Relevance to Weblogs
Bourdieu looks at constructed cultural environments--higher education, fine art production and criticism, etc--rather geographically or politically bounded cultural environments, making his model a particularly useful one in computer-mediated communication contexts.
Concern over the establishment and enforcement of weblog "rules", and the emergence of a dominant class ("A-List Bloggers") who then control the emergence of new voices.
Need for human-focused analysis of patterns in online communities, rather than simply analyzing aggregate results (e.g. "power laws").
Related readings:
- Clay Shirky
in this free, decentralized, diverse, and popular medium we find astonishing inequality, inequality so extreme it makes the distribution of television ratings look positively egalitarian. In fact, a review of any of the weblog tracking initiatives such as Technorati or the blogging ecosystem project shows thousand-fold imbalances between the most popular and average weblogs. These inequalities often fall into what's known as a power law distribution, a curve where a tiny number of sites account for a majority of the in-bound links, while the vast majority of sites have a very small number of such links. (Although the correlation with links and traffic is not perfect, it is a strong proxy for audience size.) - Alex Halavais
If you look for power laws, you will find them. If you look for normal distributions, you will find them. Neither means that they exist in any sense other than the analytical shortcut that they provide. Where does your shortcut take you? - Jeremy Hunsinger
paper idea: it's not the power law: how statistical generalizations are confusing social modeling on the internet
In this paper, i will argue why what many people argue are power law models of social networks on the internet are usually not really that at all. By critiquing the assumptions built into the data gathering and measurement, combined with the theoretical modeled used, it is easy to see that through considering time in different ways and by fragmenting the data set, that there are much more complex and interesting phenomena involved in these power law situations that is being masked and hidden by the generalization. In the end, separating out the individual phenomena that seem to map to power law situations usually illustrate the the phenomena as a whole is not related to the power law, and that by using the power law to describe the phenomena, we end up losing much of the unique understandings that could make or break the application of technologies in this arena for a variety of purposes. - Multiple authors on the subject of "rules" online:
- Rebecca Blood: Weblog Ethics
- Jonathon Delacour: Weblog Ethics
- Shelley Powers: On Identity and Ethics
- Elizabeth Lawley: Rules? I don't need no stinkin' rules!