Blogging as Participation

Writing in 2006 and capitalizing on weblogging participation, Lankshear and Knobel distinguished between “participation that is directed to particular or specified others, participation that is directed toward a larger community, and participation that is directed at both.”(p.5) And to illustrate the first type of participation, they cited the post and ensued comments talking about a UK Education Fair and taking place between Encaustic and Sun_Skittle. From these artifacts, the use of acronyms and abbreviations came rushing to my attention, such as URE for you are, SUMTHIN for something, wld for would, rite for right, OMG for Oh My God, prob for probably, unis for universities, depts for departments. This feature reminds me of Instant Messaging communication (on which my multimodal project centered its attention). It is understandable that the real-timeness of IM communication might call for users to shorten their messages to keep the communication smoothly and the exchange quicker. Yet, since there exists a time lag in weblogging, that is, an asynchrony between posting and viewing, there is not need for immediate response. In this case, I’m curious about bloggers’ reasons for abbreviating and acronyming when there is no need to type quickly.

Lankshear and Knobel (2006) also noted that as the audience of a blog grows, the blogger might not be able to respond to all of the comments, ending up “becoming a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.” (p. 4) This led me to reflect on my own purpose of keeping a weblog. And I came to realize that my blog serves solely as a venue where I upload and share photos with friends, with virtually no conversation taking place in my blogoshpere. Therefore, as opposed to going from a participation facilitator to an information distributor, my blog is born a broadcast outlet. I guess this springs largely from the fact that keeping a weblog as a place for conversations entails an amount of time and efforts for me. As I recall, posting and responding always took me a while to get done, which when novelty of blogging faded out became nothing short of a burden. True, weblogs, when directed to particular people, indeed function as a site for friends to “hang out” and exchange thoughts and ideas. Yet, as far as I am concerned, I still prefer IM to blogging when it comes to having conversations with my friends.

In our last class on April 30, we talked about the features of blogging, 2 of which pertain to the permanency and the huge scale of visibility of postings. Here's video clip I found on Youtube elaborating on the Danger of Social Networking.