Blogging: self presentation and privacy

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children’s daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers’ subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the ‘private’ to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so

An exploratory investigation on the effects of online social networking sites on college students

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects online social networking sites have on college students, mainly the effects on their communication. A study at Rowan University was conducted using a random selection of undergraduate students. The Rowan Subject pool was used to recruit students. Although each student was in different majors, all of the students were in an introduction to psychology course. To examine the effects online social networking sites have on college students, there were two separate groups of students designed to interact with one another in two different ways. A group was instructed to communicate face-to-face on a topic and the group were audio and visually recorded. The other group was instructed to communicate through a Facebook page created by the researcher. A status was posted on the main page and the subjects were instructed to communication via Facebook. To examine communication, the number of words was counted. I hypothesized due to the increased use of online social networking sites; the group communicating through Facebook would have a higher word count than the group communicating face-to-face

Blogging about Family Building (Infertility, Pregnancy Loss, Adoption, Pregnancy, Trying to Conceive): Content and Blogging Motivations

To better understand the content and process of family building blogging, two interrelated studies took place. First, blogs with posts during a designated week were analyzed for content. Then, hosts of active blogs were invited to complete a survey on their blog content and reasons for blogging. Results of both content analysis and survey indicated a variety of content appearing in such blogs, with children, pregnancy, attempts to conceive, and negative emotional experiences related to those emerging as popular topics. To identify motivations for blogging about such content, a principal components analysis (PCA) suggested seven different blogging motivations: gaining attention, benefitting others, becoming a career blogger, entertaining others, documenting life events, self-expression, and forming an online social support network. To further explore blogging motivations, subgroups of bloggers (those having experienced infertility, those having experienced pregnancy loss, and those already parenting) were compared on their ratings of the seven blogging motivations with multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). While results mostly supported consistency across subgroups in motivations, there was a significant effect for infertility experience on ratings for educating others and self-expression. This investigation represents the first known attempt to capture what information is included in the growing subgenre of family building blogs and what reasons inspire bloggers to create and maintain them

Exploring children's social and moral behaviour in a technology context

The central argument of this thesis is that disclosure of certain information via computer-mediated communication technologies influence specific behaviours in relation to trust, and betrayal for children and young people. The main aim of this thesis is to extend the computer mediated communication literature by investigating young people‘s use of digital communication devices in an effort to explore interactions between methods of computer mediated communication and young people‘s subsequent social and moral behaviour. The thesis begins with qualitative analyses of data gathered via focus groups to raise a broad range of issues important to the young user rather than the issues deemed important by parents and educators. Young people indicate clearly that they are aware of the safety issues that concern parents and academics eager to protect them from predators. Whilst the single most popular reason they identify for engaging with technology is to communicate, they identify three key areas of concern related to technology use; usage preferences, positive aspects of technology use and negative aspects of technology use. The topics relating to the latter two themes combine social and moral behaviours forming a preliminary framework for understanding behaviour within the HCI agenda. Subjective and objective methodology is implemented, typically via questionnaires and content analysis. In depth examination and assessment of those concerns deemed important to the young user is achieved via questionnaire studies developed from the issues raised in the focus groups. Building upon the preliminary framework identified in the first study, the thesis employs a questionnaire study to examine whether technology has an impact on trust by young people and how any betrayal of trust might impact on their subsequent behaviour. The questionnaire studies reveal that for young people dynamics of trust and forgiveness are functions of both type of medium chosen to convey information, as well as the recipient to whom the information is related. Further investigation confirms that similar elements exist for older users communicating via digital communication technologies. Subsequent investigation reveals that as young users of computer mediated communication adopt each new alternative communication medium, they then manipulate that new medium to fit their communication needs by using them in such a way as to enhance the speed and quality of communication

They made a career with their opinions: An exploratory study of reader perception of credibility of high-status bloggers

The 21st century has developed so quickly digitally that information spreads so quickly through e-word-of-mouth. To effectively communicate, companies have to find a way to spread their own messages in a fast, unique way to entice their publics. In the fashion industry, instead of using their own websites and social media, which can be viewed as untrustworthy, many companies turn to partnerships with high-status (career) bloggers in order to reach more people. These high-status bloggers have made careers out of their sites, bringing in a salary through advertising, sponsored content and brand partnerships. The purpose of this study was to find if these bloggers were still seen as a credible source for information when readers knew about their ‘status’ and earnings, especially how their salary was made. Initial research made the researcher suspect that the bloggers would not be seen as a credible source. However, the participants focused their responses on their feelings of pride for these amateurs who had made a career out of their opinions, and that as long as they remained as open and authentic as when their blog first started, the bloggers’ credibility would remain intact. This exploratory research found that the source credibility theory remained true in this digital context, and also provides different sub-factors of credibility for the source of career blogs

Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital MediaThis chapter explores why young authors find value in expressing themselves on the Internet. Concentrating on the genres of personal home pages and blogs, in particular, the chapter aims to answer the following questions: What do adolescents see as the rewards of online expression? How do they make choices about the self-presentations they offer? What role do audiences play in their decision-making? How is online expression meaningful, and in what ways is it unfulfilling? Discussion is based in large part on interviews with hundreds of authors ranging in age from 12 to 21 years. The chapter notes how youth authors' sentiments about their online practices reflect their engagement with important developmental tasks associated with adolescence. The goal throughout this chapter is to broaden the terrain of discussion about online youth expression practices so that our public and popular discourse about young people is more meaningful and contextualized

Group level influence on blog's design behaviour

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly, this research aims to investigate whether the design preferences of bloggers in selected countries from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by national culture traits. The investigation involves two categories of blogs selected within a country where the bloggers share similar attributes such as language or geographical location. Secondly, simultaneously, this research intends to discover the possibility of the impact of group level influence on design preferences of bloggers who are linked together in a network through bloggers’ linkage or blogrolls. To achieve the said purposes, observations on both the global and local blogs of six selected countries are conducted using the content analysis method. This method allows this research to observe web pages and rate design preferences of bloggers via a coding system, similar to the method used to analyse documents or manuscripts to find common themes or keywords. A total of 612 blogs (306 global and 306 local) are observed for a period of nine months to identify cultural traits on design behaviour based on national culture indicators chosen from prominent literatures. To prevent a systematic error, an independent second observer was appointed and the results obtained are compared using a statistical methodology. In addition, translators were also engaged to verify that the translations are of a correct meaning and comprehension since blogs use various national languages on their web pages. The data were statistically tested using SPSS engaging in statistical analysis of frequency table, Cross-Tabulation and cluster analyses and MANOVA. Results shown that design preferences between both the global and local blogs in each country, has significant differences in most of the design indicators chosen. The findings indicate that the national culture influence on design preferences in linked networks of blogs is weakening indicating another type of influence might be in existence. The results also provide evidence that blogs in linked networks are statistically significant as a cluster or a group by themselves and are independent from one cluster to another. The research, however, studies only six countries from six different cultural dimensions. The inclusion of other countries, similar to or different from the countries under investigation, would be an added advantage. Furthermore, the use of only a single type of global blog provider (blogspot.com) in this research could be extended to other global blog providers such as wordpress.com to give fairer coverage of major and popular global blogs as well as providing a wider generalisation effect of the research findings

Logging in, Blogging "Out": Gay College Age Males and the Blogosphere

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Scholarly research in the genre of blogging has to date been minimal. This study examines part of that genre, specifically blogging by gay males between the ages of 18 and 25, and explores how these bloggers use specific textual and visual markers to publicly identify as gay