Danah Boyd speaks at ETech
Want to learn how to bake a fudge marbled cake? Or do you want to hear about the interior details of the Hagia Sophia? Anything and almost everything can be found on blogs today whether that be related to skiing, cooking, traveling, etc.
Danah Boyd, who is currently a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, dives into the social status of blogs that exist today. Boyd holds a PhD from the School of Information at University of California-Berkeley. She researches how young people incorporate social media into their day-to-day lives. Boyd has studied a plethora of social media sites including Twitter, Friendster, Myspace, etc.
Blogs, according to Boyd, have been and are described in a contradictory manner. In her paper, “A Blogger’s Blog”, Boyd wishes to debunk the misconceptions people hold about blogs. Instead of attempting to extrapolate a definition of the word “blog” or “blogging”, Boyd proposes scholars to ruminate blogging as not one but a multitude of heterogeneous practices.
One of Boyd’s first goals in the paper is to convey how advertisers, researchers, and, overall, the social media are responsible for shaping the conceptualizations that exist around the idea blogs. Secondly, she wishes to relay the thought that “blogs must be conceptualized as both a medium and a bi-product of expression.”
From the time blogs were initially created up until today, the definition of a blog tends to vary with different parties. Each party goes on to manipulate the definition according to their given product.
The most explicit definitions of blogging come from the companies who built tools to support it. These definitions are devised as marketing pitches, intended to explain why people should try their service and thus the practice embedded. When they launched in October 1999, Blogger described its product as “an automated weblog publishing tool,” assuming that users had pre-existing knowledge of weblogs. Six months later, their tagline became “push button publishing” and the description of their tool changed to “Blogger offers you instant communication power by letting you post your thoughts to the web whenever the urge strikes.”
Whether it be distinct websites, dictionaries, or encyclopedias, the definitive definition of a blog changes with the context it is being used in, “indicating that no consistent definition is operating amongst researchers.” As a result, often blogs are conceptualized with diaries, such as in “Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?”. By thinking of blogs as “digitial diaries”, one is undermining the concept of a blog as well as preventing themselves from apprehending blogging.
In trying to explain the idea of a blog to a beginner, it makes sense to use metaphors to improve the understanding of the newcomer. As a result, “people consistently frame blogs in terms of diaries and journals, journalism, bookmarking, and note taking.” For example, Merriam-Webster defines blog as a “a web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.” However, the problem that arises with using metaphors is it often limits the newcomer’s ability to assess what the concept truly is. Often, the actual concept of a blog is forgotten; furthermore, metaphors like “web diary” or “amateur journalism” are not the same way to frame blogs.
The misunderstanding of blogs is evident in the social media today. According to Boyd, When national newspapers, such as the New York Times, describe blogs as “web diaries”, there is a clear bias that seems a bit condescending. To the surprise of many people, bloggers are aware that they are releasing their statements publicly. As a result of such incidents, a convoluted relationship forms between bloggers and journalists, who attempt to reduce the significance of their counterpart’s work.
According to Boyd, in order to understand blogging, it is vital to turn to the bloggers, not those who evaluate blogging. Even though metaphors can be used by bloggers, they, immediately, “try to explain the differences.” To a blogger, his or her blog gives them a sense of self because it is their online face. “It is their home and other are invited to come over…”, it is their form of expressing their thoughts and interests to others who may hold similar thoughts. Similar to how one decorates the space he or she live in, bloggers can digitally decorate and meet new people virtually. Unfortunately, the borders placed around blogs are “socially constructed.” There is no authority who says what one blogger posted is incorrect or correct.
Boyd strongly believes the problem arising with analyzing blogs “is that they are both the product of blogging and the medium through which the blogger produces their expressions…blogs are the bi-product of expression and the medium itself.” There are many different mediums that exist whether that be paper, to express feelings through writing, or language, to express feelings verbally. Boyd explains how mediums are flexible. “Mediums are partially distinguished by their format, but the format does not define the medium.” Blogs are simply not one more form of communication available for people to use today, but they are a medium through which people can communicate.