Blog as a Form of Popular Communication
In 2005 spring, a 16 years old boy from southern U.S. decided to tell his parents he was a gay and he did not take it well. Thus, his parents decided to send him to a Christian “straight camp” to get him back on the right path. He poured his emotions into a blog on his MySpace.com website which was accessible to the whole Internet. In his posting, he raised the idea of suicide and harming his parents and he wrote his emotional anguish about the camp, including a strict list of rules he would be living upon in next several weeks before leaving for the camp. Within one day, his postings began spreading among blogosphere, provoking a political demonstrating, a state investigation and international new coverage eventually (Tremayne, 2007). The impact of the experience on him remains unclear, but the whole event suggests that the power and dominance of blog in transmission of information and message are evidence comparing with the pre-blog era, in which his story unlikely spreads out further than the circle of his family and friends.
According to Gunn and Brummett (2004), among communication studies scholars, “popular communication concerns the study of objects that are widely circulated by means of mass media” (p. 708). In early time, the most popular objects of analysis were radio, television, advertisements and films. However, along with the Internet matures and becomes essential in people’s daily life, new types of popular communication medium gradually penetrate every corner in the world, such as weblog, e-mail, MSN, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. Weblogs, first introduced by Turnbull in 1999 as “the latest internet craze” in The Scotsman’s, have become one of the most popular communication tools, providing people a window to get into others’ life and making it a truly interactive, two-way communication form by which bloggers can post blog entries on every subject and get feedback from readers as well. In this paper, first I am going to introduce the background of blog development and its political impacts, demonstrate the motivations of using blogs, talk about its influences on public sphere and finally give a conclusion.
Background
In earlier 1999, two automated blog creation, Blogger and Pitas, were released to the public and during the first few months after Blogger’s release, it gained 10 to 20 new users every day, ending with 2300 registered users in that year (Blood, 2002). After a slow start, by the end of January 2001, the registered number rose to 117970, a 5029% increase in 13 months (Turnbull, 2001). Since 2002, “blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, and spinning news stories” (“Blog”, 2011) and the figure of active blogs continued to increase at an exponential rate. With the blog usage spread, hosted blog tools such as Open Diary, LiveJournal, and Xange were also largely popularized and familiar by public. By the end of the first quarter of 2004, the estimate number of blogs had grown to 31.6 million (Henning, Scheidt, Bonus & Wright, 2005) and in April 2005, blogs in existence exceeded 50 million worldwide (Riley, 2005).
With the number of blogs has increased, their ability to respond the world and thereby impact the politics satisfies people’s desire to involve in the discussion on famous political or society events happened around them. After the events of 9/11, blog posting amount and frequency rapidly grew, so as the comments per post increased as well. On September 11, 2001, blogger Dave Winer wrote on bulletin that “most of the major news sites are inaccessible, but news and pictures are reaching us through email, webcams and the weblog community” (2001). Also, in 2002 when no major media organizations responded with the substantial outcry over U.S. Senator Trent Lott’s racist remarks at Strom Thurmon’s 100th birthday party, bloggers broke the story and his controversial comments which forced the traditional media outlets renew their coverage and thereby led to Lott’s eventual resignation. (“Blog”, 2011). In the whole story, blogs made contribution on creation of political crisis and acted as an agenda setter for mass media due to the lack of original reporting by traditional media.
Early blogs were almost personal diaries that used to entertain with few friends and family members, but later they have become more globally and political in nature. “Among the blogs that have attracted the most media attention are the so-called warblogs. Warbloggers are filter bloggers who express their views on current political events” (Herring, Scheidt, Kouper & Wright, 2006, p. 27). Warblogs first appeared during post-9/11 events, in particular U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001. It has become one of the most popular political blogs on the Internet and focuses on reporting the news that mainstream medium are unlikely going to report (“Warblog”, 2011). Warblogs can be categorized as follows: participant or observer blogs; pro-war commentary/filter blogs; antiwar commentary/filter blogs; weblogs on other aspects such as military strategy or media observation and they are usually written by people in the field, particular by members of the armed forces, embedded reporters, Iraqis, or others who write about their first-hand experiences (Thompson, 2003). In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense noticed the increasing trend of warbloggings and begun to carry out regulation to monitor online activities due to their potential violence.
Motivations for using blogs
Uses and gratification studies have been used for years to gain understanding of the motivations for using mass media and mass communication, and researchers advocated applying this approach to new communication forms (Williams, Phillips & Lum, 1985). This assumption is based on that “members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives” (“Uses and gratifications theory”, 2011) which means audiences are responsible for choosing media to gratify their wide variety of needs.
