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Blogging Culture

Content and Representation in Blogs

Zizi Papacharissi and Sharon Meraz

Content is conditioned by context, and context in turn may be reinterpreted through content. The culture of postindustrialization has advanced a transition from existential to self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). Self-expression values refer to the desire to control one's environment, increase one's autonomy, and question authority. Media content lends shape and form to these conflicting and converging tendencies (Bauman, 2001; Giddens, 1990). Blogs epitomize self-expression, in a manner that permits individuals a form of control over their personalized media ecology, affords a measure of autonomy, even if temporary, and enables the questioning of authority. One could argue that, for contemporary citizens, blogs present a sociocultural practice that reflects and reifies the desire for control, autonomy and the questioning of authority. Blog content as artifact reflects and reifies these tendencies.

This chapter examines the evolution of blog content, from the early stages of personal home pages, to the development of the blog format, to A-list blogs that influence other media and public opinion. Blogging content is examined, with a focus on blogging norms, patterns, and dominant trends the form of blogging takes on. As the blogosphere is vast and diverse, the authors consider the plurality of blog content and the functions it serves for multiple bloggers and potential audiences. Blogging content is examined as a form of sociocultural expression, with an analysis of its function and place in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes with a look at what the future holds for blogs and associated, emerging web platforms, in the context of converging media and reflexive societies. In line with the volume's focus on content and representation, we begin by mapping the origins and evolution of blogging content. We examine how blogging content differs from that of neighboring media practices, and consider ways of theoretically situating it within contemporary mediascapes and ecologies. To this end, the chapter then considers gender, class, and racial or ethnic representations in blogging content, so as to assess the sociocultural contribution of blogging. Finally, we conclude by examining the meaning of blogging content for networked publics.

Blogging Content: Evolution

Blogs can be traced back to the mid-1990s and are characterized by a diary-like format aimed at primarily documenting the everyday experience. An earlier form of blogs can be traced to personal home pages, which developed as online personal spaces, home to the personal reflections and pursuits of their owners. Personal home pages were characterized by their emphasis on self-expression, introspection, and, in general, a presentation of the self through multi-mediated storytelling (Dominick, 1999; Papacharissi, 2002a, 2002b; Smith, 1998; Walker, 2000). In these discursive spaces, users adapted norms to the online setting to effect connectedness and to self-disclose within architectures heavily influenced by templated design. Blogs evolved out of templates that emphasized the chronological sequencing of storytelling, as websites featuring regular updates, an array of links, and the author's personal take on a variety of issues and events. For most nontechnical users, usage of the early blog format did not deviate from the standard layout of template design (Scheidt & Wright, 2004). With the growth of blogging platforms, the use of blogs became more accessible and was driven by major events, typically major catastrophes or political campaigns (Allan, 2006; Allan & Matheson, 2009). A small number of high-profile bloggers were responsible for a strong and positive influence on the public perception of blogs, and research has shown that the 9/11 terrorist attack, the Iraqi War, and the 2004 US presidential election campaign were pivotal events that directed media attention to blogs (Hogg, Lomicky, & Hossain, 2008; Trammell & Keshelashvili, 2005).

Nowadays, blogs are typically defined as web pages that consist of regular or daily posts, arranged in reverse chronological order and archived (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, & Wright, 2004). Internet enthusiasts greeted blogging as a groundbreaking development in the world of news reporting and information dissemination (Gillmor, 2006; Sullivan, 2002). Academics, activists, and a variety of publics recognized the democratizing premise inherent in the practice of blogging, as it affords media consumers the opportunity to become media producers or produsers (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006; Coleman, 2005; Jenkins, 2006). Bloggers present a personalized take on the events of the day, including, but not confined to, news events. It is not uncommon for the abstract, diverse, and heterogeneous collective of blogs, known as the blogosphere, to succeed in placing a news item in the mainstream news agenda, or elevate its profile. By creating noise over issues or political candidates initially marginalized by mainstream media, blogs or bloggers frequently function as gateways to mainstream media coverage (Kerbel & Bloom, 2005; Meraz, 2007; Tremayne, 2007; Walker Rettberg, 2008).

