Reflections on Blogging

Weblogs as a communication medium
Since my introduction to weblogs in March, I have moved through the initial scepticism, then fascination, then to considering how they could be incorporated into everyday life and work.

At first I had difficulty with the concept. Despite my previous study and having been online for some time, I had not encountered blogs before. I immediately linked them to the closest idea in my mind – paper journals. Now I realise blogs and paper journals have things in common, but to think of a blog as an online journal is to seriously underestimate its purpose and potential.

I think a journal is essentially private, a place to record you thoughts. A blog is to share your thoughts. I know that sounds obvious, but its an important psychological shift for me. You see, at first the idea of blogs scared me a bit because I thought of putting my journal online and I didn't like the idea. Now I see blogs as a communication medium and I see them differently. In my journal I write things I want to think about , but not necessarily share, in a blog, I would only write things I wanted to share. I think Howard Rheingold makes a valid point in The Virtual Community when he says "there's a theatrical element to this medium - written conversation as a performing art." (1994, p.61).

Across distance, I think blogs are great, as discussed in a previous post, I have started one to let an overseas friend know the exceedingly boring events of my daily life.

I also agree with classmate Michelle Manners that blogging for this subject has been more interesting that a paper journal, which I have had to keep for other classes.

a public forum for ideas
I see potential for blogs in my workplace. Because they're on the web, anyone with Internet access can see them. I could use it to show progress on projects to all the people involved, post all the necessary documents and let people make comments.

I see potential socially as I have mentioned above. Sometimes I feel a little concerned about both surveillance and the fact that anybody can read your blog. It's a little paranoid I know, which is funny, because it's not that I'm not a publicly online person. My details are available online in the context of my work – someone could easily track me down if they wanted to. But in the context of work, that's the idea.

weblog vs traditional journal
I just think there's something mysterious about a written journal. It's a mysterious part of a person and putting it up for the world to see takes some of that mystery away. Besides, my paper journal is a beautiful Italian leather one.

Portability an issue when it comes to journalling. I know my blog is on the web and I can access it from anywhere – but really, I can't. I don't have a computer everywhere I go. Sometimes I carry my paper journal in my bag and write in it while I'm waiting for the bus. Sometimes you just want to write down your thoughts for your own benefit, not to have a permanent public record. Here's a funny thing though, I think you're more likely to re-read your own blog than your paper journal.

A big difference between paper and online for me is the picture ability. On the flip side, sometimes I put stickers or momentos in my journal – can't do that online.

Comparing blogs
As I have already mentioned in a previous post about blogs, there are some angry, angry people out there. Most of the ones I have stumbled across during this semester have been pretty banal (except the ones from this class of course :).

I can see a future in this blogging thing

I think there are uses for this blogging idea, even though a lot of the blogs I have seen on blogspot are by angry, angry people. I have not come across many that seem to be long term projects - that doesn't mean they're not there of course. I came across a couple of interesting ones made by a couple of boys at an unnamed Sydney school. There seems to have been an incident at the school and tempers flared. Two boys have created blogs in response to the situation:
http://lordsaddler.blogspot.com/
http://mindlesspeons.blogspot.com/
They're a bit juvenile, but they do demonstrate the extension of real life communities into virtual life. They have effectively created a space outside the confines of their school (meaning they don't have to conform to standards, as evidenced by the language) where thay can talk about the incident and give their response. The responses they received offline have made an appearance online as well, with some unflattering comments left.

Anyway, I have started another personal blog to my friend Annie who is living on the other side of the world for a time. I think it will be a great way to connect her into everyday life here at home, the way she would be if we were close by. Although we are able to talk on the phone, it isn't as frequent as we would normally and so you forget things. It's also hard sometimes to sit and write an email about everything that's been happening for weeks, as I discovered when overseas myself. As I said, the aim of my blog is to give her a feeling of everyday life at home. It is called Dear Annie: http://www.dearannieg.blogspot.com/.

opposing views

I think the clearest thing I have discovered in all my reading this semester is that there are a lot of opposing views surrounding virtual cultures and virtual communities. There are the enthusiastic Howard Rheingolds, with plenty of positive experience on the Internet and then his "opponents" like Sardar who talk about "the external racism of Western society is echoed in cyberspace as online monoculture." (p.744). Pretty strong words. Then you've got authors who are actually (I think) quite vicious towards others. Like Robins and Webster who talk about Cristina Odone spinning out political visions in her imagination like "candy floss" and "Odone says concisely what the techno-futurist Howard Rheingold can only say in a fat book, full of similar communitarian aspirations" (p.230). Come on guys, it's okay to disagree with the ideas, but your comments are a bit strong don't you think?

This is all "generation 2" cyberculture studies - the backlash against "generation 1" boosterism. I find I get a much more balanced approach from the likes of Terry Flew - a 3rd generation approach that examines both sides of the argument.

Robins, K. & Webster, F. 1999. Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life.
Sadar, Z. 2000. Alt.Civilizations.FAQ: Cyberspace as the Darker side of the West. In The Cybercultures Reader. ed. Bell, D. & Kennedy, B. (pp. 732-752).
Flew, T. 2004. New Media: An Introduction.

My brain hurts - can I go home?

"The problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time immersed in the information flow, is that there is too much information available and few effective filters for sifting the key data that are useful and interesting to us as individuals." - Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, 1994, p.57.

I, like many others I'm sure, cannot always find the information I am looking for on the web. I find the public sphere of the web is very good at trivia. You can easily find all sorts of bits of interesting information. Academic information requires networks or communities. I need to belong to the library to access databases of journal articles. I find the work Intranet very valuable to find all sorts of information I need to do my job - this is a way of using the physical network as a tool to make work more efficient and effective.

