Tuesday, 27 August 2013

Community and culture in the Blogosphere


With the rapid development of technology, Internet is been used more widely in people’s social life. Traditional forms of media are replaced with digital media in recent times. Blogs can be seen as the transforms of dairy. More and more people like to use blogs to write down their daily observations or record some interesting things and share with their friends. Blogosphere is a new culture of media to provide a public sphere and form a discussion area to let people engage in. It made up with all the forms of blogs including microblogs. There are some well-known websites such as Google Blog, RenRen and Sina Microblog.


Community is a particular sub-culture as there are many different communities associating with various purposes in Blogosphere. For example, ‘the Blogosphere can be a vehicle for worldwide interactions and formation of global Muslin community, the ummah ’ (Lim, 2012). Especially in Indonesia, Muslin bloggers use the blogs as the new communication way to discuss about Islam relative issues. Every community has the power to force a small topic center that allows other social members to engage in discussion among Blogosphere. Community also assembles people who have the same interests or religions and push them together to form the particular theme blogs on the websites.


 
Culture is the important factor that can influence the trend of Blogosphere. Different countries have the different culture background, therefore, the domestic bloggers may focus on news and topics which are popular in their own countries. For example, American bloggers could write an article about how capitalism progress with the analysis of America current situation. Moreover, ‘When discussing terrorism, Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of terrorists. When the US is discussed, it is nearly always critically’ (Etling etc, 2009). This draws the fact that people’s thoughts, opinions can be affected deeply due to the native culture background, especially in the ways of their thinking, writing and speaking. This is the diversity between in different cultures and forms the characteristic themes, topics and news in relating to Blogosphere.

Reference

Etling, B Kelly, J Faris R and Palfrey J 2009, ‘Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent’, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/Mapping_the_Arabic_Blogosphere .
 
Lim, M 2012 ‘Life is Local in the Imagined Global Community: Islam and Politics in the Indonesian Blogosphere’, Journal of Media and Religion, vol.11, pp 127-140.    

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3 comments:

  1. Unknown30 August 2013 at 20:17

    Hi Yue Han

    Thank you for the post Yue Han

    To a degree, I agree that internet is definitely been used more widely,as a result of technology innovation, the accessibility is almost everywhere, because of such, it has become an integral part of our daily communication. But I’m not too sure about blogging. I can understand that it’s new trend - social media software tools, but I am less incline, indeed agreed with the statement that people use blogs to stay connect and interact with friends. For examples, there are many people that I came across, yet use mobile devices to interact with their friends / family as they do fear of the security / privacy concerns.

    Nevertheless, I agree that culture does have a great influence on the blogosphere – public sphere: different people from different cultural background, countries does have different views and perspective to specific interest and or news. This helps to shape the new social media – social networking trend.

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  2. Unknown2 September 2013 at 05:05

    Hi Yue Han

    Thank you for that insightful post. You used some great examples of blogging platforms instead of using the usual Facebook, Twitter or Instagram sites so thank you for that! I believe that culture is a driving force in the blogosphere as culture has a lot to with individuals opinions on certain matters such as politics. I liked your comment on how blogs are beginning to transform into peoples diaries as I've noticed that too and wrote about it in my blog post this week.
    Keep up the good work!

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  3. Unknown4 September 2013 at 05:51

    Hi Yue Han,
    Thanks for clearing the air about Muslim and their blogging because personally, I have held the notion that Muslims can never hold a rational discussion about their religion (Etling, et al, 2009). I have developed a new level of respect for the Muslim community because of your blog. I would like to propose a new direction for the Muslim blogging because I realize that both Muslims and Jews use blogs and perhaps we should turn to the blogosphere for discourse instead of conflict. Blogosphere can be a very good catalyst for peace. Perhaps we can change destiny by forging a subculture of people who reason through discourse before taking actions because the globalized world has made it easy for people to share irrespective of their background. I am looking forward to a day when we can share freely over the blogosphere irrespective of religious background and determine a new direction without being limited to the desires of the authorities or being controlled by the imperialists

    Reference
    Etling, B Kelly, J Faris R and Palfrey J (2009), ‘Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent’, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/Mapping_the_Arabic_Blogosphere .

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