Doing Fatherhood Online: Men's Parental Identities,Experiences, and Ideologies on Social Media

Online discourse about parenting has grown with the expansion of social media technologies. With a community of “dad bloggers” developing in North America, further investigation into how men write about fatherhood on the Internet is needed. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of 201 blog posts written by 40 dad bloggers. Adopting a social psychological perspective, I examine how fatherhood is constructed across lines of identity, experience, and ideology. My findings illustrate how dad bloggers reinforce and reshape family discourses in their writing about parental role models, becoming a father, work–family balance, generativity, and “good” and “bad” dads. Social media use is discussed as a part of fathering in everyday life and as a tool to display, promote, and normalize involved fatherhood.     

‘The locals are friendly!’ An empirical analysis of mobility and mooring in travel blogs

While relations of power have been a repeated theme in studies on textual representations of guest–host interaction in travel and tourism, the emerging genre of travel blogs may offer a new perspective. This paper introduces the mobility/mooring paradigm as a framework for examining communications, looking initially at travel blogs. It proposes that bloggers both ‘moor’ their interactions with foreign locals in existing archetypes by representing them in stereotypical or generic terms; and represent them in ‘mobile’ terms, as individuals whose meaning is negotiable rather than fixed. Through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of travel blog posts, it finds that bloggers mostly report local people in positive terms, that these inhabitants written about mostly work in the tourism and service industries, and are mostly reported in ‘mobile’ terms that allows for re-negotiation of their identity through interaction. The implications for research into power in travel texts are discussed, as well as suggestions for future use of the mobilities/mooring paradigm in communication studies.     

Online posting anxiety: impacts on blogging

This study investigates what influences the blog-maintenance intentions of American and Chinese bloggers. Specifically, the current study investigates the role of online posting anxiety and its determinants. Based on social cognitive theory (SCT), this study suggests that bloggers experience anxiety because of their low blogging self-efficacy, negative outcome expectations, and the specific characteristics of blogs. To investigate this hypothesis, in-depth interviews were conducted to examine the nature of online posting anxiety among American and Chinese bloggers. Ten American and 16 Chinese bloggers were interviewed online about their beliefs pertaining to blogging self-efficacy, negative outcome expectations, and online posting anxiety. The current research therefore makes a unique and original contribution, in that this research applies social cognitive concepts to explain online posting anxiety in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) domain.     

Tensions and unity in the struggle for citizenship: Swedish disability rights activists claim ‘Full Participation! Now!’

This article analyses the claims of contemporary disability rights activists mobilising in a context where de facto second-class citizenship co-exists with legal and political declarations about the rights of disabled people. As an empirical case, it focuses on the blog ‘Full Participation.Now’, which was initiated by disability rights activists in Sweden. Drawing upon citizenship research, the article points to the tensions and dilemmas featuring the bloggers’ demand for participation and equality, as well as the challenges relative to their struggle. Although the bloggers formulate contrasting arguments, the article highlights that the activists share a common aspiration for ‘full citizenship’.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

The role of reciprocation in social network formation,with an application to LiveJournal

This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals’ social networks. We follow the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year and investigate the extent to which initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. We adapt a standard capital investment model to study how reciprocation affects the build-up of the individual social capital of bloggers, as measured by their links and interactions with others. This allows us to measure the role of content production and relationship building in the dynamics of online social networks and to distinguish between the social networking and media aspects of blogging.     

Bio-citizens online: A content analysis of pro-ana and weight loss blogs

Current neoliberal ideology in Western society encourages individuals to self-monitor their body to control population health. The resulting self-surveillance includes weight management, promoted as a marker of health. Disordered eating, like anorexia, is framed as a health disorder. However, weight loss is framed as a health initiative; we argue that these framings are engaging with the same body project, encouraging thinness as a marker of health and good bio-citizenry. Using content analysis to compare online blog context created by individuals engaged in weight loss and individuals who identify as pro-anorexia, we argue and evidence that both groups are engaged in body projects with shared parameters. Findings suggest each group is striving to embody a thin ideal through weight management. Specifically, weight loss bloggers and pro-ana bloggers demonstrate similar diet and exercise behaviours in online diaries detailing their weight loss experiences. Thus, weight loss and anorexia exist on the same spectrum of responsible bio-citizenry.     

