Community in the Blogosphere: The Social Construction of Textual Community

Abstract

Some worry that people’s connection to each other is declining in contemporary society. I join the chorus of theorists who object to this notion and argue that people’s connections are changing instead of disappearing. In this thesis, I qualitatively investigate one new mode of human connection: blogging. Based on 34 online interviews, I describe the experience of blogging from the perspective of bloggers. I find that although the blogosphere may appear to be just another new type of broadcast medium through which people seek fleeting moments of micro-celebrity, blogs are interactive, and bloggers are community builders. Many are more focused on forming and maintaining rich online relationships than gaining fame. I show how bloggers experience many of the same things that people in offline communities experience. Then again, I also show that community in the blogosphere is deeply affected by the differences between face-to-face interaction and asynchronous, text-based Internet interactions.