This is how weblogs started - to categorize the mountains of information and sift the useful from the useless. Having not been on the net in the early days I missed the original blogs and came in during the time of the portal. Then web applications started having dashboards (like blogger) does. All ways of gathering useful functions and information.

Talking about information overload, a few weeks ago, there was a problem with my email at work and in resolving it all my emails came into my inbox instead of their respective folders and filters. I had over 3000 emails to sift back into their files.

I found someone to talk to!

It's very exciting, I found someone to talk to in the LambdaMOO. After being intrigued by the article I read I have been wandering around the Lambda House hoping to find people to talk to. I could never find anyone even though the statistics said there were over one hundred people logged on.

After roaming the halls for days, last night when I went into the living room there was actually someone in there who smiled at me. You know, I am quite amazed that the Lambda House is so interesting and that I was excited to find someone because I don't play computer games and I am not really involved in any online communities.

The person I spoke to had been a member for over 10 years - wow. They said people didn't hang out in the living room much any more because of the abusive players and guests, which is what the article implied. My new friend said I could page them next time I am in the house.

The projection of geographical communities into cyberspace

Sanderson and Fortin talk about the Internet being a new form of public space "one which is at the same time interpersonal (for example, e-mail) and mediated (web pages). It is a communication space which allows new relationships between self, physical space and others." They looking at the representation of geographic communities in cyberspace, the most obvious difference being that "a municipality can have only one geographic site but it may exhibit multiple 'personalities' when it enters into cyberspace' (p 190).

They go on to talk about how there are studies about online communities which focus on personal and cultural charatceristic such as sex, age, tastes and lifestyle, but there is not much study about connections with place and local social organisations - web sites relevant to people in a certain locality, but not necessarily to those from elsewhere (p 190).

Again in this chapter is the recurring theme I have found of "realness" online. They talk about the devices web designers employ to convey a sense of realness on web sites, including photos of places, groups or events and spaces for individuals to identify themselves. In talking about representation online, they also caution that beacuse web sites can be produced by people with relatively modest means, "A presence in cyberspace is not necessarily an indicator of geographic size or political importance (p 197).

The final interesting point I got from this reading was the opportunity for protecting languages and cultures online. Sanderson and Fortin explore how geographic space was the natural protector of languages and cultures but the opportunity to move online allow both the sharing and preservation of cultures. Miller and Slater found this in their ethnographic study of the use of the Internet in Trinidad. They talk about how the society brings elements of what it means to be "Trini" omline with them.

Because place and geographic community is one of the defining elements of identity, Sanderson and Fortin assert that the absence of this information (people in onine environments) will introduce social and comunication ambiguities (p 202). They believe "We will surely witness new structures appearing on the Web which are at the intersecton of the persistence of place-based social structures and identities, and the desire to create new relationships and identities" (p203).

D Sanderson and A Fortin (2001) Technospaces (edited by Sally R. Munt) - Chapter 12
Continuum: London and New York.

The LambdaMOO

After that intriguing article from my last post, I have been into the LambdaMOO for a look around. LambdaMOO is a text-based community so there are no fancy graphics or anything like Sal Humphreys showed us from the Star Wars Galaxy. It seems a lot to me like reading a book, as you enter a room you get a description of what and who are in it. I haven't found any people yet, but plenty of things. I went for a swim in the disgusting pool which has, among other things, a corpse floating in it.

I have climbed up onto the roof and been out the front of the house where the street leads down to the shops. My favourite place so far is when you look in the mirror in the entrance hall you can slip through it into the Looking Glass Tavern Bar, It's very cool, but there's never anyone in there. Upstairs in the Tavern are rooms for rent. There is a directory where you can see who occupies them and go in and visit. I couldn't find anyone in there either.

I like the text based idea, I find it very imaginative. There are objects people have made that you can look at and they do things. You can read signs and posters and look at books and stuff. It just goes on forever. The point of it is community though, so I will be very frustrated if I can't find anyone. I think I am probably in a different timezone to a lot of the people. That is an interesting point I must put in my assignment: you may have the opportunity to interact with people around the world in real time - only it's a different time if you're on the other side of the world!

A Rape in Cyberspace

Well, that's a title that gets your attention, isn't it. It certainly got mine. It's a chapter in the book Reading Digital Culture edited by David Trend. It can also be found online at Julian Dibbell's website (he's the author).

The article is about an online community called the LambdaMOO, a text-based community that meet in a place called the Lambda House. As I have decided to look the difference between online and offline communities for my assignment, this article was extremely pertinant. It talks about how the virtual representation of the crime affected the members of the community both in their virtual world and in their physical ones. For example, Dibbell writes "Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face - a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting."

A member of the community. Mr Bungle, entered the living room where a number of people were chatting and used a "voodoo doll," a subprogram which can be used to attribute "actions to other characters that their users did not actually write," to force two of the female characters to perform sexual acts over which they had no control while he laughed evilly in the background. After the attack there was much discussion about a fitting punishment wich ended in My Bungle's being toaded, which means his character was erased.

Dibbell says of MUDS "what happens inside a MUDmade world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-beleive, but profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally meaningful."

Rebecca Blood in her book The Weblog Handbook repeatedly emphasises the need to exercise etiquette just as you would in real life and cautions against flaming and other bad behaviour. There are real life consequences to online behaviour which need to be considered. It demonstrates how the move to third generation Internet studies is a timely one, addressing the melding of online and offline worlds rather than viewing them as mutually exclusive entities.