Blogtrax

Just a quickie … I am having a guest writer on my DrJoolz blog next week.
The writer is a person who has avidly been commenting on my blog ever since I began last October.
I feel that she is already a substantial maker of the text of which my blog compriises. It will be interesting to see whether she does anything differently in her new role.
And I will comment on her.

I think I’ve probably said before that commenting on postings isn’t a really big thing for me as a blogger. It isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t tend to leave comments on other people’s blogs and I’m not particularly bothered whether or not people leave them on mine. In fact, when I first started blogging I had the comments button ‘off’. Maybe this just reflects how I am in meatspace: sometimes I have the comments button off and I can’t be bothered to comment - I don’t know.

Coming back to blogging after a break, I was interested in how lively the comment scene had become for Dr J. OK, K was quiet, but MP, SC and Dr J were leaving comments on each others blogs. And others, too. People I knew had gone comment crazy. At first I felt a bit isolated, like being in the playground when a gang starts up and you’re not in it and people you like are. There’s a conversation going on, but no way in for you.

In Lincoln I started scribbling down what people were saying about comments. Comments about comments. (I haven’t asked permission or anything, so this is sailing close to the wind ethically speaking). Very interesting. MP in conversation: I like blogging cos I get comments; JG (a one-time blogger) I tried blogging, but I felt isolated - maybe I’ll give it another go; SC Even if I get just a few comments it’s OK.

I began to wonder if I’d got it wrong (was a bad blogger or such like), whether this was about different genres of blogs (and what we aspired to), different kinds of people….or gender. I still don’t know. A lot of the blogs I read don’t have many comments at all. But then again, some do. When they do, the tone varies from the rather light-hearted banter that you often get on boards to more serious on-topic ideas stuff, and just about every shade in between.

Anyway, I’ve had a funny week with the world of comments. Well, for a start off I’ve been a bit more outgoing. Rather than just commenting on Dr J, I’ve left comments on VC, A, MP, SC and S. At the same time, I’ve had my best ever week for getting comments - that is if ‘best ever’ is a crude count of the number of comments. One of the postings has drawn 9 (to date). But it’s clearly not simply a reciprocal thing. It’s not as if people have commented on mine because I commented on theirs. There’s not a neat correspondence, and what’s more I’ve had comments from two complete strangers (maybe it’s just because they see that there’s the ‘hum of conversation’; they don’t have to break a silence). I even had an email comment on a posting from someone in the office next door at work!

Have I done something different, this week? Become a nicer person, for instance. Invited comment? Chosen safe topics? Not, conciously. Nothing, unless you count my experiment with being a bit more outgoing - could that subtley come through by own postings? The only thing that comes to mind is the jokeiness of the weird pet theme - does that soften the blog, I wonder.

And after all this ‘mild comment frenzy’, do I care? Does it matter, and what might it change? Well, from the perspective of theory, I love the fact that blog readers can also be writers. Response is good, I’m seduced by the promise of interactivity. But also, when the audience waves you know they’re there and when they shout out, they’re engaging in some way or another.

I’ve not resolved to post differently now, to pander to my audience, to include pets more, or anything like that. I may or may not keep busy commenting on other bloggers. But I have noticed I keep an eye on my blog a bit more. Sometimes it’s down there on the bar while I work (I wonder if anyone else has left a comment?). I wonder if anyone will leave a comment?

I was just wondering …

But I wanted to comment that I have noticed that people interact with me over different things in different spaces. The observation is this:
When I post pictures on my blog, people do not comment much or interact about them. So for example, on this post here I had only one comment - and that was received after a few days of the post being there. It is significant who commented - Mary Plain - she has asked me about photoshop several times and is also thinking of getting a camera. But in fact, I think she was just being polite in commenting - I had just commented on her blog.
Comparing this post (and there are other examples) with ones where the content is about areas of my research, people are much more keen to comment, like here.

Conversely, photos get lots of comments on Flickr. Now this might be an obvious point but lets move to some analysis.

Gee says that affinity spaces are about CONTENT. And people ARE selective over what content they want to interact about. There is a degree to which the stuff is just social. There is a lot of reciprocity that goes on, in terms of comments to and fro, but it has to be more than just social. There has to be a content PULL.

But this is just about comments. I wish we knew more about the silent lurkers - or blurkers - as Jackie would have it.

But also … why do you think hardly anyone reads this blog?

In trying to interrogate the concept of affinity space(s) in the activity of blogging, I’m wondering how helpful an understanding of play and social networking might be. Are the blogs and bloggers we feature most part of an existing or emergent social network that already exists, but is somehow extended and propelled in the blogosphere? And is that space more like a playspace than an affinity space?

Play is pointless in the sense that it very rarely has a primary purpose which exists outside of itself. It is essentially non-functional, although of course, various rhetorics of play do import notions of extrinsic worth (development, therapy, learning etc). Affinity spaces, according to Gee, seem to be much more guided by purpose.

what people have an affinity with (or for) is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavour or interest around which the space is organised

So, blogs could, of course be affinity spaces, but the ones we talk about do not easily constellate around a clear ‘endeavour’ or ‘interest’. Perhaps setting play and affinity in opposition will not stand up to scrutiny, but, thinking for a moment about meeting at BGC, there were times in which we inhabited a fairly unbounded (in a sense, pointless) playspace: eg at Zoots; and other times in which we entered an affinity space (more or less purposeful) to get something done. There is of course leakage, but nevertheless some sort of distinction here.

The emergence of affinity seems to happen when we begin to migrate from simply hanging out or making everyday meanings into the activities of categorisation, reflection or knowledge exchange. In tagging what we’ve said or what we’ve seen, we begin to move out of our own space, imagining, at least, a social world. A tag cluster signals the possibility of a group and shared interest. Or at Zoots we slide into a conversation about resizing photographs or the role of comments. [In this way we drag our blogs into meatspace like identity appendages.] And Blogtrax, too, and the whole enterprise of researching blogging, drags the activity out of play space into an affinity space.