The raising of the level of stratification of cultural, commercial and political discourse within the Blogosphere

The Blogosphere as vehicle of media convergence

Elijah N. James, @00237656{Salford University}

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Contents

I. Introduction: definitionsi. Media convergence & the Blogosphere (p. 3)

II. The three arenas: society, culture & the political economyi. Society (p. 3 – 4)ii. Culture (p. 4 – 5)iii. Political economy (p. 5 – 6)

III. The fourth estate: from political economy to totalizing hegemonyi. Fragmented hegemony (p. 6 – 7)ii. Totalizing hegemony (p. 7)

IV. The marketi. Nodes/terminals (p. 7 – 8)ii. Market as zonal (p. 8 – 9)iii. Crowdsourcing (p. 9)

V. Conclusions, pp. 9 – 11.

References, pp. 11; 12.

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I. Introduction: Definitions

Media Convergence & The Blogosphere Hierarchies do not find any mode of expression in technology-enabled networked

societies. Professional journalism within the context of the convergence concept comes together from all strands within the networked society (Mudhai, 2011, p.677). The most appropriate media for use in the conveyance of the journalistic story come together in the new convergence horizon. Filak & Quinn describe convergence journalism as: “ … what takes place in the newsroom as editorial staff members work together to produce multiple products for multiple platforms to reach a mass audience with interactive content, often on a 24/7 timescale” (2005, p.4). They go on to describe convergence journalism as: “a revolutionary and evolutionary form of journalism that is emerging in many parts of the world [and] varies from country to country and from culture to culture both within countries and individual companies” (Ibid., p.3).

Certain aspects of reporting can change the outcome of political elections and highlight the drama of historical moments and the coverage of news on the Internet not only adds to these elements but enhances them. Beckett states that: “networked journalism has arrived … [in the form of] … a remarkable combination of online and mainstream, professional and citizen media … news media that has audience interactivity, participation and connectivity.” – Beckett, 2010, p.1. The entire world practice of journalism, the crucial arena for free speech, seems to move more and more towards the environment of the digital media landscape and converged technologies horizon, and networking shows how modes of operation like WikiLeaks depend on this progressive state of affairs (Mudhai, 2011, p.676).

A blog – the portmanteau of the term weblog – forms part of a discussion as an informational site published on the World Wide Web and consists of discrete entries, or posts, typically displayed in reverse chronological order, meaning, the most recent post appears first (Blood, 2000). The blogosphere comprises all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community, or as a collection of connected communities, or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.

The blogosphere affects aspects of media convergence spanning across three areas: i) society; ii) culture; iii) the broad political economy.

II. The Three Arenas: Society, Culture, & The Political Economy

SocietyIn the language of media convergence, the blogosphere brings together dissident

voices from disparate nodal points to create plurality, especially in a closed society where information control operates as a totality. Society, currently, moves according to how

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communication models affect it. An interactive and decentralized communication model such as the blogosphere – comprising essays, personal thoughts and commentary – initially linked its nodes to various other nodes in webspace, proportionately and uniquely, to create a journalism of hybridity which emerged relatively quickly as a new genre. Coalescence of public opinion fills the new spaces that open up in areas between the connectivity of nodal points. The production of genuine conversations that build community on planes of multi-leveled communication and interaction typify blogging as a whole. Civil rights and free speech, which essentially inform true democratic discourse, can threaten the mode of control employed by regimes renowned for their methods of internet censorship such as the Chinese government. As interest in citizen journalism increases, societies like China, traditionally closed, witness these new communication models evolve into polarized or binary discourses. Changes in cyberspace happen so rapidly that they have the potential to truly challenge deacde-long debates over internet regulation by oppressive structures (Hong/Wang, 2010, p.67 – 68). As the practice of blogging grows to a burgeoning size, we can hypothesize that the blogosphere represents its own regime, a space in time populated by citizen journalists situated everywhere whom borders cannot limit.

CultureAs a culture itself the blogosphere represents a topography – an arrangement of the

natural and artificial physical features of an area, or, a detailed description on a map of such features – having been subject to the culmination of successive periods of web/Internet development over time. Over the last 20 years practices of mapping the web have produced 'political geometries' that account for four distinctive spatializations: i) initially, cybernauts propelled themselves into these dimensions through links on websites during what Richard Rogers calls the “web as hyperspace period” that shaped virtual space in the 1990s (Rogers cited in Lury/Parisi/Terranova, 2012, p.18). Networks, whether distributed, decentralized or centralized, and their early typology did not correspond to network topologies that displayed a politics of association whose emerging importance highlighted hyperlinks and their mapping. Association by these limited acts shaped and demarcated a created space making links selective by their very nature; ii) thematic mapping followed, whereby the “great conversation” found its conception on the web specifically, creating the spatialization referred to as the “neo-pluralistic period” of the public sphere (Ibid., 18). Tagging and commenting‡ of online article material that generated spaces for alternative mapping reached a limit: the web's political geometries thus far had been organized by search engines of centrality, centrally, which meant as they increased in number their emerging processes of complexity required auto-spatializing. “Folksonomic spaces” such as the blogosphere emerged as a serialization of sub-spaces as part of the web's enacting of itself through the co-constructions of site owner behavior and search engine algorithms which subsequently increased these ‡ 'Tagging' refers to the practice of labeling online textual content and 'commenting' refers to the practice of

leaving remarks in threads relating to the original online textual content in a successive fashion.

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spheres; iii) the co-constitution revealed by “issue spaces” linked to “clusters of actors” helped to actualize the social networks and show how these social networks mapped the web at their inception; iv) finally, technologies of a locative nature diffused these sites and currently we see a mutation of web topology. Cybernauts can travel “physically from event to event” (Ibid.) whilst spatializations temporarily involve the network actors that construct them rather than the grounding of physical space which we now might see as a limitation perhaps faced by the old news organization.

Political economyPfister states that: “the growth of the blogosphere in the context of the political

economy of the institutional mass media … is an alternative site for the invention of public argument.” – Pfister, 2011, p.141. However, a problem presents itself in the juxtaposition of the public interest, represented by the blogosphere in this instance, and private interests represented by the institutional mass media. The processes of public deliberation which the blogosphere legitimates and the necessary processes of public argument invention that it carries both find themselves dampened by the mass media, in particular, by its political economy. The issue for convergence means here that public deliberation, which Pfister comments ought to function through those acting peripherally (as opposed to centrally), does not include the full integration of argument invention due to the marginalization of those peripheral actors by the solidifying hegemony of the mass media. The United States of America serves as the best example of where the institutional and the alternative channel failing to integrate appears most acute: in the past thirty years the reduction of fifty media firms to five overall conglomerations reveal the totalizing nature of the corporate news media. The site of investigative journalism where well staffed newsroom workforces find themselves overtaken by the pressure of advertising produce more and more syndicated material which then steadily shrinks viewpoint diversity. (Pfister, 2011, pp.143 – 144) Political economy shapes the discourse of the invention of public argument but it seems that due to the introduction of the blogosphere into the overall convergence horizon this new channel of persuasion could better represent the informing citizen as opposed to the consumer.

As a phenomenon the blogosphere takes on a relatively new role in the news media convergence horizon affecting the entire field of journalism. At present, the constitution of a field of journalism centres upon the idea of a sociological construct of mass media as an institution in terms of its political economy. Change to any such field would usually find opposition by a powerful inertia; any accepted traditional dogma. Codes of conduct – “certain rules of the game” (Ibid., 145) – that have their share in the routine of the news, work towards the news' dramatization increasing (as spectacle) and debates of an ideological nature grow narrower in the overall production of the output from the traditional journalistic field. Actions and perceptions shaped by cultural norms or rules implicit in the governance of relationships of power work to organize the actors participating in the field, whether that means bloggers as a group or the newsrooms as an entirely distinct entity. The blogosphere

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represents an increase in source points producing journalism which could potentially find itself coupled with an increase in spectators and readers from different, decentralized vantage points, to: “challenge received norms in the journalistic field and enable a transformation of the field itself.” – Pfister, 2011, p.145. The issue of making the blogosphere commercially viable for its inhabitants to produce material would either mean that its shape changes from a nodal net to an assimilated and extended arm of a field that we see reaching out to include the crowd (herd) as source.