Research has shown that blogs can broadly be divided into A-list blogs (popular publicized blogs), blogs that are somewhat interconnected, and a majority of sparsely socially connected and less conversational blogs (Herring et al., 2005). The latter majority of bloggers frequently engages in self-confessional posting that resembles the tone of diary keeping, with few exceptions that engage in journalistically informed punditry (Papacharissi, 2007; Scott, 2007; Sundar, Edwards, Hu, & Stavrositu, 2007). Despite their potentially infinite reach, the majority of non-A-list blogs are typically assembled with a smaller audience in mind, one that closely mirrors the individual's personal social sphere. Thus, content produced frequently merges what media theories have classified in the past as the distinct categories of the “informational” and “social” into news that is personal, social, and participatory (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010).

Numerous Pew Internet and American Life Project reports have revealed that most early blogging content was created by men, although the difference margin was slight (57%; Rainie, 2005), and debatable, and has by now evened out (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). Bloggers tend to be younger users under 30, with considerable Internet experience, and the proportion of bloggers who are White is smaller than the proportion of Internet users in general, indicating blog use is more popular among social and ethnic minority Internet users (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). They also tend to be more media and computer literate, pursue a wider diversity of online activities, and get their news online (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). Non-personally oriented blogs are more likely to be authored by older, married, and better educated males, who blog mostly about government and politics to mass intended audiences that they do not know personally but feel they know rather well (Cenite, Detenber, Koh, Lim, & Soon, 2009). Personal bloggers, on the other hand, are mostly students or IT workers, who tend to express their thoughts or document their lives for smaller audiences they mostly know personally (Cenite et al., 2009). As a result, blogging content frequently serves needs for self-expression and connectivity, met by producing content that blends commentary on public affairs with private introspection and discussion of personal matters.

The Private, the Public, and the Personal in Blogging Content

A hobby for most, blogging is motivated by goals and priorities that are subjective, aimed at connecting bloggers to their social sphere and a variety of publics, and involving them in the process of information production and consumption. Even though the public imagination frequently compares the blogger to the journalist, the two are driven by different needs, or, alternatively, cater to the same ends but from different perspectives. Blog content is determined by subjective inclinations and tendencies based on a personal evaluation of content (Lu & Hsiao, 2007). Even news-oriented, A-list blogs can present a mélange of public and private information that is subjectively arrived at and removed from Western standards of the journalistic profession observed by objective or partisan press traditions. Blogs are both public and private, and challenge cultural norms that discern private from public (Gurak & Antonijevic, 2008). The practices of blogging and journalism, however, are compatible, and, to this end, several major news outlets survey blogging content to obtain a public opinion substitute. Most mainstream outlets have incorporated blogging into their traditional reporting and use it to provide in-depth reporting and/or indulge specific journalists' story interests. The symmetrical relationship between independent blogs and traditional mass media is furthered when A-list bloggers are invited to produce guest columns for newspapers or when newspaper columnists are used as sources on A-list group blogs.

The civic merit of blogging content is frequently appreciated by examining how it competes with or completes journalism, thus filling some of the voids created by contemporary media. Within this media landscape, web-related innovation enables direct citizen intervention in the media agenda, reifying citizen journalists, and thus making the democratic space upon which citizens and journalists interact more pluralistic (Bimber, 1998) and directly representative (Coleman, 2005). Online technologies like blogs create content that serves as the material cause of mobilization and public discussion.

As potential opinion leaders, bloggers use their own blogs as public pulpits to express opinions on affairs public and personal (e.g., Scott, 2007; Tremayne, 2007). Through a web of interconnections with other citizen journalists, activists, and commentators, and with conventional media, blogging content may create sufficient noise to impact the media, public, and policy agendas (Walker Rettberg, 2008). It may take on many forms, which range from the frequently mundane subject matter of personal home pages to the more politically charged content of alternative social movement media (Atton, 2001). Motivated by a watchdog's orientation, blogging content will draw attention to issues marginalized or ignored by mainstream media (e.g., Meraz, 2007; Sundar et al., 2007). Blogging content acquires meaning as it successfully dilutes the singular agenda-setting influence of traditional news sources on the public agenda to present novel, subjective interpretations of what constitutes news. Atomized acts of journalism performed via blogging may, for instance, afford citizens unique storytelling duties and the ability to “place” themselves in the story (Robinson, 2009), or to report on “unknown” stories (Rutigliano, 2009). In this sense, blogging content and mainstream journalism may be understood as complements rather than substitutes to each other (Deuze, 2009; Gillmor, 2009).

