediums result in subtle differences in textuality and embodiment.

The tone, argument structure and narrow focus of this book can probably be attributed to its original construction as a doctoral dissertation. The presentation is dense and each section restates and defends the same thesis from different angles using one body of empirical data. In constructing a dissertation, authors are encouraged to strongly ground their arguments in theoretical frameworks and empirical data. As such, the focus is quite narrow, although the supposed application could be quite broad. In translating these finding to a book, the reader would have benefited by seeing the broader application. Hopefully, Sunden will use her theoretical framework to address other digital textual cultures in future journal articles.

"Material Virtualities" is certainly not for the faint of heart, but it is an articulate and necessary critique of previous theoretical approaches to cyberculture. As such, it is a significant and meaningful contribution and definitely relevant for anyone interested in this space.

Meta-notes:

Reed is an anthropologist studying British "journal bloggers" who participate in a directory of British bloggers. He has studied them extensively and has one of the best understandings of blogging that i've seen. His essay reveals many of the complicated issues in blogging, including "my blog is me" / "I am not my blog" and how celebrity culture plays into blogging.

Notes:

Reed is inspired by the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell who offers a way for substituting objects for people so that the analysis can look like anthropology and be useful for anthropologists. His work is focused on art-objects and he offers for kinds of "subjects" that the analyst can use: 'index' (the object itself), 'artist', 'recipient', and 'prototype.' "Gell is interested in the way artefacts can organise sets of relations and gain significance as a consequence of the agency assigned to them" (2).

Reed argues that an anthropological analysis of texts (including blogging) should begin with Gell's premise. "As Gell argues with art-objects, I suggest that one might best start by considering the ways in which texts appear to extend the agency of persons" (2). Reed argues, along the lines of Annelise Riles, that blogging is a culture explicitly "centered on substituting texts for persons" (3). They are concerned with the relations amongst bloggers.

The blogs that Reed encounters are of the typical "journal" style, centered around narratives of the authors' life. "Those webloggers I eventually met treated their texts as straightforward indexes of self. Unlike novelists, who, I was told, only let bits of themselves appear in their stories, journal bloggers put themselves forward unreservedly. For them, there is no issue of representation; they commonly assert that 'my blog is me'" (3). The constant updating is part of what gives blogging life; everything is meant to be a work in progress. Blogs are meant to be 'of the moment'. Blogging is not an act of composition, but a brain dump of what the bloggers is thinking right now (3).

The process is cathartic because you can get out what you are thinking at the moment. You can let it go, release it from your brain, rant and vent (4-5). All of the energy spent releasing negativity helps the blogger cope with the everyday by exorcising the negative aspects of the day.

There is a tension between "my blog is me" and "I am not my weblog" which explicitly references the fact that the blog does not represent the individual in entirety (5).

Journal bloggers know that people are reading what they write; this motivates them to keep writing. Reed prefers to use the term 'recipient' (from Gell) rather than 'reader' because bloggers have problems with this concept because it's different than being 'read.' Bloggers that he speaks with talk about 'visitors' instead of 'readers' (6). Visitors have easy access, don't have to pay, can leave notes and otherwise move about cyberspace.

"Just like a private diary, a weblog is composed so a subject can view himself or herself in mediated form, exteriorised as text. Although it is known that other people visit the site, the blogger insists that he or she is the main recipient; the popular refrain among journal bloggers is 'I blog for me'" (6). A lot of what bloggers talk about is looking back and remembering. Reading backwards is a process of getting access to historical feelings. That said, no blogger wants to be the only visitor to their blog. "Repeatedly, journal bloggers told me that part of the pleasure of weblogging lay in the sensation of exposing oneself, through the text, to people one doesn't know (letting them 'gawp' at your life)" (7).

"Knowing that anonymous people were visiting the weblog made the act of posting entries seem more significant; journal bloggers felt they had licence to express themselves fully to others, but without the fear of being judged or the risk of damaging personal relations. However, most journal bloggers soon learn that strangers are not the only visitors to the text. At some point, they discover that some of their recipients are people they know—family, work colleagues and friends" (7). It's fine when friends at a distance read it - it's a way of keeping in touch... but when people you know and see regularly access it, it often obstructs self-expression. When one of Reed's subject's boyfriend found it, he needed to go back and edit to protect himself; his posting rules also changed. Many of his subjects talk about self-censoring. Journal bloggers often complain about how this changes the initial purpose of blogging for self.

Developments in blogging like having directories and posting about blogging have made it more of a community but also changed the tenor of posting. With commenting, there ended up being a network of 'me' instead of a single narrative (9). Bloggers are concerned about the self-referential turn in blogging.

There are a handful of famous bloggers ("A-list") who appear on most others' blogs in the form of posts, links, blog rolls. "The extent of their fame (these persons/texts seem to be indexed everywhere) can be a source of envy and irritation, but also of admiration" (10). Many want to have their name appear in the same way, to make themselves the focus of others. One concern about celebrity culture is that it makes people focus on how they might attract more recipients. People post frequently to appear on the recently updated list, to try to attract attention. While people talk about blogging for themselves, they pay a lot of attention to hit counts. The "A-List" complain about the celebrity culture, citing that their fame is unsolicited and not always welcome; they talk about feeling coerced by the attention and of feeling too much pressure (11).

This has been complicated by the fact that many of these bloggers meet offline. One of the problems with the offline meeting is that people have these odd mediated relationships ahead of time. "It wasn’t that we didn’t know each other, it was that we did" (11). The blogmeets strengthen the relationships and motivation to keep blogging. "For them, these offline gatherings demonstrate that texts can improve the relations between persons, but also that persons can improve the relations between texts... Even more than before, reading the digital text feels like visiting a person you know" (12).