Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice (13 May 2005) The goal of this paper is to reveal tensions underlying conceptualizations of blogging. First, I introduce how metaphorical constructions of blogging are being employed and limiting research on blogging by obfuscating an understanding of bloggers’ practices. I use Ong’s ‘secondary orality’ to discuss how blogging complicates delineations between orality and textuality. Finally, I discuss other dichotomous moves in framing blogging such as spatiality and corporeality, artifact and practice, relying on bloggers’ depictions of their practices to shed light on the tensions in each. This paper stems from my ethnographic research on blogging, including seven years as a participant and insider, eighteen months as a participant-observer and eight months of explicit data collection. During those eight months, I engaged in hundreds of informal discussions with a diverse range of bloggers including early adopters and newcomers, people who blogged as part of their profession and those who blogged in their free time, college students and working mothers. Most of my discussions took place in major metropolitan areas or through email and instant messaging. I used tools like Technorati, Blogger’s Next Blog and the recently updated tools on Xanga and LiveJournal to get as much of a random sample of blogs as possible and read thousands of random blogs to get a sense of content and practice. Using a combination of snowballing, public advertisements on Craigslist and cold emails to random bloggers, I chose sixteen bloggers who represented many of the different practices I observed and heard about during my informal discussions and blog surfing. Of the sixteen subjects chosen, eight identified as male, six as female and two as transgendered. Their ages ranged from 19-57 with a mean of 29.4. All of my subjects lived in major metropolitan areas, with nine located on the west coast of the United States, four on the east coast and three around London. All but one blogged in English. Twelve identified as Caucasian, three as Asian-American and one as Latino. My subjects used a variety of different tools for blogging. My subject pool did not include teenagers, which is a significant limitation given their heavy participation in blogging. Additionally, the lack of representation of rural regions, non-English speakers and non-Western cultures limits the findings. Article URL: http://www.danah.org/papers/MEABrokenMetaphors.pdf Read 23 more articles from Apophenia sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Collaborative Performance Experiments in the Distributed Immersive Performance Project     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy