Blogging & Voyeurism

I have a story I tell about how my dissertation developed.  Way back when in 2002 I was thinking about blogs as identity tools.  When I told people about the project, I noticed a HUGE generational split; people over the age of 40 thought that bloggers were exhibitionists and blog readers were voyeurs, while people under the age of about 25 were very nonchalant about the practice.  (Obviously I’m generalizing; I know bloggers who are over 40 and I know people who are part of the “internet generation” who adamantly will not blog and will not read personal blogs.)  It was this generational split that led me to begin looking at my actual topic, how bloggers are negotiating the public/private distinction.

I was recently reading Carolyn Miller & Dawn Shepherd’s 2004 article “Blogging as Social Action” and came across a very relevant quote addressing this question of voyeurism.

“…voyeurism more generally strikes us as an unseemly interest in others as curiosities, not as moral equals…”

This brought me back to that very early thinking and I started wondering about WHY bloggers and blog readers don’t generally seem to be exhibitionists/voyeurs.  I think the difference really lies in the “moral equals” angle - bloggers view each other more or less as equals, so there’s no possibility of their reading being a voyeuristic activity.  Obviously there may be exceptions to this, but fundamentally I think bloggers and blog readers view their relationships as one of equals rather than one of unequal power.

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“Weak” communities, ha!

I have a lot of other stuff I want to post about, but I have a great story to illustrate the strength of online communities.

I’m a moderator of a support-related listserv; last night one of our members found herself in all alone and in a very tough situation.  And within a couple of hours of her posting, one of the other members of our list, who happens to live in the same area, was with her so she didn’t have to be all alone.

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Examining my own prejudices…

As I’m weeding through my survey data and thinking about which participants to recruit for the ethnographic phase of the project, I find that I have to examine some of my own assumptions.  I’m sorting blogs into three categories: “large public” (large, probably fairly heterogeneous/unknown readership), “small public” (smaller, not entirely known readership), and “private” (folks who are using access controls and know exactly who their readership is - Friends Locked LJs, for example).  And as I page through them, I find myself having to combat the assumption that LJs and blogs hosted at a commercial site (rather than having their own URL) are more likely to fall into the “small public” or “private” categories and, conversely, that those that aren’t blogging-service hosted are more likely to fall inot the “large public” category.

Dissertation by correspondence, with occasional F2F

I was back in WMass for a couple of days in order to meet with Bob.  Very good, very productive meeting and I have a good plan in place to move forward with the next phase of the project.

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Oh, rats…

I missed my first chance to be a talking head in the newspaper!  The tech report for the Buffalo News called Canisius looking for someone to talk to about flash mobs and social technologies and they ended up directed to me.  Unfortunately, the stuff that he’s writing the article about is happening on Saturday, when I won’t be available to chat with him.  :^(

Dragging on…

The problem with a project that has been percolating in my mind for FIVE DAMN YEARS (and perhaps a quirk of my own personality as well) is that I have been through about a MILLION organizational schemes for it.  I have kept lists of thoughts in Word, in VoodoPad, in OmniOutliner.  I have taken notes on readings in one document or in multiple documents.  I have annotated lists of sources in Word (why?  I was using EndNote before the project started…).  It’s a mess.

Academically Star-Struck

A while back I contacted one of the major theorists upon whose work I’m basing my dissertation to request the text of a keynote speech he had given.  He wrote back quite quickly and promised the book chapter that the speech was based on (still in manuscript form) soon.  We bounced e-mails back and forth a bit and I hadn’t thought much about it in probably a month.  Got another e-mail from him yesterday saying he didn’t want to keep me waiting and included not only the text of the chapter we had discussed previously but also drafts of numerous other things he’s working on, and welcomes my comments, corrections, and suggestions on them all.

WELCOMES MY SUGGESTIONS!  As if!  (OK, probably he’s just being polite - but he certainly didn’t have to do a core dump of work-in-progress on me!)  Though, as Trine points out, perhaps I’ll know I’m ready to submit when I am finding holes in his work.

You’d think they would know better…

As I was working on a fellowship application, it occurred to me that an agency offering dissertation fellowships ought to know that a graduate student’s work history I don’t think that I’m alone in this… If we go CHRONOLOGICALLY, my work history since starting grad school goes like this:

• AY1999-2000: TA
• Summer 2000: Departmental Lackey / Con Ed Instructor
• AY 2000-2001: TA
  • (Winter 2001: Con Ed Instructor)
• Summer 2001: Con Ed Instructor
• Fall 2001: TA
• Spring 2002: Teaching Associate
• Summer 2002: Con Ed Instructor
• AY 2002-2003: TA
• Summer 2003 & AY 2003-2004: Rose Fellow
• Summer 2004: Temp (I don’t even put this in my employment history)
• Fall 2004: Medical Leave/Departmental Lackey
• Spring 2005: Teaching Associate
• Fall 2005: Unemployed
• Spring & Summer 2006; Summer & Fall 2007:  Adjunct Prof.

I’m not alone in this, am I? I can’t be… And so ordering my employment by position and then wanting simple dates is just a major pain in the rear.

And let’s not get into applications that break out employment and teaching, and whose applications don’t make any sense for those of us who are in adjunct hell.  Ah well… the application is done & there ain’t anything that can be done about it now.

How much does it cost to do research?

I’m in the process of applying for a dissertation fellowship… for which I have to itemize my research costs.  So far I’ve got:

• Continuing enrollment fees for 1 year
• SurveyMonkey hosting for 1 year
• Childcare for 1 year
• Internet access for 1 year
• SkypePro for 1 year
• Travel to BlogHer to do interviews
• Parallels and qualitative analysis software

Am I forgetting anything?

Bumping up my numbers…

My survey has been in the field for several months now (four and a bit, to be precise).  At the moment, I’m sitting at a very lopsided response rate in terms of the blogging service that my respondents are using - we’re talking 75% LiveJournal users, 7% Blogger/Blogspot users, 5% WordPress users, 3.2% “other” users (which includes a lot of people who use multiple services, and many of them reference LJ in their comments), and 2ish% Xanga, WordPress.com, MovableType/Typepad, and MySpace users.

So… if you have suggestions for how to bump up participation from other services, I’d love to hear them; I am not above spamming all sorts of places to get more responses.  And if you’re a blogger using another service, I’d love to hear from you!

For those who are curious about more numbers, 1460 people have begun the survey and 808 have completed it (and my committee was concerned about me having a big enough n!) for a 55.3% response rate so far.  I need to figure out what exactly SurveyMonkey considers “completed”, though, because on the order of 890 people have answered the closing questions on the last page of the survey.  (In any case, I feel save in saying that 800 < n > 900.)