Previously, as influenced by our discussion of Rebecca Blood, the internet has become a clutter of information, which danah boyd would argue is partly due to the introduction of blogs.
Blogging Outloud: Shifts in Public Voice - danah boyd
In the talk given by danah boyd at LITA Conference, she makes the link between librarians and blogs. She states that librarians were the “gatekeepers of information”. However, blogging changed the conception of knowledge because now more people were providing information.
Once the internet began the dissemination of information, Google became the place to access information without a gatekeeper, filtering through to relevant information based on what you are looking for.
Blogs as Sources of Information
Blogs are not attempting to be strictly information based, they are people’s own interpretations of information, feelings and ideas.
boyd discusses how bloggers are mainly disregarded as amateur journalists, when they aren’t trying to be; or the people are actually trying to give decent and reliable information are clumped into the group of people who aren’t
- There is a difference between opinions and news - many blogs are simply people’s personal accounts of information, which are not intended to be considered news. However, there are some citizens who practice their right in participatory journalism and are providing accurate accounts of information.
- This can correspond to Blood’s distinction between filter-style and journal-style blogs
What is a Blog?
boyd makes the relation of blogs to paper
- “Paper has been used for journalism, diaries, scribbling, gossip, passing notes, writing letters, bookkeeping, collages, photographs, and all sorts of other practices”
- Secondary Orality
- Doesn’t have to be edited, but it the flow of our thought process and individuals simply coming forward with their interests and information
- The goal is to share and get thoughts across, it is not about publishing
- It’s simply an avenue to express an opinion
- “Free style blogs are nothing less than an outbreak of self-expression” Rebecca Blood
- Personal interests and opinions are no longer private information, they are put online to display to the world
- Bloggers are aware that what they are saying is very public, even if we don’t have the mentality to understand just how public it is
- “No physical bodies, only traces of communication”
- Blogging represents part of the ways that boundaries are broken down between people and nations
- “Blogs are generating huge archives of contemporary culture”
- Personal lives are being stored online for future generations to see, just as letters, journals and diaries were kept from the 18th century
- Currently, libraries are our archives where we learn about previous generations, but in the future the internet will be the archives in which people learn about our generation.
Blogging versus Librarians - Information Access
- boyd is suggesting that librarians believe Google is the enemy as they are trying to give out information as it is free, but the librarians want to “win back their rightful place as the guardians of the world’s knowledge”
- boyd believes that librarians should not be the sole gatekeepers to access; as more people begin to work on freeing information, the more cultural and structural access to information can be maximized
- Computers changed the norm where librarians acted as the filterers of information - determining what was valuable and providing access to that
- Now, librarians’ judgements are no longer needed
- People are given the opportunity to be their own gatekeepers - the concept of “valuable” information has drastically changed - we can now filter through all the information provided to us and deem what is valuable on our own accord
- On the negative side, librarians were a human account, making it easier to establish a relationship between information and people; relating this to Google, it is simply a search engine full of information that may or may not be relevant, making it a lot more difficult to filter through
- Most of us experience this in our own library - many times it is much easier to go to the librarians to help us filter through the masses of information online rather than trying to search through ourselves.
- boyd is saying that because technology is so prevalent and has “changed the rules of the game”, that a people-centric view is essential
- Blogging is a crucial aspect of this as 30-40,000 blogs and over 500,000 new posts are created per day
- Blogging as self-produced content, boyd describes as being overwhelming because it is difficult to find relevant or desired information – blogs clog the pages on Google searches
- As Rebecca Blood emphasizes, “the need for reliable filters will become more pressing” Weblogs: A History and Perspective
- Example; searching danah boyd on Google doesn’t include her academic work, but her blog posts
Affordances of the Blog
- Giving people the opportunity to personally or critically engage with a topic
- Also acting as a space for people to connect through niche interests
- Acting as an archive for common, everyday life
- As a form of citizen media (hyperlink to blog about citizen media)
Critique of boyd
- Uses the internet and blogs as interchangeable terms
- Her discussion of the relationship between librarians and blogs doesn’t coherently flow with her overall debate
- Ultimately stating that there is a need for a filtration system, but without a top down system
- Relates to the fact that this all results in participatory culture
Workshop
- Find a blog about "Occupy Wall Street" which you feel provides the most valuable information on the topic.
