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The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation inpersonal publishing has also come to engender a new form ofsocial interaction on the web: a massively distributed butcompletely connected conversation covering every imaginabletopic of interest. (Marlow 2004: n.p.)In this essay I will explore some of the ways in which bloggingconstitutes a new literacy practice characterised by what Lankshearand Knobel call an “active sociality” (2006: 1). This “activesociality” is exemplified by modes of participation and displays ofidentity and affiliation that mark it out as significantly differentfrom other forms of textual communication. I will argue that thevarious practices of blogging can be best understood within theintellectual paradigm of the New Literacy Studies (Street 1995;Barton
et al.
2000; Barton 2007) which conceptualises literacy insociocultural terms as ‘practices’ embedded in different domains oflife and instantiated through local, socially-specific ‘events’. AsLankshear and Knobel summarise: “’Literacy bits’ do not exist apartfrom the social practices in which they are embedded and in whichthey are acquired” (2006: 13). I’ll also be drawing on the work ofvarious academics who have researched new and emerging multimodalliteracy practices associated with digital and mobile technologies(Davies and Merchant 2006; Lankshear and Knobel 2006) as well asresearchers who have published in more general terms on the socialimplications of digital technologies (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006;Keen 2008; Shirky 2008).There are four aspects of blogging that I find particularlyinteresting and which are relevant to this essay. Firstly,blogging’s variegated practices blur distinctions between thedomains of ‘home’ and ‘work’, between private and public spheres andbetween ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ identities. Secondly, bloggingfrequently merges ‘communications’ media (conversational, two-way)and ‘broadcast’ (transmissive, one-way) media (Shirky 2008: 85-7) tocreate hybrid forms of text production. Thirdly, blogging is viewedby some as “emblematic of [a] convergence culture" (Jenkins: 2006:225) in which traditional broadcast media and user-generated digital
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content, and the participatory practices that surround that content,have become inextricably linked. Fourthly, I’m also interested inthe ways blogging ‘remediates’, to use Jay David Bolter and RichardGrusin’s term (1999), analogue cultural practices, refashioning bothdialogue-driven as well as text-based communicative practicesthrough the specific affordances of blogging software. AlthoughRebecca Blood has claimed that “weblogs are not just a digitalvariation on an established formula […] [t]hey are of the Webitself” (2002: x), I will argue the contrary; that blogs are complexhybrids of many different types of literacy practices, many of whichpre-date digital technologies.My choice of blogs has been mainly informed by these areas ofinterest and is restricted to just two examples:
Blyde Life
 (http://theblydes.blogspot.com), an example of a personal diary-typeblog and
Greater Surbiton
(http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/),an example of a political/polemical blog. The respective blogauthors are not known to me personally although I have used workconnections to contact the authors to request permission to usetheir blogs for the purposes of this essay and to correspond withthem via email to seek clarification on a number of questions.Neither of the blogs, with respect to their authors, is an exampleof what are known as ‘A-list’ blogs with a large readership andlisted on so-called meta-blogging sites such asTechnorati; rather,they were chosen as examples of the ‘ordinary’ blogosphere. Theywere also selected on the basis of their use of popular freeblogging services – Blogger and Wordpress respectively, which typifythe sorts of technological features common to most blogs. Finally, Iwas drawn to these blogs for their contrasting characteristics:
Blyde Life
extensively exploiting multiple semiotic modalities andexemplifying private-sphere discourse going public to a knownaudience of friends and family;
Greater Surbiton
primarily, althoughnot exclusively, textual and exemplifying ‘convergence culture’, theblurring of personal and professional identities and an engagementwith a wider and heterogeneous community of readers.These blogs will be discussed in greater detail in separate sectionsof this essay. Before moving on to these ‘stories from the
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