Somehow it seems fitting that I’ve chosen to write the first entry on this new blog about Micheal Kerens and his book “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena
“. I will state at the outset I have not read the book, nor am I likely to. I did locate and read this piece of drek published in the Canadian Journal of Communication in 2004. I suspect that this ‘essay’ formed the basis of his approach to the book.

The book projects the message that bloggers are:

“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills…” — Globe & Mail, Jan. 31, 2007

The problem with general statements like that is they come up to bite some. Not all bloggers consider themselves to be rebels against anything. Many consider themselves to be pursuing an outlet for their thoughts and willingness to share them. Not unlike academics who spew forth what they consider to be intellectual wisdom.

In the essay reference above the author shows himself to have an ill-formed approach to ‘understanding’ blogging. He acknowledges that the very nature of the beast makes it difficult to attempt to analyze blogging based on traditional criteria:

During the 2003 annual meeting of the Association of Internet Studies (when some of the first fruits of communication research on blogging were presented), it became immediately apparent how careful one has to be in applying traditional research methods to this new medium. Standard attempts to generalize about blogs on the basis of random sampling turned out to be quite inappropriate in the absence of a clear, stable, finite universe of blogs to be sampled.

See, he has a bit of a clue here. The nature of blogs and blogging is so widely diverse it is pretty much impossible to form general statements:

Communication studies in which traditional sampling techniques are used to make general statements about the gender or socioeconomic composure of bloggers are therefore misleading.

He’s figured out his problem here, he requires new methods of analysis if he’s going to come to understand this subject. He may have to actually think instead of using tried and true methods. That is going to be tough. So he solves the problem:

While research on such subjects as the politics of newspapers deals with individuals and institutions whose identity can, in principle, be traced, we know little about the producers of blogs besides their nicknames. The person presented in the diary may be in part or in full a fictional character and for all practical purposes, ought to be treated as such. Therefore, any statement about the nature and politics of blogging does not necessarily apply to an identifiable group of off-line actors.

There, he now has his hypothesis and methodology. He just turned millions of bloggers into fictional characters and their writing to be viewed as such. He then goes on to apply his methodology in an analysis of several years of archives of Jason Kottke’s Kottke.org. Once you understand that Keren doesn’t seen Kottke (or by extension me or you) as a real person, you can then see the weird ivory tower humour in his analysis.

A quick search on some blogs revealed that others took him and his theory just about as seriously… with some exceptions of course.

Rea over at a Brown Bag Blog: Project much? was somewhat bemused and then proceeded to skewer Kerean. After all, academics and bloggers have a lot in common, we just don’t use the big words.

Over at Bub and Pie: Lonely Hearts Club the writer has a few ideas that Keren likely should have understood before taking his approach but then the writer likely isn’t in the ivory tower and is not worthy to be heard.

Barbara at the Bad Tempered Zombie took a bit more of a serious approach in responding to Keren as did those who were commenting on her entry.

Schmutzie over at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney or Not, Here I Come well he’s got it right, you just don’t fight the ivory tower, you just reframe your life and perceptions based on what the academic has told you… resistance is futile.

The most well stated headline has got to go to Adam at One Man & His Blog — Academic Jumps on Blogging Bandwagon. Misses — he makes a good point when he points out that you know something is becoming important when academics start producing half-baked reports.

Finally, the shortest and to the point post has to go to Eugene at LE REVUE GAUCHE - Left Analysis And Comment: Lonely Academic . Well put Eugene

Keren can’t be too completely out to lunch or his publicist isn’t. By getting his message out to the mainstream media he can then get noticed by the fictional blogging world and get some buzz going, but I do hope he realizes that isn’t real. So that unreal buzz might not help to lift his book sales. He’s currently sitting in the 695,000 range in sales at Amazon.com and 224,000 at Amazon.ca.

Poor guy, he must have been feeling like Father McKenzie.