The Pastor in the Basement: Discourses of Authenticity in the Networked Public Sphere

Applying Altheide's method of ethnographic content analysis, this article tracks competing discourses of authenticity in media coverage of Jeremiah Wright and Sarah Palin. The “pastor problems” of the last election demonstrate a bias toward issues of sincerity and authenticity in the networked public sphere. Pundits and bloggers use viral videos to construct rival representations of candidates’ backstage identities. Such debates favor “flat” notions of authenticity, however, and decontextualization tends to thwart the critical gatekeeping functions of journalism. Religion serves as a proxy for issues of race, prophetic critique is demonized, and apocalyptic thinking is normalized.     

SPLOGS AND ABANDONED BLOGS: The perils of sampling bloggers and their blogs

In this paper the authors explore the problems inherent with sampling bloggers and their blogs, specifically several factors unique to these populations: spam blogs, abandoned blogs, access-restricted blogs, and non-traditional blogs. Reviewing 24 blogging studies, they focus on the four strategies that researchers have employed to sample bloggers and blogs on the Internet: self-selected and convenience samples, sampling through blog hosts, sampling with the assistance of blog aggregators or indexing websites, and sampling from ready-published lists of blogs. They look closely at the practicality of such methods and discuss their tradeoffs. They then examine several techniques that researchers utilize to sample elusive, networked and rare populations in an offline context, emphasizing how they can be applied to sampling bloggers and blogs. In conclusion, they propose that these suggestions be applied to sampling methodologies concerning other Internet-based communities.     

Blog bias: Reports,inferences, and judgments of credentialed bloggers at the 2004 nominating conventions

Public relations practitioners awarded bloggers media credentials in 2004 to the summer presidential nomination conventions. Using the Hayakawa–Lowry bias categories, this quantitative content analysis reviewed sentences posted by credentialed bloggers during the convention to examine blogger reports (attributed, unattributed), inferences (labeled, unlabeled), and judgments (attributed and favorable, unattributed and favorable, attributed and unfavorable, unattributed and unfavorable) to analyze potential bias in “coverage”.     

The evolution of the blogger: Blogger considerations of public relations-sponsored content in the blogosphere

Blogging, though a personal medium for self-expression, has also become a channel for public relations to represent organizational interests. This study addresses blogger considerations of public relations in such a personal arena. Results show that as bloggers go through an evolutionary process of blogosphere introduction, community membership, and autonomy, which influences their content considerations and willingness to work with public relations practitioners.     

Can Social Media Use Produce Enduring Social Ties? Affordances and the Case of Katrina Bloggers

Can previously unacquainted, grieving individuals who use social media to organize and participate in decentralized mobilizations build strong, lasting social ties? If so, how? What is it about particular social media technologies and platforms that might explain the strength and longevity of their social ties? Drawing on a case study of New Orleans bloggers who took part in a variety of contentious and non-contentious mobilizations after hurricane Katrina, we find that people who mobilize through social media like blogs can form strong and lasting social ties. We argue that this is partly because of the types of communication and interaction that blogs afford. We identify two types of affordances, mechanical and cultural, as distinct qualities of social media like blogs, and illustrate how they enable the building of strong, digitally mediated social ties among grieving people.     

Peak Oil and the Narrative Construction of Unmarked Identities

Resource depletion is usually an ecological or economic issue, but I approach interpretations of peak oil as the interplay between local and cultural knowledge during narrative identity construction. I examine two internet resource depletion blogs finding that bloggers compete for narrative control using identity unmarkers. Identity unmarkers are taken for granted understandings of normativity. I call this process narrative unmarking. I discuss four identity unmarkers that play on everyday sentiments of normativity: doing something, doing rationality, making plausible insights, and proposing solutions.     

Let the countdown begin — Aging experiences of young adults in countdown blogs

This paper examines a particular blog phenomenon that has not yet received much attention: Countdown blogs which are written before a significant birthday (in this paper, it is the thirtieth birthday). The bloggers fill the remaining time, often a year, with the accomplishment of particular tasks, reflections on their lives or photo projects. In their blogs, the young adults demonstrate an age awareness that is often overlooked in aging studies. The paper argues that young adults use countdown blogs to cope with their aging experiences and, in doing so, they apply a particular economic rhetoric and emerge as entrepreneurs of themselves - an identity concept that Foucault presented in the late 1970s. Foucault, however, did not consider the themes of age as symbolic capital nor the marketing strategies that entrepreneurship of the self imply. In a close reading of a sample of twenty-one countdown blogs, the paper suggests new complexities in Foucault's concept. At the same time, it argues that young adults today have developed creative strategies in terms of multimedia projects and heightened self-scrutiny to cope with the finitude of time, the expectations of age-appropriate behavior and the coercions of neoliberal consumer culture.     

