Blogging Practices Research Articles

Making a Home, Keeping God Close

Abstract In Evangelical Christian communities, the responsibility for maintaining the home is taken up primarily by women (Bartkowski, 1999; Gallagher & Smith, 1999). The discursive construction of the home as a sacred space free from toxic influences emerged during the Cold War, when the global turmoil seemed to demand the delineation of a matriarchal safe space (Shively, 2017; Neumann, 2019; Anagnost 2013). More recently, restrictions concerning covid-19 have initiated a further shift from the public to the private sphere. Women who were accustomed to conducting housework while their husbands were at work have abruptly come to the foreground as life primarily took place at home. This article explores the intersection of daily activities with religious beliefs as reflected in the practice of blogging. Central to this study is the assumption that ordinary, daily activities provide a unique lens into the way people ‘in the pews’ live their lives.

All the science that is fit to blog: An analysis of science blogging practices

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Mundane citizenship on the move: A counter-public response to inbound shopping tourism via mobile social media applications use

Using digital ethnography to examine the daily mobile (micro)blogging (moblogging) practices of local residents as they confronted a wave of inbound shopping tourists in pre-Covid-19 pandemic Hong Kong, this article explores how the latest mode of mundane citizenship emerges from the communicative mobility of urban dwellers equipped with mobile phones and social media applications (apps). Recent research on the role of mobile devices and social media apps in citizen participation has focused on more visible forms of civic–political events, such as protests and voting, and tended to neglect the effects of mobile communication performed during banal travel and quotidian activities. This article offers an alternative reading of the relevance of mobile social media (MSM) in contemporary public lives by examining how they open up new temporalities and spatialities for counter-public engagement in the contexts of mundane urban mobility. The findings demonstrate various moblogging practices that entail modalities of counter-public engagement that traverse the personal, proto-political, and communal, and reveal how local residents used these modalities to articulate alternative public agendas, connect acts of consumer activism, and perform communal belonging vis-à-vis inbound shopping tourism amid their daily routines and modest journeys. Focusing on mobile socialities enabled by smartphones and networking apps, this article explicates how contemporary moblogging can, on the one hand, extend people's capacity to engage in citizen talk and connective action, while on the other hand, allow them to flexibly connect and contribute personal photobiographies and narratives to counter-public communities. By unpacking the novel pathways to citizen participation, it offers insights into new ways in which everyday mobile communication can be transformed into public involvement, albeit often in agonistic and emotional forms, and the role of MSM in this process.

A Quantitative Approach: Hope Labor Among Turkish Female Bloggers

This study investigates the blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. Based on a quantitative approach, a snowballing survey method is conducted, to explore the spaces within which women seek “self-realization,” “self-formation” and “publicity” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. There are two main questions that undergird this project: “Do women, performing in social media, unintentionally become subjugated to a form of exploitation and alienation, as the literature on digital labor suggests?” “Is hope labor is influential in female bloggers’ blog usage and content writing? Research findings demonstrate that these women, while constructing their identities as bloggers, incorporate to the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey via articulation of blogging with the global market system. Although blogs provide employment opportunities and economic gains, main motivation behind women’s blogging practices remain to be self-realization and self-fulfillment, leaving hope labor less influential in blog writing. Traditional views like unemployed women participate to public sphere via blogging activities wriggling out of their inherited gender roles also remain to be an over determination since employed women feel more emancipated through blogging.

Travel blogging between personal staging and commercial alignment – a conceptual framework

Due to recent changes in the blogosphere, and in travel blogging in particular, there is a need to reflect on travel blogs as complex media. In this article, commodification and professionalization processes, as well as the specific situatedness of travel blogs at the interface of on- and offline worlds, are taken into account in order to present a differentiated and adaptable conceptual framework for analyzing travel blogs. Within this framework, blogs are situated between personal staging and commercial alignment. The paper shows, how the use of different blogging practices (such as sharing and recommending travel experiences) allows bloggers to construct and use different web-identities simultaneously. By using close and wide readings, it is demonstrated how playing the role of connoisseur of a tourist city and online friend (personal staging) enables bloggers to establish a profitable travel blog and be effective with their marketing strategies (commercial alignment). A case study of travel blogs relating to Barcelona serves as an illustrative example and confirms the suitability of this conceptual approach.

