Imagining the Blogosphere:
An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing
blog.lib.umn.edu
by Graham Lampa, Hamline University
quotes:
“The Blogging Iceberg,” a survey conducted by the Perseus Development Company (2003), found that two thirds of public weblogs created via centralized hosting services have not been updated in two months and are considered “abandoned.” Furthermore, 1.09 million of these have been deemed “one-day wonders”—blogs that were posted to just once and have not been touched since. The remainder of the abandoned blogs averaged a lifespan of just four months. Of the 1.4 million active blogs surveyed, 80.8% contained at least one external link, yet only 9.9% contained a current link to a traditional news source. Taking this data, Perseus concluded that the blogosphere takes on the form of an iceberg whose vast bulk floats out of sight and out of mind. Blogs above the waterline—those which are frequently updated, widely read, and consistently linked—may represent the conception of blogs in the public mind, but they are not representative of blogs in general. They instead found that the "typical blog" is written by "a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life." These blogs have "nanoaudiences" comprised of a blogger's friends and family. They are rarely linked to by other blogs, and they more closely resemble personal diaries rather than the classic link-commentary mode of blogging.
For those making a case for the blogosphere as a community, the results of the Perseus study are anything but encouraging. How can a community be said to exist among individuals, the vast majority of whom have never met one another and do not communicate with one another? The easy answer is to declare that the blogging community does not exist, that the blogosphere is not a cohesive group of people who share common goals and values. This answer, however, does not account for the widespread notion of the transnational blogging community or for the persistence of the blogger identity. A clearer answer to the community conundrum lies somewhere between the hype of a new and revolutionary online community and the sobering statistical reality of the Perseus study. In the absence of strong interpersonal links among members of the blogosphere, an alternative explanation for the persistence of community is needed. At the core of the blogosphere lies a minority of active and engaged bloggers who post, comment, and link frequently, creating a kernel of conversational community based on personal networks facilitated by blogging tools and associated technologies. However, for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing.
In the case of the blogosphere, the sense of community is coaxed into existence within the minds of its members in a style that stems from the instant publishing medium itself to create a discursive, transnational, online imagined community.
..the economy of the blogosphere is driven by the free dissemination of texts produced by unpaid amateurs. This distinction between the not-for-profit gift economy of the blogosphere and the market economy of the traditional press has been cited by press critic Jay Rosen (2003) as the number one indication that weblog-based journalism represents a substantial shift from the status quo.
The form of journalism found in the blogosphere has the potential to pull power away from the dominant one-way communication of formal and professional print and broadcast journalism to a decentralized realm of individual publishers who not only consume texts but also produce texts that are circulated, reproduced, and consumed by others. The blogosphere forms an imagined community based on a new form of amateurized and personalized journalism practiced by persons who may never meet one another yet can engage in conversation and share a common identity. This journalism can be considered personal because the output of a singular blog is closely linked with the personality of its author. Because it is generally understood that a blog directly represents the intent of the person who produces it, a blog empowers the writer with greater freedom to provide colorful, subjective, and political commentary than would be possible within the framework of a traditional media outlet, which has an economic interest in maintaining a sense of detached objectivity.
By facilitating the entrance of laypersons into online discussions regarding national and international events, issues, and ideas, the process of blogging has a democratizing effect that can evoke feelings of shared experience.
Because of the nature of hypertext and the web, bloggers have the ability to provide their readers with one-click access to the information upon which they are basing their opinion and analysis of a given issue. On this point, blogging clearly has the upper hand on print and broadcast journalism. For forming community, hyperlinks become essential for creating the central core of the blogosphere. Bloggers have the ability to publicly debate issues back and forth by directly linking to one another’s posts as well as news articles that may serve as source material.
At its most developed point, the so-called link-commentary style of blogging becomes conversational, with the emergent web of connections growing denser with each additional post.
A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that only about 10% of American bloggers update their sites daily and 60% update their blogs 1-2 times per week or less (Lenhart, Horrigan, & Fallows, 2004). These results indicate that the perception of blogging as a rapid-fire back-and-forth exchange actually only describes a very small minority of the blogosphere, which itself only comprises about 2-7% of the entire Internet population. With this new data, a clear separation can be seen in the blogosphere between an active, highly social core and a large periphery that is disengaged from that core.
With so many people being able to publish so much content for such little investment, filtering is essential for individuals wanting to make sense of the decentralized jumble of blogs. Because there are so many thousands of diarist bloggers within the blogosphere, filters must act to promote stories and posts that represent the more common interest of the larger community. While a diarist’s account of her Friday night activities may be of interest to her friends, it is most likely not relevant to the other hundreds of thousands of bloggers the world over. . . . The blogosphere filters content more collaboratively and without the same profit motive of print-capitalism, making it more open to outside voices and dissenting views. The critical difference between the front-page stories of newspapers and the top-rated stories on blog indices is that in the blogosphere, there exists no editorial board with centralized authority to decide what constitutes news for the greater community—the community itself decides (with the help of mathematical algorithms and a bit of clever programming). Free of many of the constraints of Anderson's print capitalism, the blogosphere filters content more democratically than national media outlets and indeed forms its own unique mediascape, to borrow a helpful and illustrative term from Arjun Appadurai (1996). Instead of deciding what will be most profitable to promote, the blogosphere promotes what its members find to be most interesting by means of both human and automated processes. This filtering occurs on the micro level through the work of individual bloggers who point to posts and news articles they find interesting; it also works on the macro level through aggregate blog indices like Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop, and Popdex. The aggregated filtering that occurs in the blogging community is based both on the perceived value of each discrete bit of information (an individual blog post) and the authority and exposure of the author (quantified by accumulated inbound links) within the community (Sifry, 2003b; MIT, 2003). Small-scale filtering engages bloggers with their readers and other community members; by pointing one’s audience to other sites (both traditional media outlets and other blogs) via hyperlink, a blogger simultaneously strengthens the ties that bind the core of the blogosphere and also reinforces this dominant theme within the community. Large-scale filtering in the form of news aggregation serves a purpose more akin to traditional national print journalism—providing community members with a shared set of world events and issues that further allows individual bloggers to imagine themselves as part of a greater whole. While most diarist or small-audience blogs are left out of these types of rankings, at least one person has taken it upon himself to rework his indexing engine to be more favorable to newcomers. David Sifry of Technorati produced a new index on his site that reverses Shirky’s power law to make it work in favor of the under-linked, providing greater exposure to lesser-known bloggers (Sifry, 2003a).
The low-cost appeal of instant publishing promotes a democratic feeling that permeates the blogosphere, but when one critically considers global Internet access and usage, it is clear that the community represents a relatively small number of global elites who have the luxury of time, talent, and expendable wealth. In this way the blogosphere parallels ancient Athens, with a system of enlightened democracy that was nonetheless restricted to the wealthy few. While there are no formal mechanisms barring entry into the blogosphere, the mere luxury of Internet access remains out of reach for the vast majority of global citizens. . . . Adding to this global digital divide is the dominance of English on the Internet, which is reflected in the blogosphere as well; English-language blogs outnumber all other blogs three to one (NITLE, 2003). The promising response to Blogger’s introduction of a Portuguese version of its software for users in Brazil (Rebêlo, 2002) demonstrates that there exists a demand for instant publishing in non-English contexts. Through these tailored blogging portals, tens of thousands of Brazilians have entered the blogosphere and have made Portuguese second only to English in its share of blogdom (NITLE, 2003). |