III. The Fourth Estate: from Political Economy to Totalizing Hegemony

Fragmented HegemonyThe political blogosphere that relates to the conversation of an egalitarian collectivity

develops the continual survival of its own configuration-output of political persuasion through its use of hypertextual links to maintain its structure of a fragmented hegemony. Structures through which power exists and reproduces support a symbolic society in subordination to dominant representational structures transmitted through traditional media – the production and circulation of news – which involves the relationship of its various actors to the various different power structures to which it opposes. New media, such as the blogosphere, affects democratic processes that involve various social actors, particularly affecting national issues, issues that pertain to commonalities and even cross-national considerations as peripheral totalities (Hyun, 2012, p.398). Bloggers oppositional to political exchanges within particular power structures make use of hyperlinks to cross-section the overall conversation – a practice known as “cross cutting” (Ibid.) – engaging other bloggers in a dense subgroup network domain. Exchange of information connected via hyperlinks creates egalitarian relations between bloggers forming a network centralization; hyperlinks produce patterns of interconnectivity and network density. Political discourse, expressed through the conversational venue of the blogosphere as egalitarian and cohesive, constitutes the fragmented hegemony of the blogosphere spanning across the three arenas of political economy, culture and society specifically. The fragmented hegemony formed by the blogosphere's hypertextual nature structures the network itself in terms of “communicative relations among bloggers,” (Ibid.). Despite orientational opposition between bloggers, as opposed to bloggers of a like-minded nature who share similar political affiliations, they still participate in the arena where hypertext unites them and egalitarian collectivity represents them. Even political differentiation and bipartisan communication between bloggers contributes to the fragmented hegemony, moving the network of the blogosphere towards a homophilic tendency; 'homophily' means the predisposition among social actors “to establish social and communicative relations on the basis of the similarity of key attributes [that they share]” (Ibid., p.401). Interaction and exchange, socially and mutually, fosters trust and makes communication more efficient wherever the homophilic inclination appears but even with differences and disputes among the fragmented hegemony the blogosphere can still

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appear united through its expression of an egalitarian collectivity.

Totalizing HegemonyWe can hypothesize that the blogosphere resembles a virtual state, a totalizing

hegemony, that can actualize democratic participation through the inclusion of numbers of citizen contributors surrounding constituent speakers. The Internet search engine for searching blogs, Technorati, views the blogosphere as a State, in the conventional sense, and attempts to map the web as a live phenomenon with a current of political discourse involving citizens running through it. Blog readers numbered 346 million persons and blog-users, bloggers, numbered 184 million persons according to the 2008 estimation by Technorati. The sheer number of bloggers/blog readers shows that the “potential effect” that the blogosphere can have on political matters proves paramount, especially if, viewed as a totalizing hegemony by its own regulator, Technorati (McLaughlin & Robertson, 2011, p.109). The journalist Charlie Brooker's blog published by The Guardian on 20 May 2009 saw a debate surrounding the British National Party in receipt of 1,383 comments, clearly showing a political discourse outside the realms of the usual and traditional forms of state ministry; Brooker serving as the minister/speaker which enabled a public participation more direct and democratic than that of the actual politic (Ibid., 115). The blogosphere can give confidence to political journalists who have the scope to leverage real political change depending entirely upon the reaction of their body-politic. The Brooker-public example shows the State of the blogosphere comprising an informed public centred around a debate initiated by its constituent speaker, speakers whom in the days of political hypocrisy have more integrity, honesty, candour and reputation than do the financial or political classes (Ibid., 125). A structure emerges without class distinction but with constituent speakers that emit messages from a stratified level, ratified by their fact-opinions, emerging as a temporary hierarchy that flattens itself out immediately as audience participation occurs and grows steadily.