Still, blogging content is typically found to be expressive first and deliberative only by accident. A content analysis of a random sample of blogs revealed the design, structure, and content of the average blog to be driven by self-expression and social connectivity (Papacharissi, 2007). Similarly, an ethnographic study of teenage girls' uses of blogs revealed that teen girls used blogs as creative tools for maintaining relationships and expressing identity (Bortree, 2005). These girls used blogs to delineate “safe” spaces for self-expression and community, but were also challenged by maintaining a consistent sense of self across a variety of friends, family, and other publics that presented possible readers of their blogs. Further studies indicate that bloggers tend to write for friends and family, thus using blogs and similar media that afford “the public performance of personal thoughts” to enhance existing relationships (Stefanone & Jang, 2008; Stefanone & Lackaff, 2009, p. 964). Some have characterized blogging content as “phatic,” or emblematic of communication that has purely social and not informational or dialogic intents (Miller, 2008). Others find content to reflect individualistic patterns of sociability (Hodkinson, 2007), and emphasize immediacy, the subjective, and decentralization (Matheson, 2009). In this sense, blogging content sustains an ongoing project of the self, affording users opportunities for intimate communication in a mediated setting.

Self-disclosure on blogs has been connected to social support and improved social integration for bloggers, thus creating social capital on a personal level (Ko & Kuo, 2009). Blogging content is frequently characterized by verbal motifs of self-discovery and identity play (Blood, 2004; Gonzales & Hancock, 2008). Blogging language and tone will frequently be more experimental, playful, and relaxed (Ducate & Lomicka, 2008). In the context of blogging communities, however, ground rules, the presence of moderators, availability of profile information, net etiquette, and a variety of content-regulating practices will also shape the parameters of blogging content (Silva, Goel, & Mousavidin, 2008).

Blogs combine elements of personal media with the potentialities of mass media, thus indulging content produced privately and broadcast publicly under relatively deinstitutionalized settings. As a result, the hybrid rhetoric or vernacular of blogs is not defined by a single institutional structure but contains a variety of institutional references woven into discursive themes that blend personal priorities with mass aspirations. The following sections examine how representative blogging narratives may be.

Blogging and Representation

The prevailing hope with the release of blogging technology was that real-world inequalities would lessen, allowing all voices, races, and regions to have an equal chance for representation online (Ito, 2003; Lebkowsky & Ratcliffe, 2007). Unfortunately, this scenario has not come to fruition. Like existing inequalities in the real world, and similar to prior technologies that failed to redress race, gender, and class imbalances, Web 2.0 technologies have spawned their own levels of inequalities. The mechanisms that have led to the growth of power inequalities within the blogosphere prove difficult to surmount for many bloggers who find themselves in a similar minority position to their real-world status.

This inequality has been highlighted by blog aggregators such as Technorati and BlogPulse, who seek to provide snapshots of an ever-expanding blogosphere by highlighting the top 100 blogs across all genres and regions. This popular list, which has been around since the early twenty-first century, has led to the growth of an A-list group of influential bloggers who wield power on the agendas of traditional media and general web publics (Farrell & Drezner, 2007; Tremayne, 2004). These popular blogs, often focused on politics, technology, or entertainment, also seek to indicate their group memberships in relevant communities by linking to additional blogs in their blogroll lists. These blogroll links, which are semi-static, have further boosted the popularity of existing popular blogs since blog aggregators utilize counts of a blog's incoming links as a metric for determining blog popularity (Thompson, 2006). The mechanism that creates blog celebrity status fuels itself: newly created blogs, seeking attention, link to these already-popular blogs in an effort to receive validation from credible bloggers. This scenario, well described in social network science theory by the term preferential attachment (Barabási & Albert, 1999; Barabási, Albert, & Jeong, 2000), has made it difficult for less popular blogs to gain visibility among web publics and traditional mass media entities.

For a variety of reasons, existing real-world inequalities in terms of gender, race, and class were largely transferred to the US blogosphere during its early explosive growth, making women, minority bloggers, and lower socioeconomic classes disadvantaged as later entrants to the blogosphere. The well-documented criticism that the popular US blogosphere is largely White and male (Meraz, 2008) has also resulted in a series of countermeasure strategies adopted by many of these invisible communities, who seek to raise their status and influence to the web publics interested in their content. Many of these countermeasures attest to the significance of free blogging technology, which may not whitewash inequalities but provides a platform for the articulation of the interests of niche, interest-based web publics. Blogging technology has enabled previously invisible web publics to highlight agendas of interest to their communities, and it is from this vantage point that blogging has served the varied purposes of underrepresented publics as it relates to race, class, and gender diversity.

