The “I” represents, the “I” in network: an ethnographic study on the blogs

Abstract

This paper presents and analyses “weblogs” – popularly termed “blogs” – as a contemporary social phenomenon that engenders a specific form of presentation of the self. Blogs are defined as a modality of “on-line” personal publication where the subject enacts himself and his daily life, constantly interacting with others and attaining the potentiality of being seen and of interacting. What nurtures blogs is not, therefore, tied up to “intimacy” or “private life”. It is an invented, dramatized and constantly negotiated daily life which becomes bestowed inside specific social contexts. Thus, in the approximatory field between Symbolic Interactionism and Speech Ethnography, the analysis of the “blogging” allows understand it like a way of doing, a daily practice, in which the subjects present themselves in special ways (performances), mobilizing specific competences and building, in the course of such activity, social particular contexts. In this way, it is possible to be said that the social life in the universe of blogs unfolds in the densities of the nets, where relationships are built and are kept by means of bonds of reciprocity, by the daily interchange of visits, comments and links. It is in the backdrop of these local “blogospheres”, where subjects construct themselves through their relationship with others that blogs are constituted as a daily and procedural experience, which builds up in a constant movement between harmony and discord, between conflict and sociability.