An Ethnographical Approach: Female Blogosphere In Turkey

This paper is about the preliminary ethnographic fieldwork of a work-in progress conducted on the female blogging practices and the female blogosphere in Turkey, focusing specifically on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. The study attempts to understand the role of blogging as a medium in women’s self-formation processes and explore how female bloggers construct their identities via online media representations and negotiate disclosure, fame and labor in an age of extreme self-display. Based on an anthropological approach, the study explores the spaces within which women seek “self-realization”, “publicity” and “employment opportunities” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. Taking female blogosphere as a field, the study examines how blog production is manifested in Turkey, through the female bloggers’ struggle for hope. Preliminary research demonstrates that blogging acts as a medium of hope for many female bloggers. Given the heterogeneous nature of female blogosphere, experiencing this hope shows differences. At times, upper mobility opportunities are expected, but sometimes hope is realized to provide feelings like happiness, appreciation, self-realization and usefulness. Networking and socialization opportunities are also other motivations of bloggers. The aim of the study is to see how these women use blogging as a media practice to explain themselves in social media platforms. Thus, through the framework of hope (Hage 2004), relatability (Kanai 2019), fame and visibility notions, material formation of identities in this process, the nature of labor production in blogs as well as the construction of female subjectivities within celebrity culture will also be discussed.

A New Materialist take on the possibilities and impossibilities of becoming a scholarly blogger

ABSTRACT As social media platforms become increasingly entangled in how academia gets performed, there is growing pressure on individuals to cultivate a digital presence or risk becoming invisible. While some adopt new and emerging online communicative tools with gusto and élan, there are others who resent and resist their creeping territorialisation of workspaces. This paper uses a feminist New Materialist onto-epistemology to offer an alternative understanding of the material, discursive, and affective forces that enfold to nurture and/or neuter the uptake of scholarly blogging practices in academia. Unlike conventional humanist ontologies, a New Materialist approach views agency as distributed across all matter – not just the human form. This approach allows for the social, historical, affective, technological, and spatial forces, fluxes, and flows shaping and reshaping diverging scholarly blogging practices and performances to be plumbed. The insights generated have implications for how academic developers might encourage the uptake of scholarly blogging within and across their institutions.

‘Have you wondered why sportspeople die?’ The medical weblog as a popularisation tool

The paper considers the role of medical blogging practices in Poland, and more specifically, aims to explore the use of popularisation strategies in medical weblogs. Following recent approaches to the study of online communication in healthcare contexts that emphasise the importance of the interpersonal aspect, the study of blogging practices among Polish medical practitioners uses discourse analysis to examine healthcare practitioners’ professional identity via their engagement in popularisation. The qualitative analysis of the blog posts explores, and illustrates in detail, the popularisation strategies employed by healthcare practitioners. Healthcare practitioners effectively exploit the affordances of the blog to share knowledge and inform, e.g. through detailed explanations of terms, examples from everyday life and relevant contextual information via links, but also to educate and entertain, e.g. through the use of humour and irony, or narratives of professional and personal experience. The analysis also reveals that popularisation intertwines with self-expression in the medical weblog. The bloggers engage in self-disclosure and evaluative expression, use conversational, colloquial language, but at the same time they show that they are close to patients’ everyday experience.

Transforming Consumers Into Brands: Tracing Transformation Processes of the Practice of Blogging

The goal of this research is to explore the transformational power of a new consumption and production practice, the practice of blogging, to understand its impact on consumers' identity transformations beyond their self-concept as consumers and on the blogosphere as an organizational field. Through an exploratory study of over 12,000 blog posts from five fashion bloggers, complemented by in-depth interviews, we trace the transformation of consumer bloggers. We identify and describe three identity phases, the individual consumer, collective blogger and blogger identity phase, and two important turning points. Our findings show that through a continuous process of identity negotiation, adaptation, and re-interpretation with multiple stakeholders, these bloggers transform into human brands. In turn, these individual transformation processes reciprocally influence the emergence of blogging as a professional practice and of the blogosphere as a new organizational field. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of consumer transformation processes in a new field, where consumers can leave their role as consumers through continuously engaging in identity negotiation, adaptation and re-interpretation, creating alternative points of reference and validation in a new field that in turn continues to influence their brand identity. Furthermore, our findings contribute to an understanding of human brands from a brand-as-process perspective, and have implications for brands wishing to collaborate with these influential actors.

Understanding the Blogging Practices of Women Undergoing In Vitro Fertilization (IVF): A Discourse Analysis of Women’s IVF Blogs

Infertility and its associated treatments, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), can have a profound impact on the emotional health and well-being of women desiring to become mothers. Researchers have measured the impact of infertility and described the experience of infertility and its treatment, leaving the rich descriptions of the IVF experience as captured in women’s blogs to be explored. This discourse analysis describes the blogging practices of women undergoing IVF, exploring both the content and function of the IVF blog discourse. Data were collected from the text of seven women’s blogs (n=1,149 blog posts) and resulted in four main functions of the discourse: creation of and connection to a community, emotional support, blogging as therapy, and creation of an IVF resource. Findings suggest that blogging can have a positive impact on the psychosocial consequences experienced by women in fertility treatment.

