silva rerum

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying

As anyone knows, I am a prolific researcher – when I read about topics that interest me (i.e. hegemonic masculinity, factors influencing human altruism or narrative style of Jane Austen when compared with J.K. Rowling), I invariably refer to the body of scholarly literature extant on the subject. It demarcates me in some ways, positing me in the ivory tower, and illuminates me in others, allowing me to critically examine bodies of study.

Since writing for the UBC Spectator, I have taken a keen interest in blogging (and associated social media, evidenced by my use of tools such as CoverItLive). As I am wont to do, I researched about blogging, about bloggers and about blogs. Who writes blogs? Who reads them? And what makes one blog better than another? Perhaps most salient to the voter funded media competition – what will make people read my blog and not another one? Kudos to Kristian Arciaga who assuredly drummed up support among Arts and Commerce students during the VFM, but the burden of producing worthy content still laid upon the writers of the UBC Spectator.

Even before I performed any formal scholarly investigation in the literature, I noticed several things – namely, that the UBC VFM pool was typically dominated by online heavyweights such as the UBC Insiders or the Radical Beer Tribune. How silly, I thought, how silly am I to imagine I can take either of these blogs on? But I did.

Having been an avid follower of the UBC Insiders, I knew their niche well; they were informed, savvy and insightful about student politics. And yet something bothered me about the whole concept of “insiders.” What does that make the rest of us? Outsiders? And I knew there was something very wrong. (It was also a little bit of my own vanity that was miffed at not being considered insider enough to have been asked to write for the Insiders, though it wasn’t really anyone’s fault but mine for being irrational.) I analyzed the content and the way in which the content was presented; mainly student issues written in lengthy prose with the occasional picspam to enliven the discussion. Yet for the most part, and forgive me for commenting on this, Maria’s commentary was deadpan albeit insightful (and Maayan’s was simply full of rage and indignation).

I had realised that Matthew had taken over the Radical Beer Tribune (he must have, or he would have continued it at the Blogspot location) and that his commentary was likely to also be about serious topics delivered in a slightly more amusing manner than the Insiders. I didn’t know much about Matthew but I knew that he was as privy, if not more so than Maria, to AMS insider politics.

So I started the UBC Spectator as a medium “for the rest of us.” The so-called non-insiders, non-devotees to the gospel of radical beer. And I wrote simply; I wrote what I would be amused to read. I created comprehensive link lists for people to examine candidate platforms. I exposed the people behind the platforms, the humans behind the rhetoric. What did I find? Crystal Hon was not a pushover nor overly idealistic. Jeremy Wood was actually a rather relaxed and sharply dressed individual. Ale Coates was a sweetheart. I found it increasingly difficult to tease any of the candidates as I thought of them less as abstracted candidates and more as my peers.

I soon began to notice other blogs arriving on the scene (my favourite, of which, was AMS Gossip Guy). I linked to them indiscriminately; the more the merrier I thought. And I was rewarded! The Radical Beer Tribune linked back to the Spectator within a week. And, of course, I met the loquacious Phoebe Yu.

By this point, I was trying to find new angles to make people interested in voting for the AMS elections and trying my very best to be the first to post official announcements from the AMS Elections Committee. I nailed it a few times but I was still gracious when I didn’t; I did my best to show where credit was due and the RBT really did beat me on several announcements.

The rest of the 2009 VFM competition is history but my dedication to blogging still remains. Recently, I’ve been trawling through academic databases for research on blogging and while such research is currently scanty and disorganized, I’ll share some of my more interesting findings here:

• age and gender are determinable by analyses of blog writing style (Schler et al. 2005)

• keywords that are likely indicators of a male author include “software, “google” or “server” while likely indicators of a female writer include “husband,” “cute” or “mom”
• if the author uses the words “bored” or “awesome,” they are likely within the 10s while twenty-somethings tended to use words like “college” or “apartment”
• blogs, bloggers and micro/macro-blogospheres are constantly engaged in conversation sustained by posts and links; attributes of conversational blogging include linking as conversational glue, tangential conversations and interplays between conversation with self and conversation with others (Efimova and de Moor, 2005)
• Schmidt (2007) has come up with an analytical framework with which to study blogs consisting of rules (adequacy rules and procedural rules), relations (hypertextual relations and social relations) and code (blogging software); all three of which contribute to what Schmidt calls a “blogging episode”