Blogging and Race

Within academic discussions of the political blogosphere, little formal focus has been dedicated to the intersection of blogging and race. Few popular, minority-status political bloggers consciously push a race agenda. In terms of general genre popularity, blogging about race has failed to acquire popularity within the US blogosphere, as evidenced by blog aggregators like Technorati or BlogPulse, which show few to no political bloggers who highlight race issues within their top 100 listings. Similarly, since the creation of the Annual Weblog Awards in 2001 (a community-driven award system that collates Internet votes to determine the best weblogs by genre), there remains no category for minority blogging. Though blog awards exist for separate regions of the world, the lack of specific identification of blogging with race best illustrates the general belief that blogging is a neutral technology.

Minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics disproportionally represent the laggard adopters of the Internet and its associated technologies (Spooner, 2000, 2001). Though blog tools are free, it has long been noted that a user's Internet skill impacts his or her capacity to innovate with web technologies. As such, it is not surprising that these minorities are less likely to blog when compared with their White counterparts. Yet, though the popular bloggers are less likely to be a minority, bloggers in total are less likely to be White (60%) when compared to the general Internet audience (74%), with approximately 20% and 11% of bloggers identifying as Hispanic and African American respectively (Lenhart & Fox, 2006).

Little work has been done on the political uses of blogs among racial minorities outside the United States. In one of the few studies, Yao (2009) found that migrant Filipino women in Britain used the blog tool to connect with others of shared status in both online and offline contexts. Within the United States, of all minority groups, the political usage of the blog tool by Blacks has been most visible and documented. In a practical sense, Black bloggers have been alive to their marginalization within popular blog listings and within community-wide metrics that seek to reveal popular blogs. In an effort to circumvent their invisibility, Black bloggers have formed their own, alternative Black awards system, designed to highlight the interests and achievements of Black bloggers. Highlighting bloggers from over 90 countries across 31 interest-based blog categories, the Black Weblogs Awards, since their creation in 2005, have drawn public attention from traditional media entities and web publics. Such political blogs as Negrophile, The Field Negro, Jack and Jill Politics, and Postbourgie have claimed the top political blog category over the recent years of this award's existence. It is undeniable that Black bloggers are creating conscious networks to make themselves visible to their audiences; for example, at the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas (an annual US conference that highlights emerging technology trends and their consequences for politics, culture, and society), the first-ever panel on Black blogging titled Black Blogging Rockstars sought to address common issues that bloggers of color face in trying to make their blog relevant and successful to their web publics.

Very little work has been done regarding the motivations to blog among Black bloggers; however, findings from interviews reveal that Black bloggers share similar socio-economic status to bloggers in other prominent communities (Pole, 2006). According to Pole (2006), Black bloggers are highly educated, with most having attained postgraduate education. In this study, Black bloggers confirmed that they place heightened significance on Black issues relevant to their community, though they do not seem constrained or limited to adopting a Black agenda. These bloggers saw their primary audiences as highly educated and Black, and they often use their sites to encourage their primarily male audience to participate more deeply in political activity.

Black blog communities also enact identity performance, enabling participatory web publics to affirm a sense of Black identity. In enabling a focused discussion of subject matter of importance to Black communities, such as AIDS, one study also found evidence of Black identity performance as witnessed through cultural and linguistic markers, which was utilized by Black audience members to provide social support and create a sense of shared, in-group identity (Kvansy & Igwe, 2008). Yet, the limitations of the blog tool in its capacity to support threaded, complex cross-conversation among conversational participants was evidenced in another study, suggesting that the technology remains somewhat limited in its capability to support a deeply focused discussion on highly charged racial issues (Brock, 2009).

Blogging and Class

The adoption of blogging technology over the years has followed a trajectory similar to that predicted by theories such as the diffusion of innovations. Since the development of blogging software in 1999, the earliest adopters of the technology were technophiles, highly political individuals, often male, highly educated, and of a higher socioeconomic class (Rainie, 2005; Sifry, 2005, 2006). Now over a decade old, blogs can be considered a mature technology as they now yield ground to newer, trendier web activities like microblogging and social networking sites.