Rebranding the Hamon Arts Library Blog: Seeking Connections within the Arts Community

Blogs are now a common form of social media used as a communication and outreach tool for libraries. With applications such as WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr, they are easy to initiate without much financial investment or technology skills. Yet the success of a blog depends on additional factors, including the planning, time, and effort by library staff. In this article, the author discusses how she retired the old Hamon Arts Library Blog for a newly conceived blog that is more dynamic and responsive. Her plan resulted in assembling a team to rebrand the library’s old practice of intermittent blogging into a new one that actively engaged the library staff and encouraged postings from guest bloggers.[This article is an expansion of the poster session “Rebranding Your Library’s Blog” presented at the ARLIS/NA + VRA 3rd Joint Conference, Seattle, Washington, in March 2016.]

Paola Vettorel, English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices

Recensione di English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices di Paola Vettorel

English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices

English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices

Vettorel, Paola: English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices

Vettorel, Paola: English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices

Travel blogging: An auto-ethnographic study of how online interactions influence a journey

Travel blogging’s necessary routine and connectedness directly challenge the sensation of liminality seen as the core experience of travel. Using the lens of auto–ethnography, this paper finds that the practice of travel blogging affects the experience of travel in three main ways:by creating a routine in which the traveller needs to regularly find an Internet connection;in taking the traveller out of the moment and putting them into a detached narratorial role; and,by mediating the experience of travel as the blogger frequently takes their online audience into account as they travel.Taken together, these results suggest that blogging precipitates a constraining effect on travel as it creates structure and commitments which limit the freedom of the journeyer. Moreover, the requirement to narrate in a way that matches the conventions of the blogosphere suggests that blogging travellers will have more homogenous patterns of travel as similar images, sites and destinations are pursued.

Audience-Aware Credibility: From Understanding Audience to Establishing Credible Blogs

This study examines how bloggers establish and enhance the credibility of their blogs through a series of blogging practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with 22 independent bloggers who blog on a range of topics, we present audience-aware credibility as a theoretical construct. Audience-aware credibility is defined as how bloggers signal their credibility based on who they think their audience is and how they provide value to that perceived audience. The analysis of bloggers’ credibility constructs, conceptualizations of audience, and perceived blog value identified four types of bloggers who constructed audience-aware credibility in distinctive ways: Community Builder, Expertise Provider, Topic Synthesizer, and Information Filterer. We then report on these bloggers’ blogging practices for establishing credibility and strategies for interacting with their audience to enhance credibility. The contributions of this study are to expand credibility constructs for social media research and to demonstrate the role of credibility perceptions in content contributors’ online activities. The findings reveal that a multi-dimensional construct of audience-aware credibility serves as a driving factor influencing and shaping blogging practices of all four types of bloggers. Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

Uniting Political Bloggers in Diversity: Collective Identity and Web Activism

In contrast to the common view of blogging as a highly narcissistic activity, this study explicates how blogging is a communal activity and the emergence of a collective identity which drives collective action. 41 interviews with activist and nonactivist bloggers revealed that shared consciousness, distinctive blogging practices, and the articulation of a common adversary contribute to the development of a collective identity. Furthermore, identity multiplexity points to the emergence of individualized collectiveness, which extends beyond networked individualism and is reinforced by offline participation in activism and pre-existing social ties with other activists.

Users' perceptions of blog functions: educational vs personal use

Purpose – This paper aims to understand how users' perceptions of the different functions of blogs vary in educational use and personal use, and further to explore whether experience with blogs has an influence on differences in perceptions of blog functions. Design/methodology/approach – To empirically determine whether the blog functions were suitable for educational and personal use, a blog system with numerous functions was constructed for users to evaluate. In total, 48 college students were recruited to participate in the study. The participants navigated this system and then filled in a questionnaire to give their opinions on the functions of both educational blogs and personal blogs. Findings – The findings of this study indicate that of the 26 blog functions, perceptions of 20 of the functions differed significantly between educational and personal use. Moreover, the results showed that only two blog functions, backup and traffic source, were influenced by both blog experience and blog usage. Originality/value – This study distinguishes itself from the previous studies on blogging systems in its specific focus on functionality with detailed evaluation under different purposes of contexts. Practical suggestions are accordingly made for practitioners to choose when and which functions to use under different circumstances to enhance the interaction and information exchange between users in the field practice of educational blogging.

Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges

Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style. This paper holds this advocacy up to empirical scrutiny. A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice; the intended audience for this work is other higher education staff. We contend that academic blogging may constitute a community of practice in which a hybrid public/private academic operates in a ‘gift economy’. We note however that academic blogging is increasingly of interest to institutions and this may challenge some of the current practices we have recorded. We conclude that there is still much to learn about academic blogging practices.

Evaluating multimodal literacies in student blogs

AbstractThis research presents ways in which high school students used the multimodal and interactive affordances of blogs to create, organize, communicate and participate on an educational blog. Their actions demonstrated how plural modes of literacy are infiltrating digital environments and reshaping literacy and learning. Multimodal blogging practices of participants broaden the discourse about educational blogs to include an understanding of blogs as media‐rich platforms in which learners operate with plural modes of literacy to construct meaning, communicate and participate.