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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Voicing the Web: the Trajectories NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Voicing the Web: The Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Media, Technology and Society School of Communication By Ignacio Siles EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2014 ! ! 2 © Copyright by Ignacio Siles 2014 All Rights Reserved ! 3 Abstract Voicing the Web: The Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France Ignacio Siles The World Wide Web has turned into an important means to share voice, that is, the narratives through which individuals give a public account of their lives. This dissertation analyzes how this key cultural process came into being and discusses some of its main implications. To this end, it studies one specific technology of subjectivity that embodies this process in fundamental ways: the blog. This dissertation examines the processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web in two countries (the United States and France) from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. The focus is on three processes: the emergence of the blog; its constitution into a means for intervening in the public sphere and a commodity; and the identity crises triggered by the rise of novel media technologies (such as “microblogging”) designed to replace or extend it. A theoretical framework is developed that makes four analytic contributions: (a) it considers media technologies as assemblages of both textual meaning and material artifacts; (b) it analyzes both the production and use of media technologies; (c) it adopts a process-orientation to make sense of the temporal development of the Web; and (d) it implements a comparative approach to identify the similarities and differences between the cases under study. Drawing on interviews with key actors, content and artifact analyses of websites, traditional archival research, and online archival research, this dissertation examines how users and software developers have enacted particular notions of the self, conceived the publicness of their Web appropriation and development practices, and built and utilized media technologies such as websites and software programs to these ends. The analysis reveals that the cultural ! 4 identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these two countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. In the United States, particular liberal notions and neoliberal assumptions have informed the imaginary surrounding blogs in crucial ways. The study also shows how and why actors in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country’s national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead.!! ! 5 Acknowledgements Since 2008, I have been a happy member of the Media, Technology and Society (MTS) program. This program has provided an extraordinary intellectual community without which this project could not have come to fruition. My dissertation committee has been crucial for my intellectual development over the past years. I could not think of a better mentor to navigate the waters of academia than Pablo Boczkowski, chair of my dissertation committee. He went beyond the call of duty and pushed my thinking with his rigor and originality. In the process, he offered me a friendship for which I will always be grateful. I thank him for believing in me since the very first day and for showing me the means to become a researcher. I will always value our conversations about the greatness of academic research, soccer, and cinema as one of the highlights of my time at Nortwhestern. My other two advisors provided a perfect blend of guidance and inspiration. Ken Alder taught me everything I know about the history of science and technology. With his unique capacity for identifying “germs of ideas,” he showed me how to pursue difficult questions and challenged me to develop them. Jan Radway introduced me to cultural analysis and generously offered her sharp insights on numerous drafts of each phase of this project. A master of the craft, she also provided me with valuable practical tips to conduct research and resolve problems I encountered in the field. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to learn from these extraordinary mentors. I would also like to thank my professors in the MTS program, particularly Eszter Hargittai, Jennifer Light, and James Webster, for helping me turn early ideas and interests into ! 6 concrete research questions. For their friendship and support, I thank my fellow graduate students: Will Barley, Alan Clark, Lindsay Fullerton, Katie Day Good, Yu-li Patrick Hsieh, Nicole Joseph, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Jesse Nasta, Rachel Plotnick, Aditi Raghavan, Harsh Taneja, and Xiao Angela Wu. As part of the fieldwork I conducted for this project, I spent the 2011-2012 academic year in Paris, hosted by the Médialab at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). I want to thank the Paris Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern University for making this research trip possible. In Paris, I was very fortunate to meet with many researchers and collaborators whose assistance and friendship was invaluable for conducting my research: Karen Bastien, Valérie Beaudouin, Jean-Sebastien Beauscart, Dominique Boullier, Dominique Cardon, Eric Dagiral, Jérôme Denis, Remi Douine, Patrice Flichy, Guilhem Fouetillou, Alexandre Hocquet, Benoit Lelong, Camille Paloque-Bergès, Sylvain Parasie,!Ashveen Peerbaye, David Pontille, Serge Proulx, Franck Rebillard, Chloë Salles, Valérie Schafer, and Viviane Serfaty. They shared relevant information, discussed valuable ideas with me, helped me find potential interviewees, and invited me to present my research findings on several occasions. This dissertation would not have been possible without the people who gave me their time to share their experiences and talk for hours about the use and development of the Web as a technology of subjectivity. Borrowing a phrase from my former advisor Thierry Bardini that applies neatly to this project, I hope you find your voice in these pages. I also thank Thierry for speaking to me about blogs for the first time while I was a student at the Université de Montréal and for introducing me to the literature in science and technology studies. ! 7 This project benefitted greatly from comments by participants at the MTS’s brown bag seminar, the Science in Human Culture program’s doctoral colloquium, meetings of the American Sociological Association, International Communication Association, National Communication Association, Society for the History of Technology, and Society for Social Studies of Science, and seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Institut des Sciences de la Communication (ISCC) du CNRS, the Sciences Sociales du Web (W2S) seminar organized by!La Cantine and Orange Labs, Télécom Paris-Tech, and Université Paris- Est Marne-la-Vallée. The Fulbright-LASPAU scholarship program helped me in the process of applying to Northwestern University and provided economic support. I also thank Northwestern University’s Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, The Graduate School, School of Communication, and Science in Human Culture program, for their assistance and financial support. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my family for their love and encouragement. I thank my parents, Berman and Yamileth. They were and remain my greatest teachers and biggest source of inspiration. I also thank my sisters, Mariana and Marcia, for standing by me through both the happiest and the most difficult times. My daughter Lea, mi pequeño todo, arrived in this world while I was writing this project. I thank her for revealing to me a new kind of happiness and strength. My wife, best friend, and partner in crime, Tania, has done more for this project than I could find words to express. I will be eternally grateful for her love. I dedicate to her this dissertation and everything that I am. ! 8 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... 5 Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter 1. Voices of the Web ..................................................................................................... 9 Why Blogging? ............................................................................................................................. 12 A French-American Comparison .................................................................................................. 14 Conceptual Grounds: Theorizing “Registers of Voice” ................................................................ 19 Analyzing the Voices of the Web ................................................................................................. 24 How the Research Was Done ....................................................................................................... 29 Three Registers of Voice: An Overview of the Dissertation ........................................................ 30 Chapter 2. From Private to Public: The Emergence and Stabilization of the Blog ............. 35 Blogs and The Early Web Ecology in the United States .............................................................
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