Current statistics on the demographics of bloggers suggest that blogging remains a tool utilized by higher socioeconomic classes. According to Technorati's 2009 State of the Blogosphere report (McLean, 2009), 75% of bloggers have college degrees, 40% have graduate degrees, and 25% earn over $100,000 annually. Like prior technologies open to interpretative usage, the blogosphere is also stratified by the skill base of its users. Though the majority of this college-educated crowd blog as a hobby (72%), 9% of bloggers are self-employed through their blog while 4% are professional bloggers for a company or organization. Bloggers who are self-employed or professional bloggers earn money through their blogging endeavors, with more than one-third of these bloggers earning over $100,000 annually. A blogger's capacity to monetize his or her blog through attracting advertising is limited to only a small percentage of this already highly educated group of web publics.

It is possible that the blog tool's encouragement of longer-form writing may have created a gap in its adoption by the poor as a vehicle to publicize their political and social experiences. Oftentimes, the acute disempowerment of the lower socioeconomic classes is made visible during natural disasters when they most lack the voice to express their vulnerability; in such situations, their stories are left to be told through the eyes of the more powerful. During the 2005 US Hurricane Katrina crisis in New Orleans, tourists, traditional media, and popular bloggers used the blog tool for disaster response management as they sought to locate missing people through blogs and database tools (Meraz, 2006). Similarly, during the 2004 Asian tsunami crisis, wealthy tourists armed with hand-held video cameras captured the event in real time, posting videos to video blogs in their efforts to become the voice for the disempowered and poor. As Zuckerman (2004) noted in his work on deploying blogs in Africa, the tool's ready availability has not resulted in its steady uptake by the third world populations most capable of being helped by its democratic potential. Territories that lack broadband access and have lower Internet penetration may be unable to reap the promised benefits of blogging.

Clues that the longer, primarily textual form of blogging may have hindered its rapid adoption among less-educated and affluent populations are readily apparent. Less socioeconomic stratification has been witnessed with photo-blogging or blogging through photos, as evidenced by Flickr photosets of the Katrina crisis, the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2007 London bombing event, and the 2009 Iranian protests. Mobile phones can capture photographs, and there is arguably less skill required to post photos to free photo-storage sites on the web like Flickr and Photobucket. Twitter, a nimble, microblogging application developed in 2006 that constrains written communication to 140-character status updates, was also readily adopted by citizens during such incidents as the 2009 Moldovan protests (Morozov, 2009; Telegraph, 2009) and the 2009 Iranian protests (Corley, 2009; Shachtman, 2009) as they sought to broadcast first-hand news accounts to an international audience. At the behest of the US government, Twitter (2009) rescheduled routine maintenance to ensure that the tool was kept functional for Iranian citizens to publicly relay their dissent during the most active period of broadcasting protests.

Blogging and Gender

Disagreement persists over gender inequity in blog tool usage. Like former technologies in the early stage of diffusion, between the years 1999 and 2005 men outstripped women in the adoption of blogging technology (Rainie, 2005). However, since 2006, many argue that women have achieved parity with men in the usage of the blog tool (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). Though some accounts continue to cite men as more predominant users (McLean, 2009), specifically in relation to political blogging (Seely, 2007), or as more credible writers than females (Armstrong & McAdams, 2009), what is clear is that women have blazed a trail in the usage of the blog tool for networking and empowerment in relation to both the domestic sphere and the political arena. As it relates to the younger generation, girls outstrip boys as content creators and in the usage of the blog tool for personal journaling and social connections (Davis, 2010; García-Gómez, 2009; Lenhart & Madden, 2005; Lenhart, Madden, Smith, & Macgill, 2007), making this generational change a fundamental shift in how genders adopt emerging Internet technologies.

