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”