Bonnie A. Nardi 1 ISR June 8, 2004 Blogging: Past, Present and Future ISR Forum June 8, 2004 Bonnie...

Bonnie A. Nardi 1 ISR June 8, 2004

Blogging: Past, Present and Future

ISR Forum

June 8, 2004

Bonnie A. Nardi

School of Information and Computer Science

University of California, Irvine, USA


Blogging is…

A series of archived Internet posts in reverse chronological order,

usually with links, sometimes with pictures

February 10, 2004Get a J ob?

Gene Expression: I s Academia a Pyramid Scheme?

Interesting discussion here. To summarize:- Is the purpose of many academic disciplines merely to producemore academics? Yes, but does this diminish the other purposesof the academic disciplines?- Is this a problem for the humanities more than forscience/engineering? Yes! Business can absorb many of the extrascientists and engineers.

The conversation seems to devolve a bit among the comments,but there are some nuggets of truth in there... The "soft"disciplines are not restrained by empiricism as well as thesciences.

Posted by Rikurzhen at 11:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Evan, a graduatestudent in genetics

link

image

post

date


Blogging Past: 1985

Orson Scott Card predicted blogs in Ender’s Game.

Valentine and Peter create a political column posted on “the nets”

They are delighted when their posts are taken seriously and

“[some of their phrases] showed up in the major debates

on the prestige nets.”

Just like today’s bloggers who often look for their posts to reach

a wider audience.


Blogging Present:Research conducted Spring 2003--now with

• Diane Schiano (Stanford)

• Michelle Gumbrecht (Stanford)

• Luke Swartz (Stanford, Navy)

Interviews with 23 bloggers in and around Stanford• people we could interview in person in our locale

• follow-ups in email, phone, instant messaging

• still reading the blogs and corresponding with informants

Text analysis of blogs

Use of blog material with permission

Generalizations about blogging based on this sample


Sample

Ethnic mix roughly typical of Silicon Valley and Stanford

European-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, one European

16 men, 7 women

Ages 19-60

Well-educated middle class people who like to write


Who’s blogging?

Four group blogs:

• Two educational blogs

• A political “collective”

• Work blog at a research institute


Who’s blogging?

Eighteen Individually authored blogs, including:

• a philosopher who wrote criticism of rock music

• a technology consultant who specialized in underdeveloped countries

• a graduate student in genetics

• a biostatistician

• an undergraduate who planned to become a romance novelist…


Blogs are like private radio stations

Blogs have been characterized as diaries, journals, a literary genre

But they are:

• a broadcast medium of limited interactivity

Bloggers like to:

• give opinions

• dispense advice

• stay in touch


Bloggers feed off their audience

Dan, a Stanford student:

Even if it only takes you ten minutes, yeah I try to say, ‘Okay, right before I go to bed, I’m gonna type something out’ and then it’s like, ‘Well, I’m feeling tired now, I’ll just do that another day,’ and then you just fall asleep…and then you’re just sitting there saying, ‘Yeah this blog is kinda sucky.’ Your friends like look at it and they’re like, ‘What the hell happened to your blog? I can’t follow along with what’s happening in your life!’

The blog creates the audience and the audience creates the blog

Blog writers and readers together constitute the social activity of

blogging


Bloggers are mindful of their audience

“Blogs can have an edge but you should not throw a bomb.”

“Yeah…My mom mentioned something that was in my blog

…My grandma reads it, too; she just got Internet…That means

that I kind of have to censor--less cursing and stuff.”

One untenured professor would not put anything “political” on his blog.

A student said if he had “anything bad” to say about someone,

he would make the entry private. Public entries were kept “clean.”

A political blogger said, “There’s pressure to make sure you don’t

send something offensive…If you’re inflammatory--no more links to

you anymore.”


Why do bloggers blog?