As of 2010, it is more common to see women political bloggers as leading voices and sources on politics; for example, Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake feature prominently in traditional media news reports. Outside the United States, women bloggers (Campbell & Kelly, 2009) and girl bloggers (Harris, 2008) are also increasingly adopting the blog tool to document their political experiences through a personal lens. However, even as late as 2007, women political bloggers were still outnumbered by men in the top 100 popular blog listings as generated by blog aggregator tools such as Technorati. Male bloggers have suggested that female bloggers are less interested in politics (Drum, 2005a, 2005b; Ratcliffe, 2005). Women bloggers accused male bloggers of insular and gender-homophilous linking practices (Harp & Tremayne, 2006; Meraz, 2008), a trend that they state had resulted in their subversion in blog aggregators, which total a blog's incoming links as a measure of credibility, reputation, and relevance. The academic wealth of literature locating differences in writing style between women and men (Argamon, Koppel, Pennebaker, & Schler, 2007; Babcock & Laschever, 2003; Coates, 1986; Gneezy, Niederle, & Rustichini, 2003; Tannen, 1993) was also advanced as an explanation for women's difficulty in gaining an audience within the often cut-throat, highly charged, opinionated atmosphere of the political blogosphere. This is in keeping with research that supports women bloggers' more likely embrace of the personal journal blog style when compared with male bloggers, who use blogs for filtering the web's long-tail information supply (Herring & Paolillo, 2006; Karlsson, 2007; Meraz, 2008; Pederson & Macafee, 2007). Blog studies conducted outside the United States suggest less gendered usages of the blog tool (Van Doom, van Zoonen, & Wyatt, 2007) when compared to the sharp, binary gender divides found within the United States. Similarly, women's blogging intentions appear to be strongly motivated by self-expression compared to men's blogging intentions, which are typically influenced by general personal outcome expectations (Lu & Hsiao, 2009).

Since 2005, women bloggers have sought to network, in both face-to-face and online settings, in an effort to heighten their visibility and influence while providing a supportive gateway into the immense diversity of subjects of women's blogging efforts. BlogHer, created in 2005 from a face-to-face conference, is now host to thousands of women's blogs and is considered the premiere destination for locating women's blogs. In 2006, BlogHer formed an advertising network in an effort to connect women bloggers to eager marketers who continued to take note that women are the chief online purchasers for their family (Hogue, 2009). BlogHer's political influence has been visible in its attainment of credentials to cover the 2008 US Democratic National Convention in Denver, and in its invitation in 2009 by the US White House to debrief leaders on the significance of women online as a social network. Women currently outnumber men in usage of social networking sites (Taylor, 2009), and BlogHer represents a growing trend of female-only Internet spaces geared toward social connections among women, similar to other web destinations like CafeMom, iVillage, Glam, ParentsConnect, and Kaboose.

These formal organizational spaces may have given women bloggers growing confidence to document subject matter once considered the sole preserve of the private sphere. The phenomenon of sex blogging is practiced by women who seek to reassert control over the knowledge and narratives of female sexuality (Ann Wood, 2008; Attwood, 2009). Another significant trend is the phenomenon of mommyblogging (Lopez, 2009; Meraz, 2008). Mommybloggers seek to tell genuine stories of motherhood as opposed to the glamorized portrayal of mothers as presented on magazine covers. On a day-to-day basis, mommybloggers who embrace all forms of work-life balance populate their blogs with real-life accounts of such issues as post-partum depression, infertility, and frustration in juggling multiple roles as wife, mother, and worker. Prominent mommybloggers such as Heather Armstrong (Dooce.com), Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman), Alice Bradley (Flinslippy), and Stephanie Nielsen (Nie Nie Dialogues) have gained celebrity status among female audiences online, with some supporting their families from their blogs' monetization. In 2008, the power of mommybloggers as a social network was evidenced in their backlash against the company Motrin for portraying moms who wear their babies in slings as crazy and overly fashion-conscious (Petrecca, 2008). The hashtag #motrinmoms became a trending topic on Twitter, and the company Motrin was eventually forced to deliver a public apology to these mothers on the web. In the realm of politics, women and girl bloggers are also using the blog tool to document their political experiences outside the US context (Harris, 2008).

Though some high-profile women bloggers deplore the creation of separate women-only Internet spaces as an effective countermeasure strategy against male patriarchy in the blogosphere (Powers, 2004), women bloggers have used these spaces to elevate the public profile of issues once relegated to the lifestyle sections of newspapers (Harp, 2007; Poindexter, Meraz, & Schmitz-Weiss, 2008). Women bloggers' public refusal to dismiss gender inequity in the blogosphere has resulted in conscious, gender-homophilous networking for political and social purpose.