The feminine style,the male influence,and the paradox of gendered political blogspace

This article explores gender differences in political communication among blogging politicians. The article sets out to explore two baseline questions: (1) Are distinct gendered ‘blogstyles’ to be found among political representatives? and (2) How do gender and gendered blogstyles interplay and affect the impact of political blogs? The empirical study draws on a survey targeting blogging politicians in Sweden (N?=?523). The analysis identifies substantial differences in how female and male politicians communicate in the blogosphere as well as the outcomes in terms of feedback and impact. Female politicians, to a greater degree than their male counterparts, utilize blogging for the purpose of fostering a stronger connection with their readers as well as to enquire about ideas and policy perspectives. This strategy seems to be successful for fostering qualitative feedback from readers; yet, female bloggers have far less impact than their male colleges. We discuss two potential understandings of these results: relating to gender stereotypes and the network power structure of the blogosphere.     

Mapping homelands through virtual spaces: transnational embodiment and Iranian diaspora bloggers

In this article I examine Iranian diaspora blogs in an attempt to understand how Iranian bloggers outside Iran create and occupy online transnational spaces. Although it is acknowledged that the internet does not make offline borders and bodies redundant, there is a need to understand how the awareness of bodily presence in offline locations and situations continually informs and shapes online expressions. Through content analysis of English language blogs by Iranians based in the USA and Canada, as well as interviews with diaspora Iranians who read and write these blogs, I advance a concept of ‘transnational embodiment’. The importance of physical travel to, proximity to, and sensory impressions of particular places within two bounded, politically distinct nation‐states shows that diasporas rely heavily on embodied experience in constructing transnational spaces and not only on psychic ties and recalled memories. Members of the second‐generation Iranian diaspora reveal unique types of embodied ties to a diaspora ‘home’ through their apparent search for authenticity.     

The Blog-Mediated Crisis Communication Model: Recommendations for Responding to Influential External Blogs

Practitioners and academics are buzzing about the impact of the blogosphere on public relations practices. Emerging evidence indicates that strategically managing blog-mediated public relations may be especially critical for crisis managers. Yet, no known research provides a comprehensive, theoretically sound approach indicating how crisis managers should engage with the blogosphere. Therefore, this study proposes a new conceptual model to help public relations professionals navigate the evolving blogosphere: the blog-mediated crisis communication model. This model helps crisis managers monitor the blogosphere and respond, when appropriate, to influential bloggers. Future research will test the model in applied contexts, working with corporate, government, and nonprofit organizations.     

Street Harassment: Current and Promising Avenues for Researchers and Activists

Research about street harassment indicates that the problem is far reaching in its effects and that most women and girls experience sexual harassment from men they do not know in public spaces. In recent years, an increasing number of activists, bloggers, and online media outlets have published pieces about street harassment, reflecting a growing and international anti‐street harassment social movement. In this article, I discuss what scholars and activists tell us about street harassment, including prevalence, victims, harassers, responses and consequences, and theoretical explanations. I conclude with suggestions for further research, a call for more attention to the influence of overlapping inequalities, and an appeal to researchers to further explore this serious social problem.     

Qualified privilege: A defense for the public relations function

Technology continues to challenge the public relations practitioner to find ways to inform key constituents. The new technology has given rise to the “new journalism” that includes a declining traditional media and exploding internet media filled with websites and bloggers. The question posed by this research asks: Does the public relations practitioner inherit the same protection offered by “qualified privilege” that is most often associated with the traditional “press” or “reporter?” The research lays a foundation with an examination of defamation and the defense of qualified privilege. The research concludes that if information gathered by the public relations practitioner meets the “intent” and “content” tests, the information qualifies as news. Passing the “news” test, the defense of “qualified privilege” also attaches to the public relations practitioner.