Just Differently Intelligent...

Broadening the Blog I & II: Thoughts

Thoughts on the morning... sessions I attended... and presented at...

Broadening the Blog I

Alex Halavais, Thomas Burg, Cameron Marlow, Matthew Rothenberg

I'm not giving a transcript of this presentation, but rather just the thoughts that I have on what I heard. If I misheard, my apologies. I came in late, as I was running around the hotel with "macStumbler" checking to see where the wireless network was active. Then I tracked down the apple rep, and found out that he'd not plugged the wireless in yet. Ack. Missed Alex and Thomas

Cameron: interesting take away message for his presentation was the problematizing of the notion of blogsphere, and how it made him uncomfortable. Whereas blogdex has become one of the defacto arbiters of who/what is cool, the intention is not the intention.

Matthew: Mining the data... me talking about you doesn't make us a community, if you're not aware of me. But metadata and linking and indexing. It is difficult to to let you know who your community is. Strangely enough, the notion of the Livejournal.com doesn't seem to make it on the horizion. Especially the marinel.org/jouel linkage mechanism for LJ.
- Matthew noted that he too is getting blogSpam, which has been driving me crazy. That is the same as emailspam but where someone posts multiple comments to your blog, with links to viagra or porn sites.

(gak: something borked on my computer and I lost some comments I'd typed on the questions.)

Someone said: the maps and mapping of blogging are reductionist misrepresentations. Cameron (response) sees it as individual/individual.

- Take away: how has the Internet changed under the influence of blogs, in light of the commodification of the net as a business tool (after 1994) in that the opening of opportunities afforded by blogs for community and communication has so quickly been 'polluted' by spam. Does this mean that every new affordance is infected by spam as soon as it leaves the womb?

Broadening the Blog II
(~45 participants)

Well, I got through my paper, before the time was up... which is strange,since I've talked on a similar number of points in 30 minutes and

Elizabeth Lane Lawley

"Cultural Capital Dominance in the Weblog Economy" - Self-reflexive sociology of Bordieu and the cultural validation/reputation (class and power) and who controls these kinds of environments. She wants to apply Bordieu's model to the context of weblogs: field/habitus/cultural capital. I wish vera was here for this, as she's a big Bordieu fan.
http://mommamusings.net

Q: what is the cultural capital of the average blogger?
- or what is the cultCap of the bloggers we are aware of or conduct inquiry on.
Q: are not blogs self reflexive ex officio?
Q: anyone studying trash blogs. Some of us want to be beyond the horizion
Q: what about livejournal popularity contests of cheesecake photographs
- marenal.org/joule - daily friend/unfriended lists.

Q: what is a blog? handrolled? chronological series of posts?
- no comments, no pinging, no talkback, no permalinks
- just an online web based journal

Taso Lagos "Parallel Society: Weblogs, Micromedia and the Fragmentation of the Public Sphere"
- Event based expression of cultural/political action.
- Is the public sphere fragmenting, or chaotic?

Aaron Delwiche
"Reconstructing the agenda in the world of Do-It-Yourself Journalism"
- blogs lived after september 11 (Alex says), and when Trent Lot was borked for his comments via a blog (His comments on Strom Thurman's birthday, and how Strom would have created a better place if he'd become president. Twoo weeks later, Trent is toast.)
- agenda setting theory is Aaron's thing... looking at journalistically focused blogs.
- not telling people what to think, but what to think about... I never realized that this was called agenda setting theory, but it has always been what I thought that journalism was about. Of course, I'm interested in what people are not thinking about.
- but his analysis is interesting... showing how communication studies is relocalizing itself into blogging bringing in its prior conceptions of the field. Somehow individual stories are not, and will not be 'news' nor important. Their lack of cultural capital is obvious. And we're still a capitalist society, be we economic or social capitalists.

- Q: is the media setting the agenda on terrorism in blogs? or is the tool we use to see what is being blogged biasing the view of what bloggers are talking about? If 90% of the bloggers are doing an infinite number of things, and 10% are talking about what isin the media, then are we looking at blogs? or only navel-gazing at media hounds?

WHAT ABOUT THE LURKERS!!! The people reading but not actively participating in blog discourse.

Posted by jason at October 16, 2003 11:59 AM | TrackBack