Döring, Nicola. (2002). “Personal Homepages on the Web: A Review of Research”.

Both articles presented in this week class can be used to argue the idea that the analysis of websites is not suitable for ethnographic studies and it is just the analysis of text.
Döring writes:
Critics complain that personal home pages are often trivial or even tasteless, amateurish and superfluous products of narcissism and exhibitionism (Rothstein, 1996).
The Web is full of examples of assertive confession: the college sophomore who posted
every rock concert he ever attended, or another student chronicling every pop song he has listened to since Dec. 22, 1995. There are resumes, photos of significant others clothed and unclothed, and endless lists, not just of concerts and songs and tapes and CDs but of other Web sites where the word "cool" proliferates. Sartre had it only partly right. Hell is not other people, it's other people's home pages.

Döring does not agree with this notion and writes quite persuasive defence of personal homepages: No one's life is insignificant, no matter where they are, what they do, how old they are...
Anyone's experiences can bring something to our lives -- thought, perspective, laughs, tears. With a Webring, you're not limited to one social realm. You could jump from the nightmare of a divorced attorney in New York to a teen's ramblings about going to the mall.
Without a Webring, you might have only found the attorney's journal and her links to other journals of other attorneys. Thanks to Open Pages and the Webring concept, and with each individual's quirks and link crossovers, the range of lives accessible becomes limitless.

I do agree with Döring that “No one's life is insignificant” and don’t have anything to add to it. She said it well. On the other hand, I do agree with Sartre “hell is other people.” Some of us make hell for ourselves (criminals), majority of us have our life made into hell by criminal element.
Döring’s article was very much current in the era of personal homepages and phenomena such as jennicam.com (where Jeni transmitted her life over webcam 24/7, including her intimate life with her boyfriend). Today, personal webpages are part of web history and were replaced by bloggs and social networking sites.


Schmidt, Jan. (2007). “Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: 1409-1427

Schmidt concentrated his attention on blog culture. As he reports “Specialized search engines and meta-directories like blogpulse.com or technorati.com have tracked between 50 and 85 million blogs as of June 2007, although the exact number of blogs is impossible to state at any given point in time due to the highly dynamic and decentralized character of the blogosphere (Sifry, 2007),” (p.1). It is a large number pointing to a special psychological need in people to express themselves in writing. Smidth is not interested in psychology of blog writing, but rather he is interested in coming with a new general model that will “analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action” (p.1).
I fond a number of insights about censorship and blog etiquette, which I will use in my final paper; thus I will not be discussing this issue in this post.I found his ideas that blog usage can be investigated from the point of view of communication sociology agreeable.


Huffaker, David A. and Sandra L. Calvert. (2005). “Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10 (2)

Huffaker and Calvert article analyses the usage of weblogs and particular the language in teenage blogs. Huffaker and Calvert limited their study to a group aged 13 to 17, since as they explain, “many youth still live at home during those years, thereby providing a more homogenous sample than if some of our sample was in junior high school while others were in college” (p.2). They center their interest on the use of new forms of expressive language. This language “sometimes referred to as netspeak… is an emergent discourse that is shaped entirely by the creativity of its community” (p. 2). They provide examples, “The introduction of acronyms (e.g., "lol = laugh out loud," "brb = be right back"), plays or variations on words (e.g., "cya = see you", "latah = later"), graphical icons that represent emotions, called emoticons (e.g., :) or ;-{} ) or graphical icons that represent a real person in a virtual context, called avatars, are all examples of language produced by online communicators. This language continues to evolve and remains an important area of study when considering the ways in which Internet users interact and express who they are” (p.3).

One interesting finding was in the use of emoticons. Huffaker and Calvert explain: “Because females are traditionally more emotionally expressive than are males, we expected females to use emoticons in their blogs more often than males. Contrary to prediction, there were no overall gender differences for how often emoticons were used” (p. 13).
The final conclusion that Huffaker and Calvert draw is that “ The online presentations of teenagers demonstrate that blogs are an extension of the real world, rather than a place where people like to pretend. For instance, teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs.” It is hard to argue with this conclusion, but I have a question in my head after reading this article. People o reveal a lot of personal information on their blogs, but are they really the person that they present on their websites?