Wei: “Formation of Norms in a Blog Community”

The blogosphere as a rhetorical space; once again it’s impossible to avoid the tendency to see the virtual world in architectural/geographical terms, with paths, locations, planned and unplanned communities, deserted, semi-deserted, and populated places; and the purpose, parameters, and conventions of any given space shape the communication going on within. Wei investigates how a blogging community’s culture influences the development and practice of its ‘norms’ – its rules and practices, stated and unstated. She looks at the Knitting Bloggers’s webring, an example of an active community that functions in the real world, the virtual world, and various combinations of the two. Wei explains her method, which involved two coders – herself, familiar with the webring, and another, who was not. She examines stated norms and compared information found in the webring to them. The most interesting finds (for me) were that the English-only rule originated in the desire to protect the ring from being linked to porn sites, something that never would have occurred to me; and the suggestion that at least some communities in the digital world, as in the real world, do the expected (create conditions, parameters, and rules) but also the unexpected. We’ve already encountered the idea that we bring old practices into a new medium, and then find new practices shaped by the medium, and Wei’s study seems to reinforce this.

I’m trying to think about blogging communities in relation to, or in terms of, real or offline communities, while at the same time as unique constituencies boldly going where no group has gone before. They are at once real ongoing interactions and more-or-less permanent records of the same – a historical record of interaction being created simultaneously by groups of people from two or three to thousands. They are human meetings and actions that aren’t merely temporal, occurring and then departing at discrete points along a linear time line; if I joined the Knitting Bloggers’ webring today, I could go back and read and comment on activities that happened a year ago, seeing them as they happened. Time travel is now, in a sense possible. This new space has lost some constraints, even as we try to establish some norms for it.

Wei found that the level of participation (one norm was set for this) varied pretty widely, and this to me is another interesting aspect of blogs that makes me think of virtual reality as an enormous bustling cosmos with as many or more deserted storefronts, parks, and homes as places of activity. Blogs, to paraphrase Woody Allen, are like sharks: they have to be active and moving forward, if not to survive (since I imagine they just stay out there, even if deserted), then to thrive. People simply stop reading blogs if no new material is posted. And yet they remain – as if you wandered into a deserted café and could see a detailed image of all the evenings hosted there.

I didn’t mind reading this material online; there were relatively few hyperlinks and I found interesting the way I judged and selected which ones to follow. In principle and most practice, I like hyperlinks because I’ve always been a hyperlink reader even with print, stopping my reading to make notes of something to look up or looking it up if I had the materials at hand. Hyperlinks are just so damn handy.