A Welcome for Blogs

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for its support of the research which informed this paper (research reference number: RES-000-22-0869).

Notes

 [1] A further note on the word ‘new’, as I am using it here: I will generally only mean new at the level of timing and emergence, not new at the level of content.

 [2] The method of selection here was to conduct a Google search for ‘narcissism blogs’ and comment on the first result.

 [3] For another rendition of the narcissistic claim, this one taken up by a blogger in reference, presumably, to herself, see http://www.home.earthlink.net/∼dianegreco/

 [4] At the time of writing, I have just completed three years of research on blogging and bloggers, with a special focus on photoblogs. The first part of this research was conducted as part of a long-term collaboration between the INCITE research group (www.studioincite.com) at the University of Surry (UK). The second part was conducted as part of a one-year, ESRC-funded study of photography and the Internet.

 [5] See Kris Cohen (unpublished paper) ‘Going public’.

 [6] A typical entry: ‘Moving an Item from One Place to Another: There was an object occupying space on my table. Using my hand I picked up the item from its place. Having considered my options for a moment I placed the object on a different area of the table.’

 [7] See also http://www.slate.com/id/2115883/

 [8] For another kind of argument that blogs should count as journalism, see http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/

 [9] See Jon Stewart's brilliant satire of the mainstream media's disparagement of blog journalism, http://homepage.mac.com/onegoodmove/movies/ds021605bloggers.html

[10] For support of my implicit claim here that things, and not just people, can be interpellated, see Callon (1987).

[11] For a paper that specifies in far more detail the differences between blogs and diaries, and which shows how our understanding of emergent forms is limited by such associations, see van Dijck's ‘Composing the self: of diaries and lifeblogs’.

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Notes on contributors

Kris R. Cohen

Kris R. Cohen is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Chicago and a research fellow in the INCITE research group at the University of Surrey (UK). His current work looks at specific points of intersection between art and technology as part of an effort to track changes in the conditions and possibilities of public life.