IV. The Market

Nodes/TerminalsThe blogosphere contains the influence of marketing aimed towards potential

consumers who can identify with a successful brand, or to put it in other words, a virulent strand. The influence of marketing via a successful brand(s) – or virulent strand(s) – appear as the key factors within the blogosphere that shape and remodel it according to related issues of consumer intrigue, particularly those that move towards where certain commercial conversations center themselves around certain commercial interests. Nodes or terminals, where we find the end-user(s) situated, can prove influential in terms of shaping the market if they identify initial trends or contribute particular commercially-leaning characteristics to the interplay of interconnected consumer discourse. Virulence depends on the strongest seeds in terms of their influencing consumer choice. Put simply, friends influence one another,

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especially in a cybernetic family where interests groups can form readily and easily; these friends then make recommendations by diffusing information purposefully across the network to create a virus with the intention of informing influential members of the interest group. Even in an abstract way, when individuals target groups, or vice versa, when groups target individuals, the buzz or hive of activity creates the word-of-mouth sensation. Commercial interests in the blogosphere gravitate around hives and buzzes which have the knock-on effect of creating trends, which, in the larger picture inform the larger corporate interest to eventually swallow up the minnow. Suggestions for purchasing seem to arise from comments by bloggers about products and services located on the lower rungs of consumer choice where word-of-mouth promotes advertising by proxy, since advertising effectively targets those who want to purchase beforehand anyway. The advertising platform within the blogosphere looks like “a huge word-of-mouth engine” (Cheng-Yang, L., Ching-Wen, C., & Yung-Ming, L., 2011, pp.5143 – 5144). Virulent strands gain prominence when passed between various nodal end-users as seeds, whereby branding forms through the recognition of trends, by which time the blogosphere as a potential site for commerce attracts larger corporate interests.

Market as ZonalThe blogosphere inhabits a space where marketing can flood its zone(s) and create

potential for products and services to reach greater audiences. Consumers will receive promotional information highly relevant to their needs through advertising campaigns if they get fed through sites within the blogosphere. Search engine results correlate to the most relevant service available to the potential consumer and offer products that appear as short advertisements depending upon specific keywords used during a search. Google pioneered their Adwords programme tailored to the scheme of flooding zones with marketing information. The website, www.adwords.google.com/, found an highly appropriate use when an account, established independently by the company DKT, worked as a platform to promote condom use in Turkey under the branding of Fiesta. Viral marketing and video uploads serve as supporting roles to the Adword scheme, along with the proliferation of promotional materials within the blogosphere. Adwords by Google, augmented by the use of Facebook, worked to reach audiences that would not have otherwise particularly favoured condom use (Purdy, 2011, p.159). The generation of positive blogs surrounding the DKT campaign took place when the company's public relations agency sent a condom encased in glass to individual bloggers which bore the headline 'In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.' Marketing that spreads via word-of-mouth depends on the novelty of the gimmick. Discourse created from within the blogosphere, by making it the site of where the news hit first, makes marketing campaigns more successful. The DKT public relations agency introduced the well-known regional sweet, Turkish Delight, as a condom flavour to blogosphere zones and gave exclusive rights to the bloggers themselves through press releases. Direct attempts at brand marketing tend to alienate bloggers who prefer to focus on

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information of a controversial nature or something with novelty, which raises the stakes of their work finding a readership, “[u]nlike the Facebook page, where direct informative posts were welcomed by fans,” – Ibid., p.161. The success of marketing towards consumers targeted by Adword campaigns depends on those adverts and their relevance maximized by keywords and their variations, often producing multiple advertisements which therefore have the capacity to reach greater numbers (Ibid., p.162). Usually companies make use of outsourcing techniques to reach their consumer base but the direct involvement of the blogosphere shows that inclusive and personable techniques prove more successful.

CrowdsourcingTrends, originally created by advertising agencies as corporate bodies now move from

separate entities to co-authorship by their baseline target audience. Consumers can now use the webcam and the laptop to put together their own adverts by “mashing-up or remixing existing ones” (Patterson, 2012, p.527) which reveals the brands they admire, leading to the creation of new ones, a phenomenon known as 'crowdsourcing'. Crowdsourcing animates marketers and encourages consumers to communicate the shifts in marketing activities to create new ideas for branding as a whole. The consumer-led approach takes the form of 'you talk, we listen' and rises up from the individual nodes and terminals and through the networked society as a virus throughout the totality of the blogosphere. Before the advent of social networking the exchange between consumer and marketer took a one-sided approach in the form of 'we talk, you listen' as the advertising platform placed itself on a stratification above its base of customers. Now the marketing relationship founded on this out-dated rhetoric moulds to the challenges opened up by currents running through the blogosphere's communication networks. Agencies through which advertising professionals move have had to change to compete with the most liked and discussed adverts for example those of the 2010 Superbowl in The United States of America. Crowdsourcing shows how convergent media can unite the bloc of the consumer, making products and services more accessible and allowing scope for the agency of the customer themselves to create trends through their discussion of movement within the blogosphere.