1. Seek opinions and feedback

2. Express opinions to influence others

3. Inform others

4. Update on activities and whereabouts

5. “Think by writing”

6. Release emotional tension

These activities link bloggers to their readers, establish social connection

Not mutually exclusive


Seek others’ opinions:

Jack, a graduate student in English at Stanford (now an assistant

professor at the University of Toronto):

…I'd hit a bit of a rut with the blog, feeling as if I was crafting these long pieces that no one was really responding to, and that others who were producing much shorter, impressionistic pieces were getting more attention. I decided to loosen up a bit, which in part meant lowering my resistance to putting my own poems up.

I…discovered that allowing myself to post poems was helping me write poems, since I could think of it as material for the blog to be immediately posted, as opposed to being stowed in a drawer somewhere.


Express opinions to influence others


February 16, 2004 "Traditional" Agriculture

ScienceDaily News Release: Traditional Iroquois Methods Work For Today's Farmers

Blah blah blah. The fact that we don't put enough money into ecology research has nothing to do with philosophical differences between Western science and Native American mysticism. We don't study ecology because the Republicans control Congress and they don't believe in global warming.


Shower Curtain Microbiology

Biohazard lurks in bathrooms: Shower curtains awash with potentially harmful bacteria.

Wash your shower curtain every couple weeks. Otherwise, you'll be showering with a cloud of opportunistic pathogens.

Likewise, you should store kitchen sponges in a cup of weak bleach solution. Store your tooth brushes in mouthwash or the like.


Evan, a grad student in genetics

Evan offered opinions and suggested actions


Bill Gates was interviewed on television by Bill Moyers and he had made some interesting statements a couple of years ago…I thought it was a very interesting interview about…the needs of technology for certain areas and how…Gates thinks they [personal computers] are inappropriate for other [areas], which surprised a lot of people, that Bill Gates would even say that. So I put in my reaction to that on [the blog] and pointed people to the whole transcript, which was probably the only way people outside the U.S. could’ve seen the content with the comments….So they’ll go to the weblog and read my impressions and then they’ll see how they can go to the full transcript…Previously, I might’ve just said “interesting transcript about Bill Gates on this PBS site” [on my website].

Inform Others

Sam, a technology consultant:


Update others on activities and whereabouts

Jack

Off tomorrow to Massachusetts, home of your Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. (But--sorry Jim --I won't be anywhere near Boston.) I'll trust you all to hold down the fort until Friday.


“Thinking by writing”Evan said he needed an “outlet” for “thinking by writing.”

he used the blog to see if he had anything to say about the newspapers and journals he read

Alan, a historian of science, said the blog “forced” him to write,

which was good so he could refine his ideas through writing.

Jack said he used his blog to “prove to myself that I can [write].”

The public forum of the blog, with its audience, encourages

writing.

The periodicity of the blog also helps, to establish a rhythm

for writing.


Release of emotional tension

“Me working out my own issues”

Blogs enabled people to express deeply felt emotions, to:

• “let off steam” • “get it out there” • “shout”

• write about things they felt “obsessive” or “passionate” about


Amazing is the story of Uganda's civil war that I heard last night on NPR. One of many rebel

Monday, December 08, 2003

Amazing is the story of Uganda's civil war that I heard last night on NPR. One of many rebel armies armies fighting against the single party government is the Lord's Resistance Movement, "best known for its abduction of thousands of Acholi Ugandan children to serve as involuntary soldiers and, in the case of girls, "wives" or concubines for the LRA officers. Extreme brutality is used to keep the children in line, including torture and forcing children to participate in the killing of other children who try to escape." See HRW report…For more information about the country, and the political economy behind this bizarro religious and social tale, you can read here.

Vivian expressed her “amazement” at the news story and urged others

to read more, providing links

The Shout: Opinions on Everything

Vivian, an attorney


Blogs as social activity encapsulated in bloggers’ motto: Blogito Ergo Sum

Not in the Descartian sense of “I exist,” but in a social sense of

“I exist with you through the blog.”


