Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

In this paper, we explore the experience and performance of gender online in Second Life, currently one of the most popular virtual world platforms. Based on two collaborative autoethnographic projects, we propose that gender has to be explored at the intersection between our own situated perspective and the vision embedded in the social and technical infrastructure of the virtual world. For us, the visual element of a 3D world further frames the representation and performance of gender, while technical skill becomes a crucial factor in constructing our ability to play with this performance. As we recollect and interrogate our own experiences in SL, we argue that the relation between gender and virtual worlds is a complex and multifaceted one, proposing our positioned account of experiencing this relation. It is critical, we suggest, that studies of mediated experience in virtual worlds take into account the position of the researcher in ‘real’ life (IRL) as well as the dominant discourses of the environment they are immersed in. In this we must also be critical, of ourselves, our assumptions, as well as the environment itself.

/pdf/knee-high-boots-and-six-pack-abs-autoethnographic-38ysjv70e2.pdf

Knee-High Boots and Six-Pack Abs: Autoethnographic Reflections on Gender and Technology in Second Life

Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of the constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to the notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. Previous work on weblogs has largely focused on the nature of weblogs as textual artifacts. Authors such as Dave Winer (2001), Meg Hourihan (2002), and Rebecca Blood (2000; 2002) have focused on "voice," essayistic style, "community," and a pantheon of other concepts drawn from preexisting rhetorical, journalistic, sociological, and linguistic frameworks. This focus, while admirably productive, does not fully map the potential landscape of weblog research. In particular, such textual foci slight visual factors that may contribute almost as much "style" to weblogs as the particular textual practices (c.f. "voice") of individual authors. To our knowledge, very little work has been done to date that examines either the visual elements of weblogs or the relationship between the visual and textual elements of those same sites. The availability of visual design elements division of the screen into columns, image use, color and typeface choice (Hagerty, 1996) along with the placement of elements on the page permitting meaning to be suspended in the visual (Lacan, 1998), allows for non-textual self-expression. Visual design inhabits "the field of vision, which is much wider arena than a sphere for the circulation of images or question regarding the nature of representation" (Rogoff, 1998, p. 31). An informal survey of weblogs reveals that new users of the medium have adopted fewer "innovations" than their forbears: as notions of what constitutes a "weblog" concretize, the creative use of visual and hypertextual features seems to be in decline. Design innovations breaking out of a certain "acceptable" visual style are increasingly rare, while weblogs that conform to expectations three-column, smaller text down the side, prominent header and footer, some links and sparse image use (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004)continue to be created. Detailed analysis suggests that adult males are most likely, for example, to use unique templates, with teenage females ranking second in their use of customized templates. New weblogs often appear simpler than older weblogs. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere. Detailed coding for the presence of common structural, visual features allows correlation of those trends with the demographics of content producers. back to top

Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

Blogging, the publication of on-line diaries with links to other Web
sites, is a recent activity and yet is already producing its celebrities. The author analyzes diary entries posted over five years by one master blogger, and his relations with his readers, to try to originate preliminary hypotheses on the politics of blogging. Observation of blogging in one of its most glamorous manifestations suggests that the new emancipation achieved by self-representation on the World Wide Web may be associated with what Scott Lash has called “the politics of melancholy,” here characterized by preference for virtual reality, formation of a
cult-like community, and political passivity.

Resume : Le blogage, qui consiste a afficher son journal personnel en ligne en y incluant des liens vers des sites connexes, est une activite recente et pourtant elle a deja ses celebrites. L’auteur analyse les entrees de journal d’un maitre bloggeur sur une duree de cinq ans ainsi que ses rapports avec ses lecteurs, en vue de developper des hypotheses preliminaires sur la politique du blogage. L’observation du blogage dans une de ses manifestations les plus attrayantes suggere que l’on peut associer la nouvelle emancipation que permet la representation de soi sur le Web a ce que Scott Lash appelle « la politique de la melancolie », caracterisee ici par une preference pour la realite virtuelle, la formation d’une communaute ressemblant a un culte et la passivite politique.

https://people.ucalgary.ca/~baschnei/documents/facultyresearch/Keren.pdf

Blogging and the Politics of Melancholy

On Sunday, April 13, 2003, Erika-Renee Lanier writes a short essay about coming to grips with her mother’s mortality and her own unexpected adulthood. She shares these words on her personal website, Snazzykat. The same day, Mark Woods offers a birthday tribute to the late Eudora Welty and a collection of links to resources regarding her work. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web, Joseph Duemer reflects on the visual imagery of the American war in Vietnam. These instances of online writing, weblogs all, cover a range of topics as vast and varied as their authors. Lanier works at an urban teen center in Massachusetts, and frequently addresses the intimate details of her life and her work. Duemer is a poet and professor of English in upstate New York, and his weblog focuses on political and cultural fascinations. Woods offers an encyclopedic daily compendium of literary and cultural artifacts, and reveals no more about his offline life than that he writes from Ontario, Canada. Other weblogs are devoted to everything from evolutionary biology and genetics, to a fictionalized diary of Julius Caesar, to dealing with the death of an online acquaintance. All of them share the classification “weblogs,” yet each is remarkably different from its peers.

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/172823/Himmer_Labyrinth%20Unbound.pdf

Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

References

Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

Knee-High Boots and Six-Pack Abs: Autoethnographic Reflections on Gender and Technology in Second Life

Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

Blogging and the Politics of Melancholy

The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature

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