danah boyd speaking at a conference

Are blogs a genre with expectations of form and content or are they a medium of communication or even a set of writing and reading practices?  danah boyd poses these questions in her 2006 article “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium,” published in the online journal reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture.  Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research as well as a research assistant professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.  Her main research area is the intersection between youth cultures and social/digital media.  Boyd has been blogging since 1997, several years before the word “blog” was in common usage.  In pursuing the research question of how to properly define the word, not only did she read blogs and articles on blogs but she also used the following primary research methods in order to obtain data:

Using a combination of snowballing, public advertisements on Craigslist and cold emails to random bloggers, I chose sixteen bloggers who represented many of the diverse practices I observed and heard about during my informal discussions and daily blog surfing. I interviewed each for an extended period in a formal, recorded setting. Of the sixteen subjects chosen, eight identified as male, six as female and two as transgendered. Their ages ranged from 19-57 with a mean of 29.4. All lived in major metropolitan areas, with nine located on the west coast of the United States, four on the east coast and three around London. All but one blogged in English. Twelve identified as Caucasian, three as Asian-American and one as Latino. Although teenagers blog in droves, I did not formally interview any teens due to external limitations. (para 7)

boyd contends that blogs are not a genre because it is too difficult to pin down the criteria for subject matter, style, and structure.  She also rejects the use of metaphors such as “public diaries” and “citizen journalism” to define blogs.  Rather than a distinct genre or a web version of some other genre, she views blogs as both a medium and a practice, which helps her explain why the word blog is commonly used as both a subject and a verb.  She defines a medium as “the channel through which people can communicate or extend their expressions to others. Examples of media include paper, radio, and television. In McLuhan’s terms (1964) a medium is an ‘extension of man’ that allows people to express themselves” (para 32).

I think boyd is only half right here.  A blog is not a medium in the same way paper, radio, and television are because these are distinct technologies whereas a blog is not fundamentally different in a technical sense from other types of websites such as wikis or forums.  It would be more correct to say that the World Wide Web, or perhaps even the Internet, is the medium and a blog is a particular means of using that medium.  However, I think boyd’s use of McLuhan is apt because this concept of media as extensions of the senses leads her to the most interesting section of her article where she examines the corporeality and spatiality of blogs.

boyd notes that bloggers refer to blogs in the possessive and seek a certain type of readership and feedback: “The target audience is not the public at large, but those for whom the topics of discussion matter. For most people, the idea of speaking to a constructed audience in public is not a fearful one because a conception of public does not mean all people over all time and space” (para 53).  Thus, even though the blog is accessible to the public, there is an assumption of privacy.  This assumption is not as unwarranted as it may seem; take the analogy of people sitting or walking in a public area–they have expectations of how others in the public area will behave towards them and these expectations are not unreasonable and usually prove correct. Similarly, if a group of people are having a conversation in a public square, they will often speak openly of political and personal matters even though others may overhear and even join in the conversation; they know on some level that anyone in the world might be passing by but nonetheless act as if they have a set audience for their words and will not be confronted by rivals or strangers.  boyd writes, “even in the public world of blogging, there is an understanding of a private body. By entering a public square, we do not expect to be molested; likewise, in blogging, we do not expect to be attacked simply because we are in the public. We view our bodies as private space in public, just as we view our blogs” (para 56).

Roger Ebert over the years

boyd’s comparison of public blogs to private bodies reminds me of Roger Ebert’s Journal, which is a blog for the Chicago Sun-Times.  Ebert, perhaps the most famous film critic in the history of television, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer about ten years ago and gradually lost his voice as well as his facial structure.  He stopped giving reviews on TV and began reviewing films on this blog, which became his voice and public face. He also used the blog to record episodes from his life story, something he never planned to write before his illness. The autobiographical blog entries have now been combined and published in a 2011 memoir titled Life Itself. Ebert recently received a prosthetic jaw (see top right portrait) and speaks with a synthesized voice that, unlike Stephen Hawking’s, sounds much like his own.