Vancouver, AoIR 8.0

So I have finally arrived in Vancouver. The AoIR conference starts tomorrow for me. I will be presenting on the final day at a panel on the methods of blog research. Here is the abstract:

Weblogs, more commonly referred to as blogs, are a communication tools that is used by online media-based communities. Blogging has recently been established as a genre in the global ecology of the internet (Herring et al., 2005; Blood, 2002). The inherently public nature of a blogs encourages a response from anyone who feels knowledgeable about the subject under discussion. Recent advances in networking technology have provided the blogging capabilities in social networking sites, such as, Myspace or Facebook. The launch of Myspace in 2003 captured the public’s attention and attracted millions of users in the UK. Research into the nature of blogging has also grown exponentially over the last few years, showing that blogging has the ability to transcend through various niches of social life, including scholarly and political issues (Glenn, 2003). In this paper, blogs are seen as an everyday tool in the construction of dynamic social relationships in online communities. The use of a discursive methodology is presented as an opportunity to access the social practices that are exchanged in online interaction.

Research into blogging is characterised by a breadth of methodological variation. Most recently, Social Network Analysis (SNA) is interested in converting a wide variety of rich data into a statistical measure of idiosyncratic characteristics. In comparison, our argument qualitatively searches for the conversational devices used in blogs and attempts to interpolate rising techniques in discourse analysis (DA). The paper demonstrates what a discursive methodology can offer to the study of blogging and we argue that it can provide a deeper insight into the performance of language in the chosen social network – Myspace.

Blogging in Myspace typically consist of a diverse mixture of text-based interaction that utilises personal information, images and miscellaneous text. The blog feature occupies a prominent position on the individuals profile and fits a template that is consistent amongst all profiles. Blogging in social networking sites is commonly disregarded in academic research in favour of blog sites that are typically reserved for blogging alone (filter blogs, academic blogs etc.). In this context, the blogging resource is found under different ‘rules of engagement’ due to the nature of Myspace (i.e. privacy controls, higher possibility of a fictional blogger identity), but the blogs are similar to the ‘traditional’ blogs found elsewhere in structure and content. The analysis represents the ability to use a discursive methodology to understanding the dynamic, social organisation of the blogging in Myspace. This study is linked to broader discursive psychology’s concerns of memory, technology and organisation.

Key Words
Blogging · Discursive psychology · Methods · Multimedia · Myspace