Social media and personal blogging: Textures, routes and patterns

Abstract

Weblogging (or blogging) is one the social media, characteristic of the web 2.0 generation. In this article, I will present a research on the Danish blogosphere, the focus of which has been on individual and personal blogging. Inspired by media geography, I pursue the idea that personal blogging can be understood as an embodied, collaborative and distributed practice which constitutes a digital realm to be inhabited by its users. Within media geography, the concept of “textures”, taken form Henri Lefevbre and the sociology of everyday life, designates how the self, the everyday and the mundane are spun together and mark out different cultural-material routes in and between space and place, real and virtual and in so doing create different reticular patterns of the commonplace (Falkheimer & Jansson, 2006; Jansson, 2002, 2008). By means of the concepts of textures, routes and patterns, I identify four different genres in personal blogging to be illustrated by four examples from the Danish blog community.