Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Web...

Linkdumpers are understood to post primarily links to other websites, usually accompanied with a title and a brief comment from the author, while "lifeloggers" post primarily about their personal life and everyday experiences.

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Linkdumpers are understood to post primarily links to other websites, usually accompanied with a title and a brief comment from the author, while "lifeloggers" post primarily about their personal life and everyday experiences.

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ven to the point of a general "us" versus "them" discourse on many weblogs.

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"Linklifeloggers unite!" writes:

Lately I've been bothered a bit by an identity crisis

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he personal home page is a relatively static document that for its authors doesn't imply much work or thought on a daily basis, unlike the weblog, which becomes much more embedded in the everyday life of the weblogger.

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any webloggers the purpose of their weblog is the practice of weblogging itself.

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difference between game and play

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he weblog authors, however, indicated that they had no "immediate useful objective, nor defined objective" for their weblog, but that the activity of weblogging itself (including linking and getting linked to, commenting and getting commented on) was the main objective.

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bination with a postmodern sentiment in the social sciences, lead to a conceptualization of online or virtual identity as performative, fragmented, multiple, and often subversive.

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nternet researchers explored and theorized this perceived absence of the physical body and the importance of the constructedness of the virtual body in the online realm for possibilities of (playfully) challenging everyday inequalities based on supposedly inherent qualities of the physical body, such as gender and race.

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sonal home pages are a type of online environment where postmodern identity play is far less common.

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ather than fragmenting the self, personal home pages are attempts to integrate the individual, make a personal statement of identity, and show in a stable, replicable way what the individual stands for and what is deemed important (Wynn & Katz, 1997: 318).

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especially argue against attributing notions of self-consciousness and autonomy to "virtual selves," noting that whatever presentations of self we encounter online; they can only exist by virtue of a real person shaping and animating them (pp. 300-305).

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Wynn & Katz favor a more traditional, integrated, singular, but above all social view of identity. The conceptualization of the Internet as "virtual," and opposed to "real" reality, sets it up as as a radically different space and obscures the importance of the everyday social and cultural practices in which online interaction and presentation of self is embedded.

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ome page authors tend to present themselves in well established categories.

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e," there are few external links to be found on the personal home pages; the links that were there, support the already present

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nk that the notion of identity as performative is still very useful for understanding the presentation of self on home pages and weblogs

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dler (1998) argue that "[c]omparisons of home pages with face-to-face interaction are misleading," with translating Goffman's approach to the Internet is that his analyses depend so much on the study everyday, situated, and embodied "micropractices" and that online environments, such as home pages and weblogs, by virtue of being called virtual are understood as somehow different and separate from the physical everyday surroundings.

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understanding our everyday reality as socially constructed does not deny its existence and the factuality of its material or natural dimensions, but reconceives it as distinct from the process by which it comes to bear cultural meanings.

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He describes the micropractices and larger frameworks that inform the processes of "impression management" in everyday social situations and shows the amount of work that identity entails, without going so far as saying that identity is performance.

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performance is not the outcome of an identity prior to that performance, but the source of identity:

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g]ender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. (p. 270, emphasis in original)

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but more importantly we can ask which (aspects) of identity home page and weblog authors presume or call upon, which attributes of identity they claim or articulate, in short, which "stylized repetition of acts" they perform.

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Links to other weblogs, mentioning other webloggers, and commenting on what another weblogger wrote are means by which webloggers position themselves in the blogosphere. But lifelogs are about their authors. When asked what a visitor might learn about the author, several lifeloggers said that from reading their posts over a longer period of time the visitor might know pretty much everything about them. The lifelog clearly is by and about a certain real life, physical, embodied person. The lifelog may be located on the Web, but just as with many personal home pages it provides many links and details about the author's everday, offline life. Adding an "About Me" page, pictures, or maybe a webcam, reinforces those links. But even without extra details, one can read about the author riding her bike through town, visiting his sick mother in hospital, or seeing a movie with friends. In fact, just like on the home pages earlier discussed, lifeloggers primarily present themselves through well-known categories like work, family, friends, musical preferences, place of residence, pets, and political opinions to name but a few. These categories, however, are rarely the focus of the presentation of self. They feature as background facts to the ongoing narrative in which the lifelogger tries to focus on his or her unique take on the happenings of his/her everyday life. In his "Lifelogging Course"13 for the about:blank magazine, lifelogger Ton Zijp compares writing a lifelog entry with writing a love song:

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I argued that approaching identity as performance allows one to focus on the everyday micropractices that make up identity in social contexts, whether they are electronically mediated or not.

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Identity on the web is not about bending and blending gender, race, ethnicity, or class, as early studies of the Internet expected. Identity on the web is not so much "virtual" as mundane, which is not to say that it is not performed. Even mundane identity must be performed and making a weblog appear as the expression of a unique individual is hard work.

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