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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Verbing Web 2.0

I was chatting with Jeremy this morning and we were talking about the verbs associated with Web 2.0.  Well, really, I was thinking aloud and he was being skeptical.  I wondered if it’s more proper to say you “tweeted” something or “twittered” it.  This is of course related to the canonical Google:  “Go google it.”

Twitter:  tweet, or twitter (?). “I just twittered it.”
Flickr: Flickr.  “I’ll Flickr that picture for you later.”
Blogs: Blog
Digg: digg
reddit: ??
del.icio.us:  ??
YouTube: ??

What others can we add to this list?  Or is it just another example of my own linguistic idiosyncracies?

Experience or share?

Ariel wonders…

Has blogging made it so that for me, the joy isn’t in having experiences, but in sharing them? If so, that’s sort of fucked up.

I’m not sure that it is weird to enjoy sharing experiences… I mean, there is something to be said for solitary enjoyment, but it’s also lovely to recount things, to fix them in memory, to impart some of the enjoyment of the experience to others in the re-telling.

The dangers of clipping

I’ve been using ClipMarks (my clips here) to excerpt & link webpages on my various blogs for a little while.  This past week, I ran up against some unintended effects of this practice of excerpting.  I had posted a clip of a UK Guardian piece about having kids vs. remaining child free to my LiveJournal.  In selecting the parts of the piece to clip, I was very careful to be even-handed in the excerpts (I made sure to include parts where the author is addressing the merits/drawback of both choices).  And yet, many of my readers reacted very strongly (and negatively) based just on the excerpts.  (I ultimately clarified my motivations for posting the excerpt and explained why I had found it interesting here.)

What caused the strong reactions?  (Besides the fact that it is a very polarizing issue upon which I have friends who are strongly on both sides.)  Was it a lack of familiarity with the technology?  Or did I run up against an interesting by-product of these excerpting-and-reposting technologies - namely, the ability to (in this case, unwittingly) change the meaning of another person’s writing Clearly my readers’ perceptions of the article were shaped by the portions that I chose to include in my repost.

What are the dangers of these technologies?  What are the advantages?  How are they changing the meaning of authorship?

Moving right along…

No, not with my dissertation.  I’m actually referring to Internet Studies more generally.  When I was at OII SDP (Summer 2004), one of the topics that came up time and time again was the quesiton if Internet Studies as a “legitimate discipline” - along with questions of what makes a discipline, whether or not we even care, etc.

I would argue that if we want Internet Studies to be recognized as a “legitimate discipline” we simply have GOT to move beyond the descriptive.  For years, I would to go AoIR and to CITASA sessions at the ASAs and most of the work would be descriptive - little to no analysis, next to nothing about how the argument could be extended beyond the Internet.  I have been forced by a skeptical advisor to make these connections all along, so perhaps I’m more sensitive to it than others.  That said…

We  have got to move beyond the descriptive if we want to be taken seriously as an academic field.