In terms of one-way and two-way sources of communication, they are employed to satisfy different purposes and needs of websites. In a one-way source of site, creators post news and information that do not expect to get feedback from the readers and the readers does not engage in an interaction. From two-way sources of communication, such as chat room, Facebook, MSN, poster can get user’s response and both of them share their opinions and personal experiences during the process. Apparently, blog is a combination of one-way and two-way forms of communication. Blog readers can actively involve in an interaction with posters if they wish or they can also choose to simply scan the content. All the participations are determined by the users, not technology. As Kaya (2007) noted, “because blogs are one- and two-way methods of communication where users choose their level of participation, they may gratify entirely different needs from those met by than other Internet resources” (p. 151).
Kaya (2005) pointed out three main motivations for using weblogs: community, convenience and information seeking. He suggested that “Blogs seem to foster a sense of community, especially for those who think of themselves as online intellectuals who seek more in-depth analysis than what is available through traditional media and their online counterparts” (2007, p. 151). Blog content usually reflects the ideological learning of the biases of the bloggers who often lean to see only one side of issues and thereby the “blogrolling” inclines to follow party lines and attract a group of like-minded individuals which further gives them a sense of belonging and gets themselves feeling like they are part of the “blogosphere” (Levy, 2002; Rosenberg, 2002). Others suggest convenience as a motivation to employ blogs due to its easy-to-use venue to help busy users quickly approach to the most recent and hottest events, rather than let them access to enormous media websites to seek news and information through scanning a whole bunch of reports (Kaya, 2005). For most people, information seeking is also the most common reason for them to access blogs. Bloggers often offer more up-to-date events (some of them are updated like every 15minutes) than traditional media outlets. Further, news and information in weblog are usually from traditional media, insider knowledge and bloggers’ and users’ expertise which can guarantee the knowledge has been analyzed before posting and some controversial events and political issues cannot be gloss over or omit by traditional medium (Palser, 2002; Seipp, 2002). There are much more reasons to blog than those three ones. Maybe, some people use blog just to entertain others or unbosom themselves in a totally anonymous world.
One thing should be noted about weblogs that bloggers do not guarantee to show people unbiased and original news due to the lack of formal editorial review. Weblogs are different from established newspapers and electronic news outlets and can be seen as a form of journalism, a place to generate personal opinions anonymously and freely which means bloggers do not need to be responsible for the authenticity of the content. However, if they make mistakes, readers can quickly point them out through those man-on-the-street comments.
Using blogs to extend the public sphere
With the easy-to-use characteristics and relatively few entry barriers of blogs, they symbolize a breakthrough of journalism and the growing popularity of using blogs as a source of accessing information and news has significant contribution on extending public sphere with no doubt. The Internet is inherently democratic potential and some forms of discourse appeared on Internet seem intrinsically suited to democratic ideals (Cowley, 2010). Therefore, the blogosphere as a kind of deliberative space enlarge public discourse in an unprecedented way. It is an unruly space that no integrated defined rules for conduct, or regulation, except extreme illegal behaviors. Consequently, blog is viewed as an open forum communication tool and an egalitarian platform of public debate which allows facilitating public sphere.
Regarding its usage to extend public sphere, blog serves as a coffee house to provide the chance for thinkers from different places to gather together and exchange thoughts, share experiences and find out what others opinions on the same issues. Just as what Douglas Turnbull demonstrated in “The Blogosphere as Coffee House” (2002), “though the quality of mind present and the cross fertilization of ideas nurtured by it, the blogosphere can have an influence out of proportion to its number of readers. But even if it has no effect on society at large, the blogosphere still provides an intellectual home for its denizens, a place to go to hear the latest political developments and to find out what’s going on in the world, in the largest sense” (para. 6).
However, when blogs can be powerful public communication tools, it also has democratic weaknesses. In Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein (2007) maintained that “one of the undeniable effects of blogs is to spread misunderstandings and mistakes” (p.143). Regarding using blogs, what often occurs is the echo chamber effect that people hear only what they want to hear to help them reaffirm and fuel their own beliefs and “only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion…Real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them”(p.149).
Conclusion
Couple weeks ago, a gay teenage named Jamie Hubley took his life at home and his blog reveals his sad life and painful detail in final weeks before suicide (Pearson, 2011). The whole event caused strong repercussions in society. As we can see, blog has become a space where people can pour out their personal emotion regarding their happiness, sadness or despair, drawing sharply attention from mass media and the public and thereby causing profound social impacts. To sum up, the appearance of blogs defines the age of Internet to be more free and democratic then pre-blog era and recently, more and more similar new forms of popular communication tools derive from blogs, like Twitter (microblog) that substantial affect our life and recreation as well, providing more sources for accessing information and news.

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