ASAANZ conference abstract

The Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand is accepting abstracts for their 2009 conference, Re-thinking Community in Contemporary Anthropology.  The stand-out thing about this year’s conference is that people are encouraged to participate by creating you-tube presentations.  For me it means I can present a paper without having to fork out the cash to fly back to NZ – always, always appreciative of this feature at conferences.

Anyway, here’s my abstract for the Anth of Higher Ed panel:

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Things I’ve come across recently and don’t want to forget

Marres, N  2009  Testing powers of engagement: Green living experiments, the ontological turn and the undoability of involvement. European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 117-133

How public experiments (like the green energy meters) are conducted in private home spaces and then republicised, for instance on a blog – a way to engage people (with their environments as well as engage an audience for the public experiment).

 

 

Cenite, M; Detenber, BH; Koh, AWK; Lim, ALH  2009  Doing the right thing online: a survey of bloggers’ ethical beliefs and practices.  New Media & Society 11(4):575-597

Study revealed four underlying ethical principles of blogging: truth telling, accountability, minimising harm and attribution.

 

 

boyd, danah  2006 A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium. Reconstruction 6(4)

Blog blurring textuality and orality, private and public.

Article note: The radical act of ‘mommy blogging’

Lopez 2009 The radical act of ‘mommy blogging’: Redefining motherhood through the blogosphere.  New Media & Society 11(5): 729-747

At the inaugural BlogHer Conference in 2005, where women gathered to discuss their roles in the online community of bloggers, a clear tension emerged between two segments of the conference participants.  In one group were those women who blogged about politics, business and cultural commentary; the other group consisted of what has become known as ‘mommy bloggers’, women who primarily blog about their children and family.  The mommy bloggers felt their blogging had been deemed inconsequential throughout the conference and that it was being measured against standards for which it wasn’t intended rather than treating it as its own niche in the blogosphere.  One mommy blogger countered the marginalisation by describing mommy blogging as a radical act.  Her statement aroused intense discussion after the BlogHer Conference and the following year a session titled ‘Mommy Blogging as a Radical Act’ was held.

Lopez uses the controversy which emerged out of the BlogHer Conference to probe why the term ‘mommy blogger’ is so controversial, how these women are challenging dominant representations of motherhood through their blogging (there was a recent article in Ms. Magazine revolving around similar themes), and the way the women form communities around their blogs.  By blogging about motherhood, these women are pushing a topic that is traditionally characterised as a private and feminine sphere into the blogosphere, which is hyper-public and still male dominated. Mommy blogging becomes a radical act because it presents, as one of Lopez’s participants says, an unsanitised and unidealised version of motherhood.  It’s radical because it is redefining representations of motherhood in the public sphere; it’s radical because they refuse to be trivialised by other women bloggers – their writing is staking a claim to legitimation in the eyes of the public.

Lopez also draws connections between the historical practice of journaling or keeping a diary and the modern context of mommy blogging.  While both are intended to narrate the day’s happenings, the intended audience differs.  While one is meant to be deeply personal, the other aims to reach out and communicate with a community.  In the act of blogging and engaging with a blogging community, the blogger creates a somewhat bounded identity for herself based on the central feature of her blog – the title mommy blogger.  Lopez explains that one of the reasons women dislike the term mommy blogger is because it overshadows the other aspects of their identity that are presented online.  She highlights the use of categories and tags as ways to illustrate the multiple/fragmented identities that the bloggers present to their audience.

In the conclusion to the article she sums up with, “Women who blog about their children are transforming their personal narratives of struggle and challenge into interactive conversations with other mothers, and in so doing, are beginning to expand our notion of motherhood, women bloggers and the mother’s place within the public sphere.”

Slow blogging…it must be article time

There has been scant blogging around here lately.  I’ve been working on a paper for a conference on environmental, cultural, social and economic sustainability.  I was accepted as a virtual participant, which basically means I write an article and it gets peer reviewed for publication in the journal associated with the conference.  So that’s where my paper is now – the shadowy world of peer review.   I think the organisers have struck gold with virtual participation, especially for a conference on sustainability.  The end result is broader participation with fewer air miles expended and more people reading their journal.  More conferences should have this as an option.

Anyway, here’s the abstract:

In this research I focus on bloggers’ participation in the environmental sustainability movement. The objectives are to explore the ways bloggers connect their local environmentalism with the global sustainability movement.

The investigation revolves around the role of texts and metaphors in blogging, and what these reveal about bloggers’ conceptions of the relationship between nature and technology, as well as the position of the self in the world. This ethnographic examination of the collaborative and socially constructed setting of sustainability blogging uncovers a hopeful picture of the global sustainability movement, while also highlighting its deep relationship to online virtual culture.

Blog personality?

Less surprising than being told that my blog was written by a man, but still creepy is Typealyzer.  It personality types your blog, Myers-Briggs style.  Mine was INTP, The Thinkers:

“The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

I’m with Alex in wondering how they got that from my blog.

