Bamblog

Achtung - das Bamblog wird seit Mitte Oktober 2007 nicht mehr aktualisiert. Bitte besuchen Sie mein neues Weblog unter http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Danke! - Please note that this blog is no longer active. You can find my new blog at http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Thanks for visiting!

Good news again: My abstract on "Blogging as social action - the trias of practice, rules and relations" has been accepted for the German Online Research Conference 2005 in Zurich (22/23rd March). It’ll be my third presentation at a GOR-Conference, and I’m looking forward to meet the "Online Research crowd" again..

For those interested in this kind of stuff, here’s the abstract.. For all the others, there’ll be pictures of Zurich in March…

Blogging as social action -  the trias of practice, rules and relations.

The last two years have seen the emergence of Weblogs as a new genre of Internet-based communication, with an estimated number between two and four million Weblogs existing in September 2004. They attracted special attention during the American presidential campaign, where they played an important role for coordinating political action and creating a critical public sphere with increasing influence on the agenda setting process of traditional mass media. While their general form is rather simple - a regularly updated website with posts sorted in reverse chronological order -, they are used in different contexts, including private journals, journalistic endeaveours, internal or external organizational communication and personal knowledge management. Therefore, Weblogs can be regarded as an instance of "Social Software": tools connecting people through shared practices of computer-mediated communication.
Current Weblog research is mostly inductive and case-based. To lay theoretical grounds for further analysis, this paper proposes a sociological framework applying ideas of structuration theory and arguing that ongoing practices of "Blogging" (re-)produce two kinds of structures which in turn frame the individual blogging experience:
1. Structures as rules, framing individual actions by excluding or suggesting certain practices. Rules can range from shared but relatively noncommittal routines emerging out of frequent use, over obligatory regulations layed down in users’ agreements to specifications inscribed in the code and architecture of the Weblog software.
2. Structures as relations, connecting individual Weblogs through different mechanisms of linking between texts and authors. Depending on the context of use, the resulting networks can build or reinforce strong ties within small communities of friends, support knowledge forming and sharing through weak ties among experts of particular knowledge domains, or create public spheres where current issues are discussed.
These ideas will not only be explicated in the paper, but also additionally illustrated by empirical findings from an in-depth-study of the Weblog community "twoday.net", thus examining the trias of practice, rules and relations in detail and contributing to a better understanding of this new form of CMC.