Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT Blogging Second Edition Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT Digital Media and Society Series Nancy Baym: Personal Connections in the Digital Age Jean Burgess and Joshua Green: YouTube Mark Deuze: Media Work Charles Ess: Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition Alexander Halavais: Search Engine Society Graeme Kirkpatrick: Computer Games and the Social Imaginary Martin Hand: Ubiquitous Photography Robert Hassan: The Information Society Tim Jordan: Hacking Leah A. Lievrouw: Alternative and Activist New Media Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner: Mobile Communication Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan: Digital War Reporting Dhiraj Murthy: Twitter Zizi A. Papacharissi: A Private Sphere Jill Walker Rettberg: Blogging, 2nd edition Patrik Wikström: The Music Industry, 2nd edition Blogging Second edition Jill Walker Rettberg polity Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT Copyright © Jill Walker Rettberg 2014 The right of Jill Walker Rettberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published in 2008 by Polity Press This second edition first published in 2014 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6364-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6365-4(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.25 on 13 pt FF Scala by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 What is a Blog? 5 A brief history of weblogs 6 How blogs have adapted to a social media ecosystem 14 Three blogs 17 Defining blogs 30 2 From Bards to Blogs 36 Orality and literacy 37 The introduction of print 41 Print, blogging and reading 44 Printed precedents of blogs 45 The Late Age of Print 47 A modern public sphere? 50 Hypertext and computer lib 53 Technological determinism or cultural shaping of technology? 57 3 Blogs, Communities and Networks 62 Social network theory 66 Distributed conversations 69 Technology for distributed communities 72 Facebook and Twitter as microblogs 76 Publicly articulated relationships 82 Colliding networks 83 Emerging social networks 86 v Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT vi Contents 4 Citizen Journalists? 90 Bloggers’ perception of themselves 93 When it matters whether a blogger is a journalist 94 Objectivity, authority and credibility 97 First-hand reports: blogging from a war zone 101 First-hand reports: chance witnesses 104 Bloggers as independent journalists and opinionists 107 Gatewatching 108 Symbiosis 112 5 Blogs as Narratives 115 Goal-oriented narratives 116 Ongoing and episodic narration 118 Blogs as self-exploration 127 Fictions or hoaxes? Kaycee Nicole and lonelygirl15 129 6 Blogging Brands 135 The human voice 136 Advertisements and sponsored posts on blogs 139 Micropatronage 145 Sponsored posts and pay-to-post 147 Exploitation and alienation? 152 Corporate blogs 155 Engaging bloggers 161 Corporate blogging gone wrong 164 7 The Future of Blogging 169 Implicit participation and the perils of personalized media 170 References 176 Blogs Mentioned 186 Index 189 Acknowledgements Without the constant conversations with the readers of my blog and with other bloggers, and the inspiration of reading blogs throughout the blogosphere, this book wouldn’t have existed. I love social media and am immensely grateful to those early bloggers and to the people who made the first blog- ging software, thereby opening up a new field – and to the visionaries, dabblers and practitioners who came before them. A visit to Blogger.com made me aware, back in October 2000, that anyone, even I, could easily make a blog. That opened new worlds to me. While writing this book, I had the support of my colleagues at the University of Bergen, particularly in Digital Culture, and I would like to thank everyone there for years of conversations and ideas. I also spent a month at the University of Western Australia, finishing the first edition of the book while a guest researcher at the Department of Communication Studies. Tama Leaver (of tamaleaver.net) was especially helpful during my stay in Perth, reading most of the chapters and making many valuable suggestions for additions and reorganizations. I also received useful comments from Ingeborg Kleppe at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Working on the second edition, I’ve been able to draw upon feedback from my own students and from others who have taught and read the book. Thank you for all the help you’ve given me! My editor at Polity Press for the first edition of this book, Andrea Drugan, was an inspiration and support throughout the process of writing this book, from working out the synopsis vii Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT viii Acknowledgements to finishing the manuscript. Her feedback was always rapid and helpful. I’ve also appreciated the comments I’ve received from the reviewers, which have helped me to make many improvements to the manuscript. Working on the second edi- tion, I’ve had excellent support from editors, copy-editors and proof-readers at Polity: thank you! Thank you also to Rand Corporation for permission to reprint the diagram from Paul Baran’s paper, and to Jason Kottke for permission to use a screenshot from his blog. And of course, my deeply loving thanks to my family, espe- cially to my wonderful children: my teenager whose own writing online is an inspiration to me and my two little ones born after the first edition of this book was published. First and last, thank you to my wonderful husband and colleague Scott Rettberg for suggesting great examples and discussing ideas along the way, for reading the manuscript several times and giving me very useful pointers, and for being a splendid partner in every way. JWR Introduction Fifteen years ago, the word ‘blog’ didn’t exist. Ten years later, mainstream media routinely used the word without bothering to explain it. Weblogs have become part of popular conscious- ness with a speed that is remarkable by any standard. What is this new form of communication that so suddenly entered our culture? I began blogging in October 2000, when I was working on my PhD thesis, and I’ve been blogging ever since. Like most bloggers, I learnt about blogging by doing it. Blogging is as much about reading other blogs as about writing your own, and the best way to understand blogging is to immerse your- self in it. However, blogs are also a part of a larger context. They are part of the history of communication and literacy, and emblematic of a shift from uni-directional mass media to participatory media, where viewers and readers become crea- tors of media. Blogs are also part of the history of literature and writing. A path can be traced from early autobiographical writing through diary writing and memoirs up to the confes- sional and personal diary-style blogs of today (Serfaty 2004). Blogs are part of the current changes in journalism and in marketing. They are part of the growth of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which in their turn have roots in the social network theory put forward by sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the network structure of the internet, which was designed around the same period. Blogs are founded upon the link, building connections between related issues. Blogs are themselves related to many different contexts and can be interpreted from many different 1 Grahams HD:Users:Graham:Public:GRAHAM'S IMAC JOBS:14238 - POLITY - WALKER RETTBERG:WALKER-RETTBERG 9780745663647 PRINT 2 Introduction disciplines: media studies, the history of technology, sociol- ogy, ethnology, literary studies, marketing, journalism and more. Furthermore, blogs can function as a lens with which to see how all these fields have developed up until today, and with which we can understand more about other related social media. This is the second edition of Blogging, and it is updated and revised throughout. Blogs are still blogs, five years later, but they are part of a very different ecosystem today than when the first edition of this book came out. Today, social media are mainstream. The blog indexes and search engines of the middle of the last decade have all but disappeared and instead we use Facebook, Twitter and other sites to share links to blog posts and even to discuss them.