Adam Reed wrote an article in 2005, ‘My Blog Is Me’, where he explains that blogging, unlike other forms of text production, is an activity that is “explicitly concerned with substituting texts for persons.”  Apparently this isn’t the case for Typealyzer–it states “writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-perceived personality.”  True in my case–I’m not INTP, but I know that some of my personality seeps into this blog.  So, it’s not ‘My blog is me’, but ‘My blog is an extension of a part of me’ which, in spite of the title, is what Reed describes throughout the article.  The more qualified title isn’t quite as catchy, though.

Work referred to in post:

Reed, Adam 2005 ‘My Blog Is Me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and Anthropology).  Ethnos 70(2):220-242.

Blog authors and audiences

I wrote a bit yesterday about conceptualising the blogosphere as one type of virtual world; one that is predominantly a written world.  And as such it has embedded within it some of the issues that I am interested in more generally with this project such as notions of authorship and audience and the changing relationship between these two.

Authorship on a blog is a bizarre thing.  Author, authorise, authority.  All are etymologically related and all suggest a power to tell, whether it is to tell a story or to tell in the sense of directing others.  According to Blum, recent notions of authorship have changed significantly and it is largely thanks to new media.  Earlier notions of the author as a solitary figure crafting his works of genius in an intellectual vacuum have given way to more flexible and multiple versions of the self, and this self is at ease with collective forms of knowledge and knowledge creation.  (Check out the Living and Learning With New Media findings just released for more in how new media and digital technologies are reconfiguring interactions and understandings of online interaction.)

Blogging provides a platform for authors that almost by default makes their work collaborative.  I’m not writing for myself.  I’m writing with the hope that I receive feedback from other bloggers.  I’m also writing with the aim of taking some of the authority out of traditional authorship.  This seems especially important in anthropology.  Blogging should be considered another next step in leveling access to knowledge production and consumption.

Blogging has an important role in changing the relationship between author and audience.  Undoubtedly, blogs are still author-centric; ultimately the author has the choice whether to allow comments and pingbacks, and whether to engage in a dialogue with the commenters.  But I have yet to come across an anthropology blog that has disabled the comments section…or any of the blogs I read for that matter.

In terms of the relationship between author and audience in anthropology, blogging has the potential to do two things.  First, it can alter the understandings of what publishing is in anthropology, and as a result alter who is considered the anthropological audience.  Anthropological publishing is typically in journals with the intended audience being other academics.  Blogging about your research means people outside of academic institutions, or even people outside the anthropological field, as Owen highlights, will be more likely to come in contact with your work.  Secondly, blogging about your research means that your participants can be involved throughout the authorship process.  This takes some level of the ultimate authority that usually rests with the anthropologist and places it in the hands of the participants.  As a result, the path to the final out-of-the-blog-published result is a more transparent one, and also one with a digital footprint that is able to be recalled and contested.

I’m still getting my head around the audience aspect of blogging.  I find the fact that the audience is largely invisible slightly weird, although I can’t pinpoint why.  How does a blogger know who they are writing for, and what the audience is interested in?  For instance,  I can see from the stats on my blog’s dashboard that almost 50 people looked at yesterdays post, but there are no comments.  I’m just curious, who are you?  How did you find my blog?

Works referred to in post:

Blum, Susan 2008 The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism.  In Anthropology News 49(3):8-9.

Virtual Worlds

I just came across a Tom Boellstorff interview in Anthropology News which sent me off to re-read some of the blog posts that had previously popped up about his Coming of Age in Second Life book.  Boellstorff did a guest post at Savage Minds where he picks up the virtual world discussion where his book left off.  One of the issues he mentions revolves around virtual worlds not being mass media.  He writes,

Because virtual worlds are places, they are not mass media, though they may contain mass media within them (everything from magazines, books, and embedded websites to streaming audio and video media). Virtual worlds need not mediate two or more places, since they are places in their own right. If anything, it is more accurate to think of a virtual world as a “medium,” in the sense of a material in which one crafts things. This has consequences for the use of mass media theory for understanding virtual worlds: we cannot assume ahead of time how such theories will need to be reworked for virtual-world contexts.

His emphasis on virtual worlds as places in their own right resonates with me.  My focus is on the blogosphere as a virtual world, and specifically the corner of the blogosphere that focuses on issues of environmental sustainability.  I have been exploring the literature on virtual worlds and the literature on blogging, and I’m finding it difficult to bring the two together. I’m having a hard time using them as two pieces in the same puzzle.

Much of the writing on blogs categorises the blogosphere, not as a virtual world, but as a new form of mass media.  However, often the areas of the blogosphere that are referred to as forms of mass media rely heavily on partisan politics or focus on the arts/entertainment and popular culture. I think sustainability blogs take a very different approach to blogging.

In Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff defines virtual worlds as consisting of three basic elements: they must be 1. places, 2. inhabited by people, and 3. enabled by online technologies.

I don’t have any trouble conceptualising the blogosphere as a virtual world, but what makes it more of a place than a form of mass media?  In the interview in Anthropology News, Boellstorff says that he “wanted to study [Second Life] without always having to rush to talk about how it is related to the physical world. Despite constant traffic between the two worlds, there are also boundaries.”