V. Conclusions

The convergence of far-flung individual bloggers through the rhizomatic (almost organic) structure of the entity or totality we have discussed heretofore as the blogosphere justifies a far-reaching scope for marketing. The blogosphere holds within its convergent network topography the movements and currents of disparate voices who give rise to various different types of news and consumer tendencies; the larger corporate interests have taken notice of this and have taken advantage of crowdsourcing, in particular, to make their marketing more effective. The issue for convergence seems to lead us to believe that, the

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blogosphere, already a convergent technology due to its nature of connectivity, unites the individual blogger with their community and invites direct participation from the corporate body. Interest from corporate bodies flood zonal areas of the blogosphere where consumer discourse arises to exploit that potential and thereby phenomenonize, actualize and materialize it. Trends and their recognition by their eventual branding, or logos, grows from individual seeds passing the eidos between various individual nodal end-users, gaining prominence as strands that further gain virulence. The marketing techniques discussed so far represent an entirely new way of engaging the consumer, by allowing individuals to choose their brands previous to those brands finding their formation, and we should pay attention to how the blogosphere will direct the motives of those responsible for manufacturing the consent of consumer in the future.

Political economy moves throughout the blogosphere's fragmented hegemony, uniting differentiation and even dispute through its hypertextual features, and evolves towards a totalizing hegemony as audience participation increases exponentially. The steady growth of audience participation in political discourse flattens out hierarchies as bloggers rise to the stratified level of constituent speakers to ratify their facts and opinions thereby nullifying class distinctions. The direct participation of audiences from the blogosphere who surround the political opinions of fourth estate representatives gives the impression that a direct democracy can and does circumvent the usual channels of governance. Egalitarian collectivity finds a mode of expression through fragmentation, paradoxically. Despite the homophilic inclination of the blogosphere, hypertextual links can unite even the most oppositional bloggers to form an hegemony that pushes it, conceptually, towards a State that exists virtually (if not actually, eventually). Blogs with similar interests and core key attributes – homophilic – form peripheral totalities that converge as media entities and move toward bearing State-like properties. Sourcing for the new mode of information exchange on the superhighway, as we have seen, now comes from the herd, that we could view as an extended arm of an already existing field that reaches out to nodes in the overall net. Either or both of these factors could shape the way that the blogosphere engages the political economy. The idea of the informing citizen that channels political persuasion towards the overall convergence horizon contextualizes the blogosphere as a site for the invention of public argument, as if the fourth estate could audaciously move toward a fifth estate that changes political economy completely. The blogosphere serves as the best emerging platform where the possibilities for political discourse involving grass-roots commentators have their greatest potential.

The blogosphere represents a cultural spatialization that, ironically, does not occupy a physical space, but instead constructs temporary activity in a cultural (socio-political) geometry. Organizational elements of the old news-production structures have had to adapt to the overall convergence horizon shaped by the digitalization of the media and its message. The blogosphere removes limitations that once might have been seen as a barrier. Physical occupation of space recedes in favour of constructed spatializations by network actors so that

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cybernauts can navigate from event to event. Cybernauts traverse these geometries picking up on cultural trends as they go and uproot and transplant them elsewhere to form new and diverse cultures that can grow more effectively.

The blogosphere witnesses the delimitations of physical borders by the very operation of its exchanges. Situated everywhere, citizen journalists can and do challenge power structures. Populations in the conventional sense can and do find new definitions as regimes of signs spring up within the blogosphere to form their own society or societies. The society that the blogosphere forms does not exist as a separate entity from the conventional one but works like a mirror to parallel the movements, or events, that occur on a national or global scale. Totalities, whether virtual or actual, like the blogosphere or the nation-state do manipulate information towards different ends. The blogosphere can scrutinize closed societies, like the China example we have looked at, shedding light on how and why the information we receive comes in the form that it does. Disparate nodal points enhance plurality and bring together dissident voices.

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