danah boyd (2005). "Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice." Presented at Media Ecology Association Conference (MEA 2005). New York, New York, USA, June 22-26, 2005. [pdf] MEABrokenMetaphors.pdf
Danah Boyd is a PhD candidate at the School of Information at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on how people negotiate presentations of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts.
Reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's "rear-view mirror" effect, Boyd advocates a move past the use of limiting metaphors when talking about blogging. She argues such metaphors are fragmented and have been used by large media outlets to manipulate the image of blogging and bloggers in order to downplay their impact on the dissemination of "quality" information. Commonly, blogging is metaphorically referred to as writing in a diary or journalism but such metaphors are misleading and obfuscate the actual practice of blogging. Building off Walter Ong's notion of Secondary Orality, Boyd writes that blogging is a liminal practice which straddles the gray area between textuality/orality, corporeality/spatiality, and practice/artifact. Bloggers define themselves as well as their blogs by negotiating the tensions created by these dichotomous relationships.
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Reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's "rear-view mirror" effect, Boyd advocates a move past the use of limiting metaphors when talking about blogging. She argues such metaphors are fragmented and have been used by large media outlets to manipulate the image of blogging and bloggers in order to downplay their impact on the dissemination of "quality" information. Commonly, blogging is metaphorically referred to as writing in a diary or journalism but such metaphors are misleading and obfuscate the actual practice of blogging. Building off Walter Ong's notion of Secondary Orality, Boyd writes that blogging is a liminal practice which straddles the gray area between textuality/orality, corporeality/spatiality, and practice/artifact. Bloggers define themselves as well as their blogs by negotiating the tensions created by these dichotomous relationships.
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