I might be erecting more boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world than bloggers may see themselves.  Part of the reason for this, as Boellstorff points out, is just a shorthand tool–to keep it clear which ‘place’ you are referring to.  Conceptualising ‘place’ in the blogosphere is still presenting me with some problems though.

One aspect of Second Life that definitely makes it more clearly a place and a virtual world than the blogosphere is the visual nature of it.  It resembles the actual world in many instances–it is populated with avatars, who are modeled on humans, people build houses, etc.  It is much easier to imagine SL as a place when it resembles the places around you in the actual world. The blogosphere, in spite of the recent additions of audio and video, is predominantly textual and lacks these representative visual cues.  What keeps bringing me back to framing the blogosphere as a virtual world, or as a place, is something that is embedded in Boellstorff describing a virtual world as a “medium, in the sense of a material in which one crafts things”.  The sustainability blogs that I am looking at are crafting a vision of the world that they want to live in.  But in doing this, they are also blurring the boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world.  What I want to figure out is where the lines exist for them.  What exactly are they crafting?  Is it a blog, or in the process of blogging and the actions that inspire it, are they crafting their environment?

Works referred to in post:

Boellstorff, Tom 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press

Winnick, Dinah 2008 On ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’: An interview with Tom Boellstorff.  In Anthropology News 49(7): 21.

Climate change skeptics

Last month Alex Lockwood presented a paper to the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, “New Media, New Democracy?”  In it he discusses how new media is being used as a tool to sow doubt about the reality of climate change.  He looks at how the use, volume and impact of new media, especially the use of blogs, can propagate climate change skepticism.

The paper provides some insight into the gap between the consensus of the scientific community and public opinion.  When the overwhelming scientific consensus shows that yes, climate change is real and yes, humans are largely responsible for it, how does such a large portion of the public remain unconcerned about our role in this? Or more pointedly, how do some continue to deny that global warming is a problem at all?

Have people lost their faith in science?  Or is there something particular about the format and nature of blogs that contributes to the idea that there is a still a scientific debate about the veracity of anthropogenic climate change?

It could be both, but I want to stick with new media/blogs for now.  Lockwood suggests that it’s a “question of amplification, the ways in which message multipliers use the web to not only publish but proliferate.”  Exponential growth, in other words. There is also an ability to unite a minority that would ordinarily remain disconnected from each other.

There are other factors that come into play, specifically in terms of blogs. And what seems important in these circumstances is to be able to discuss and debate; create a conversation.  There structure and form of communication that is implicit in blogging is largely behind the amplification that Lockwood refers to. Information is easy to spread, especially through the trackbacks, tagging search methods, and hyperlinking that is commonplace in blog posts.  But proliferation and amplification isn’t just a result of the structural settings of blogging.  This information is also socially channeled.  It is kind of like finding your niche, and engaging primarily with similarly interested bloggers and information compatible with your arguments.

This interaction in crucial to the way information spreads throughout the blogosphere. In a recent Public Choice (sorry, it’s subscription) article Hargittai, Gallo, & Kane (2008) studied the way bloggers interact on political topics, focusing on the interactions between liberal and conservative bloggers.  The shortest explanation of their findings is that there isn’t much interaction at all, at least not much productive interaction that leads to topical debate. For the most part liberal and conservative bloggers stick with discussions amongst themselves, and when there is cross-ideological interaction it usually takes the form of pointing out fallacies or missteps on the part of the opposition.

I find the same trend apparent in climate change/global warming bloggers.  This is only my perception though; I haven’t done any quantitative study. I started this post by mentioning Alex Lockwood and I’d like to point to him again as a counter example. He does engage in discussion with climate change skeptics.  See here and here for some examples of this. He not only links to their blogs, but uses the comments section to hash out disagreements.  It often doesn’t lead to a resolution, but at least people are talking across an ideological divide.  What he also does, which sets his blog apart from many others, is try to understand what could make the skeptics believe that climate change is a hoax or a scam.  I think Lockwood is just as rigid in his belief that climate change is anthropogenic (and I’m entirely with him) as many of the skeptics are in their belief that it is not.  Once we get to the bottom of why some people think climate change isn’t a real then perhaps we can figure out ways to communicate more productively and hopefully convince them that it is a real danger to the world.

In the conclusion to his paper he writes,

“I would argue that climate disinformation online is a form of cultural and political malware every bit as threatening to our new media freedoms, used not to foster a forum for open politics but to create, in Nancy Fraser’s term, a ‘multiplicity of fragmented publics’ that harms not only our democracy, but our planet.”

He’s right, but I think many climate change believers who blog may be just as guilty– not in the sense of spreading disinformation, but in terms of contributing to the in-crowd dynamic that does very little for a well reasoned, ongoing discussion.

Works referred to in post:

Fraser, N. 1993  Rethinking the public sphere. In Robbins, B. ed. The Phantom Public Sphere, pp. 1-32.  Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Hargittai, E., Gallo, J., & Kane, M. 2008  Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers. Public Choice 134: 67-86.

Lockwood, A. 2008  Seeding doubt: how sceptics use new media to delay action on climate change.  Paper delivered to the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, “New Media, New Democracy?” Sheffield University, 12 September 2008.