Starting from zero

Welcome to the blog introduction. I don’t know the best way to bring a blog into being, so I’m going to start very generally. This blog is my entry point into fieldwork. I’m an anthropologist with training wheels. My PhD project is an ethnography of blogging, specifically blogging about environmental sustainability. The blogosphere is my fieldsite and it is where I will do my participant observation. If you are an anthropologist, then you know what I mean and will probably be feeling my pain/anxiety at this point. The cliche really is true; starting fieldwork is frightening, even if the entry point is a familiar platform.

The other crucial aspect of the blog revolves around the online culture of the group of people I want to study. If you are a blogger on sustainability and you are reading this, then I want to learn more about the way you do the things you do, as the Temptations would have phrased it. I want to blog about your blog while I am communicating with you and learning from you. That seems to be the blogging way.

So the heart of this project will be the blogging– my own and that of the participants. It is through blogging that the research aims of this project will be met. The first aim is methodological and is focussed on the issues involved in conducting an ethnography completely inside the blogosphere. The second revolves around the group of bloggers who focus on environmental sustainability. For now I am approaching this with a range of questions, but they all centre around the way ideas of sustainability are performed through the process of blogging. For instance, in what ways are bloggers actors and how do they construct narratives that resonate with the people reading their blogs? Also, what makes their blog successful to them, and what makes blogging fulfilling?

Maybe it seems like this blog is speaking to two different audiences: anthropologists on one hand, and bloggers on the other. Never fear–I expect (perhaps falsely?) that most of the anthropologists who read this will themselves be bloggers. Hurray for common ground. Perhaps this site will enable a dialogue about philosophies of blogging between the two groups.

Anyway, I’m diving in and I will be posting more specific information about my research project soon. I’ll even put the whole proposal up once the research committee approves it.

And lastly, but most importantly, an invitation. I would love comments and feedback. I will also need some participants. So if you are a blogger on sustainability or an anthropologist interested in blogs as a research tool or blogging in general, please give me a holler.

marytheberge@gmail.com