Future Trends

Trends in the content of blogging affirm its character as a public space, not a public sphere, dedicated to ideas, persons, and publics eluding the reach of mainstream media. Combining personal and mass media affordances, blogs blur agendas personal, private, and public, producing perspectives that are subjective and unique. The ensuing multiplicity of voices that fills the civic landscape promotes “dissensus” over consensus, thus “bringing to the floor what forces attempt to keep concealed” (Mouffe, quoted in Carpentier & Cammaerts, 2006, pp. 973–974). The civic effect is one of pluralization, though not of inherent democratization. Mouffe (2000) terms similar attempts agonistic, thus describing the character of expressions that are suggestive of plurality and conflict and lie at the heart of the political. Agonistic actions can have both emancipatory and destructive consequences for democratic publics, but they always succeed in promoting a somewhat anarchically driven model of disagreement that favors pluralism. Mouffe uses the concept to expose the paradox inherent in contemporary democracies that require a homogeneous public sphere at the expense of heterogeneous pluralism. As a result, the expressive autonomy of citizens is compromised for the sake of argumentative consensus. Blogs reinstate expressive autonomy to ordinary citizens, who function as agonists of contemporary democracies, pluralizing but not necessarily creating or promoting democracy. Unlike Mouffe's dissenters, bloggers are agonists of both the personal and the political. The personal becomes political, and the political remains personal, as this genre traverses and rarely distinguishes the two.

Within this plurality, there is undeniable inequality, fueled by the usage of the blog tool among a web public that is diverse in skill and interest. The utopian notion that the blog tool would transform media economics from its blockbuster, hit-driven culture of elites to a more egalitarian system of niche platforms that command smaller audiences (Anderson, 2008) has not been realized to the degree formerly perceived. True to other large-scale web networks built on Web 2.0 technologies (Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, & Johnson, 2003; Kittur & Kraut, 2008; Kittur, Suh, Pendleton, & Chi, 2007), the blogosphere is a system dominated by a few users. These celebrity blogs that command an inordinate degree of attention in the long-tail media supply have the capability to set the agenda both within the blogosphere and outside to the traditional media entities that once viewed this citizen media platform with suspicion and derision.

As blogs evolve, so do their political functions. The blog format, once celebrated for its promotion of individualism, is now utilized with the intention of maximizing network effects in both audience size and advertising dollars. Political blogs increasingly resemble traditional media newsrooms through their embrace of team blogging and editorial workflow practices similar to the traditional entities they once served to supplement or critique (Stoller, 2007). Persistent, successful blogging remains a dedicated practice of the higher-educated, higher-income, more politically interested segment of the web public. This trend is set to continue as traditional newsrooms downsize in an effort to remain profitable in a twenty-first-century media climate that no longer enables these entities to realize economic gains through constraining media supply (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). As big media bloggers join the blogosphere, and former journalists join political blogs like Politico and the Daily Beast, the US political blogosphere is being transformed from its early identification with the “pajama-clad” amateur to a climate where institutional attachments offer decided advantages to blogger independence.

Blogging, now arguably a mature technology, can be viewed in retrospect as part of the first generation of participatory Web 2.0 tools, which, though revolutionary for their time, eventually yield to tools that continue to advance our understanding of what it means to express sociality online. Blog technology, originally designed for promoting self-expression and easy web content creation, was significant in its consequence, shifting the read-only web to a read–write web for those users who lacked the technical skill to make the web responsive to their individual content-creation acts. The more participatory web public, now accustomed to the ease of uploading text, audio, and video to the web, has come to demand and expect new functionality from emerging toolkits. The blog platform, highly responsive to individual and group expression, was arguably primitive in its capacity to support community, conversation, or collaboration through its infrastructure of comment streams, trackbacks, and linking.

Applications that support immediacy and rapid, real-time updates are eroding the popularity of blogging among those networked publics that primarily desire to forge community and encourage conversation. These networked publics, not solely driven by the desire to broadcast information, are shifting to status-update platforms, or micro-media applications like Twitter and social networking sites, which encourage continuous information flow in smaller-sized increments. In the words of Edelman PR blogger Steve Rubel (2009), the blogosphere is “like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth,” in comparison to applications like Twitter, which encourage “playing doubles – and at the net all the time.” Some of these newer Web 2.0 applications like Foursquare and Gowalla include location-based features, enabling hyperconnectivity at the local level with other users who share geography and/or interest.

Whether these emerging Web 2.0 tools are viewed as a natural progression of blogging or as a replacement to blogging, what is certain is that blogging as a web activity will attract a smaller percentage of the web population as choices expand to support more specific, localized activity. To date, blogging remains the prime tool for longer-form expression, and its usage will continue to impact the political, cultural, and economic landscape of the Internet along with emerging platforms that further our capacity for connectivity and sociality.

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