Annotated Bibliography #7 – Communal discourse

‘This anchor blogs in the public arena, as part of a communal discourse’ (Mortensen & Walker 2002)

This sentence in the extract has been bothering me because I couldn’t fully understand what it means. So here is my attempt to analyse this sentence from the extract:

My first interpretation of this sentence is that while weblogs are all connected through links (as I previously explained in this post), the links connects us to an online platform or search engines which forms a community. Because no matter what hyperlink we click on, it will transport us to similar information and the linking which connects one weblog to another makes us part of a certain community; A community with similar or common topic of interest.

For example, if you Google the word ‘fashion’, the search engine would find websites that has tags linked to ‘fashion’. From the Google search results, you would find websites or blogs which are related to fashion. Google is the ‘public arena’ because it links to conversations of similar interest, making us part of the community interested in fashion.

Glance, NS, Hurst, M & Tomokiyo, T (2004) states that ‘the cross-linking that takes place between blogs, through blogrolls, explicit linking, trackbacks, and referrals has helped create a strong sense of community in the weblogging world’. Hence, it is the power of links in blogs which makes blogs part of a ‘communal discourse’ where links transport you from one blog to another making you part of a community with a discussion on similar interest.

Hence, in conclusion, everyone belongs to a certain community from the moment we are on the internet. The first tag we search on Google we are already putting ourselves into a certain community of interest, only looking for information of our own interest.

References:

• Glance, NS, Hurst, M & Tomokiyo, T 2004, ‘BlogPulse: Automated trend discovery for weblogs’, Intelliseek Applied Research Center, viewed 21 August 2011, <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.118.2654&rep=rep1&type=pdf>.
• Mortensen, T & Walker, J 2002, ‘Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool’ in Researching Ict’s in Context. Ed. Andrew Morrison. Oslo: University of Oslo, pp. 249-259.

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