Mundane Blogging: The Medium and Social Practices of Daily Kos
Mundane Blogging: The Medium and Social Practices of Daily Kos
Student: Carlo Scannella
Thesis Advisor: Paolo Carpignano
Abstract: This thesis examines the phenomenon of the blog as an emerging media form, arguing that the group or “community-based” blog creates a specific subjectivity (“the blogger”). It proposes that this type of blog is not simply a textual medium but a medium more closely related to speech and discourse, one that both recalls Walter Ong’s notions of media, community, and secondary orality and yet must also be situated more precisely in the context of the era of Web 2.0. It argues that the subjectivity of the blogger is characterized by three principle concepts: virtuality, networked publics, and the embodiment of technology, the latter exemplified through the blogger's “cyborg memory.” But the notion of cyborg, as this thesis argues, is not rooted in the exotic or the fantastic. Instead, the cyborg nature of the blogger is revealed through the pervasive ordinariness of blogging, which centers around practices such as checking on the news and conversing with others online, discussing not only politics, but cats, gardens, and struggles with drug addiction—in short, the mundanity of everyday life.