Controlled interactivity

Bloggers liked the controlled or limited interactivity of blogs.

Blogs were seen as more “voluntary,” less “intrusive” than

other online media. Readers could choose to read, or not.

Blogs seen as less interactive than email, listservs,instant messaging,

and chat.

Tammy: So I can give them the choice…it’s like I put it [on the blog]

and then if they want to see what’s going on with me, they

can go see it. They don’t have to like wade through their inbox…

Jack: Listservs often have high levels of invective and

rage. On the blog, because you are not talking directly to

a specific individual, you can be more reflective.


What about comments in blogs?

Ron used a blog in his writing class at Stanford:

Blog comments are allowed and encouraged, but they’re

also very clearly rhetorically subservient, you know, to the main

post.

Modal number of comments on individually authored blogs is

zero (Herring et al. 2004)

Interaction often happens outside the blog


Why might blogs be useful at work?

Blogs are a “grassroots” technology that many pick up on their own,

or at the urging of friends

People spontaneously use them to seek feedback, get others’

opinions, update and inform others -- all useful at work

Similar grassroots technologies include email, html, and

instant messaging

-> Invented by technical end users for themselves, then diffused

to millions of users,

-> Have found their way into the workplace.


Of course, just setting up a blog isn’t enough

Archaeology class blog we studied did not lead to student posts

Functioned as a website

Little interaction

Have to find a “hook” to get students/workers blogging


Interactions about blog posts often take place in:

instant messaging

phone

email

face to face communication…


Handling conflict about a blog post through email

(and then back to the blog)


Darryl, a poet, reviewed a poetry book in his blog:

"The more quiet, modest modes of Asian poetry appeal as an

alternative to our overblown emotions" --

An email exchange took place between Darryl and Jack. Jack,

an Asian-American, questioned what he considered a racial stereotype.

But Jack said nothing on his blog.

Darryl asked, in email, “Why not?”


Jack then wrote in his blog:

It seems silence might have been more troubling than overblown emotions-- Darryl wrote me [in email] hoping I would clarify. So, donning my scholar's robes, I will proceed to an explication of silence... My initial objection was to a line in the review of Gary Sullivan's "How to Proceed in the Arts" that Darryl posted on Monday. In his remarks on the section "70 Lines from the Chinese," Darryl wrote: "The more quiet, modest modes of Asian poetry appeal as an alternative to our overblown emotions."

My immediate response was that this assertion perpetuates a common stereotype of Asian reserve, modesty, and deference, one that while seemingly innocent enough, can have repressive implications, suggesting that the East is less capable of speaking for itself than the West…I should say that this reaction is not a literary judgment based on my familiarity with Chinese poetry, of which I know very little; rather, it was a reaction against an orientalist stereotype that has real implications for how Asians are perceived in America.


Here the troubling material is discussed in email, and then

a very polite exchange takes place in the blog.

There is a level of indirection in blogs that bloggers prized.

This quality of controlled interactivity is vital to the success of

blogs so that people feel free to post creative product such as

poems, or feelings about their work, or critiques of their

organizations.

This limited or controlled interactivity is fragile and will have to be protected

through social conventions. People are not always so polite while blogging,

and they do step on people’s toes, but bloggers said they calibrated

audience response very carefully, attempting tact, avoiding “flames.”


Blogging Future: More and better blogs

At home, work, school and in politics…. My future research: Relationship of blogs and related websites to other media

E.g., Spinsanity, “The nation's leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric”

• started small (couple of former Stanford students)

• evolved to a column in the Phildelphia Inquirer

• forthcoming book All the President’s Spin from Simon

and Schuster

move from digital to print

Such blogs and related websites such as moveon.org and rightmarch.com which attempt to influence politics.

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Bonnie A. Nardi 1 ISR June 8, 2004 Blogging: Past, Present and Future ISR Forum June 8, 2004 Bonnie...

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