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Alexander C. Halavais, assistant professor of communication, School of Informatics, studies the ways in which new communication technologies facilitate large-scale interaction.
2004 has been called "The Year of the Blog" because blogs have
been so influential during the Iraq war, the presidential election and
the tsunami disaster. What exactly is a blog? How many people regularly
consult blogs and who are they likely to be?
There is no
hard-and-fast definition of a blog, but it tends to be a Web site with
some set of common formal characteristics: short entries listed in
reverse chronological order, a set of links to other blogs and often an
ability to comment on each item. One would think that as more and more
people are interested in blogs that definition would become more stable,
but the truth is that the "bloggy" way of doing things is increasingly
leaking into other parts of the Web, making a definition difficult.
According to a recent Pew study, more than a quarter of Americans who
use the Internet say they read blogs. That number continues to grow
quite rapidly. The number of people who write for blogs grows much more
slowly. Just like any kind of writing, it seems not to have a universal
appeal. While there are bloggers across a wide spectrum, the average
blogger tends to be slightly skewed toward those who are male, higher
income, better educated, more Internet-experienced and more urban. Blog
readers also are slightly skewed in the same directions, though they
tend to be closer to the mainstream American. It is a bit more difficult
to know how this translates around the world, though it is clear that
there are substantial cultural differences in how blogs are used.
Are blogs becoming important because of decreased public trust in
world governments or traditional media outlets, or do they complement
them?
There is some controversy over this. I suspect it is a
little bit of both. The traditional news media have always been better
at reporting the facts than they are at making sense of them. Of course,
there are exceptions to this, but generally the globalization of media
has made that interpretative role even harder. I think blogs satisfy an
important need for readers and exist in a symbiotic relationship with
existing news media. I also think that we will see some changes to how
news is gathered and delivered because of the influence of this new form
of discussing ideas. Blogging will, I think, tend to make the actions of
corporations and governments more transparent. This will introduce new
tensions, as organizations that traditionally have relied on obscurity
will need to actively reshape what part of their work is public and
what is private.
Why do individuals blog in the first place? It's a lot of work. Do
they make money doing this?
Some make a lot of money doing it,
and I have predicted that this will be the big story of 2005: who is
getting paid by whom to blog. But the vast majority do not and the
reasons that they engage in blogging are extremely varied. In some
cases, it may replace other kinds of writing: keeping a diary or a
research journal, for example. In many cases, it is because it is a way
of keeping in touch with family, friends and colleagues in a public and
non-demanding way. It is a more effective, economically viable and
socially acceptable way of espousing one's own views than, say,
publishing pamphlets or speaking on street corners. Many people feel
that the greatest advantage of blogging is the ability to meet
like-minded people and exchange ideas. It is something like the reason
you might hang out at a bar or a coffee house. But in the end, there are
as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers. It is a great mistake to
assume that the millions of bloggers out there constitute some kind of
cohesive whole or share a common set of goals.
What do you see as the future of blogging? Is this a passing
trend or the future of communication?
It has become clear that
it is the latter. I suspect the word "blog" may not be with us in two or
three years, but the practices, processes and tools that blogging
already has spawned will be with us for some time. If you want to know
what the future of the Internet looks like, look to the bloggers. Their
experiments with feeds and agents, multimedia, collaborative taxonomies,
wikis and other social software represent the vanguard of the Web: what
we will all be doing several years hence.
What does it mean to "Google" someone? Is it a good idea to
"Google" yourself?
"Googling" someone usually means simply
finding out what information exists about them on the Web, using either
the Google search engine or some wider set of tools. Some people, those
who already have public personae or who are information professionals,
probably are already aware of what Google reveals about them and may be
actively shaping their signature in cyberspace by creating home pages or
the like. Some people, either because they share a very common name or
lead relatively private lives, remain fairly anonymous on the Web. But
there is a large group of people in the middle who may not realize just
how much information about them is available through the Web. A Google
search may turn up anything from the results of a 5K race to an
embarrassing photo from a party. This might not matter, except that new
acquaintances, from potential employers to potential dates, are likely
to try to find some clues to their identity by making a quick Google
inquiry. As we find a greater use of personal publishing technologies,
along with things like camera phones and other ways of moving our
offline world online, it makes sense to take a moment to find out what
Google has to say about you.
The Internet certainly has changed the way we provide and receive
information. Have technological innovations democratized
information?
"Democratization" is a problematical term. They
have, at least temporarily, opened up fissures in the structures
authority. They provide new opportunities for creating and sharing
knowledge. For those who can make effective use of the new, networked
technologies, they provide new advantages and create new inequities. I
think there are some clear examples of socially beneficial massive
collaboration on the Web—for instance, wikipedia, a multi-language,
online encyclopedia that is collectively edited by its users and
features several hundred thousand articles—but it remains to be
seen whether these will continue and to what degree traditional
institutions will work to both constrain these new technologies and be
shaped by them.
It seems that everyone is online now, so we can just fire off an
email instead of picking up the phone or making a personal visit. Has
person-to-person communication become impersonal?
On the
contrary. Perhaps it is because I am not a particularly extroverted
person, but my social networks are now more extensive and more personal
than they could ever have been via telephone. We have evidence that
those who engage in email, instant messaging and other technologies tend
to, for example, go out with friends and socialize more often, not less.
In other words, these are essentially "social" technologies and they
encourage, rather than replace, other forms of social interaction. I
have no doubt that these technologies are changing how we interact and
we should be mindful of the negative impacts that they can have, but
also recognize where they benefit society and encourage these uses.
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have
answered it?
What is the role of these new technologies in the
academic world? Many of these new technologies—blogging, wikis (Web
sites that may be collectively edited by their users) and other social
software—provide for new forms of scholarly communication and
collaboration. Scholars are already engaged in the process of
communicating discoveries and knowledge to a wide audience, and so
participating in these networks provides for a new form of public
intellectualism and helps to build bridges from the ivory tower to the
wider world. Just as importantly, it extends the kinds of global
networks that scholars already have. We have been early adopters of
technologies like email and listservs, and just as these support our
other, more traditional forms of scholarly communication, new forms of
social software will change how we do research and teach. The conference
and classroom of the next decade will be different, and I suspect
better, because of the changes in networked social technologies.