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This dissertation examines the effectiveness of blogging to improve student writing fluency and writing self-efficacy in ninth-grade English courses at Mount St. Mary Academy. Utilizing a case study approach with convergent mixed methods, a paired samples t-test found no statistically significant changes in pre- and post-assessments of general and writing self-efficacy over an eight-week period. A bivariate correlation revealed a moderately positive linear and statistically significant relationship between SESAW (pre- and post-assessment) and WCVALUER scores—indicating a strong association between initial self-efficacy and writing fluency development. Furthermore, specific blogging activities, such as reflective pieces following a communal class retreat, showed significant correlations with the SESAW and WCVALUER. The qualitative analysis revealed both positive and negative perceptions of writing among students, highlighting areas of stress and anxiety alongside opportunities for engagement and growth. Implications for practice include program refinements and tailored interventions to meet student needs, supported by ongoing faculty development programs. Future research could explore unique correlations observed in this study, particularly relating to communal experiences like the class retreat. While this study adds to the understanding of blogging as a tool for enhancing student writing outcomes, continued research and refinement of instructional practices are essential for maximizing its effectiveness in educational contexts.

The ongoing transition of Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 has had interesting effects of mediated communication, especially for online content creators. In the current Internet era of alternative media, this has had a great impact on the world of blogging, no longer requiring specific web development skills to be successful. This study explored non-activist alternative media content creators, who specifically create non-political content. These content creators were explored in two ways: by examining their audiences as well as their content. In this case, two research sites were explored: Angry Metal Guy and Nattskog’s Blog. Both sites create blog posts containing music reviews, interviews, and live concert reviews for extreme metal bands. Genre theory, affordances, and remediation theory were important lenses which were applied to the two research sites and a qualitative content analysis was used to reveal how genre, affordances, and remediation appear on Angry Metal Guy and Nattskog’s Blog. Audience interactions and their effect on content creation was explored using interviews. In total, twelve interviews occurred, lasting one-to-three hours. It was discovered that these non-activist alternative media content creators had mixed feelings concerning their perceptions of journalism, or if they consider themself a journalist. Journalistic doxa was used to help explain this phenomenon, but it is also important to note that these mixed feelings on how non-activist alternative media content creators perceive journalism may lead to lasting effects on how we define participatory journalism in the future. It was also found that in terms of audience interactions, constructive and destructive forms of criticism had the most impact on content creation. Through qualitative content analysis, 50 individual blog posts were examined in this research. It demonstrates that no new genre frameworks are present between the two research sites, but discovers genre fluidity, which I define as the culmination of different genres working together, in this case, to positively impact the user experience. This research reveals affordances are similar due to the nature of website hosts and their design, but is greatly impacted by the level of audience participation. It also discovers that remediation is regularly used in the content creation process for non-activist content creators due to the ease of repurposing digital media, such as photos and videos, from other parts of the Internet.

Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, an individual whom both readers of her blog, and readers of the novel, are encouraged to trust. Her use of a pseudonym, the non-American black, offers her sanctuary to decipher an identity for herself as a migrant, and creates space for kinship with others who value her writing as psychological and spiritual support. This updates the socially engaged practice that Toni Morrison has recommended as part of a framework for her own writing, a practice that engages with the conflict between the public and private lives of artists. Although philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others have argued that online anonymity should be eradicated, Ifemelu’s story illustrates a contradictory case in which the cultural traditions of the formerly colonized benefit from the privacy of anonymity. Further, Americanah exemplifies how the web, which was built to be nonhierarchical, is a place where black art flourishes, and that the web is a natural tool for politically engaged creativity.

The purpose of this action research study was to document the use of blogging in a middle school choral classroom. Research questions investigated the use of my blog, The Chorus Room, over the study period, how my understanding of the student learning process changed because of my blogging practices, how I perceived the influence of blogging on my practice and development as a teacher, my students’ perceptions of the influence of blogging on their music learning experience, and how I drew meaning from student responses to blog posts. During the fall 2018 semester, I regularly engaged in often overlapping cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Published blog posts suggested that at least 35 cycles occurred during the study period. Data was collected through analysis of published blog posts from the study period, teacher-researcher journals, focus group transcriptions and an emergent data source: informal commentary. Findings suggest that blogging led to experimentation with more new assignments, lessons, and technology than ever before; increased student engagement; and increased knowledge of online resources. Students noted an increase in attentive listening and positive attitudes, felt that they grew closer as a group, and developed more vocally than in previous years. Blogging in music education is a relatively undiscovered tool with untapped potential to provide outlets for professional development, networking, resources, personal growth, and practical models for both active and pre-service educators. Additional study and development of this topic could lead to an increased knowledge base and resources for the everyday music teacher.

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to explore the world of blogging and how it can be used to market and establish a publisher’s brand to the specific audience of current and potential authors and readers. While blogging has been a frequent topic in publishing circles, it has only recently emerged as a crucial marketing strategy that companies utilize to promote, strengthen, and progress their brands in various fields. All through this thesis, I will discuss the issues related to any social media advertising agent, analyze how communities are formed online and the advantage of doing so, the many ways blogging is used by publishers, and the best practices to ensure their blogs are not only sustainable but safe and successful in improving their brand and reputation.

This thesis introduces “counterpublic intellectualism” to the field of composition and rhetoric as an oppositional mode of intellectual public engagement. I argue that power differentials complicate public intellectualism and its modes of publicity. After building the theoretical foundation and outlining the participatory research design, I offer findings from two case studies on feminist counterpublic bloggers on Tumblr. I introduce “Farrah” of Feminist Women of Color. She uses agitational rhetoric to provoke consciousness-raising. Drawing upon Black feminist autoethnography, I argue that Farrah offers an interactional model for feminist counterpublic intellectualism. The second case study involves Liz Laribee of Saved by the bell hooks. She uses mashup memes of Saved by the Bell stills and bell hooks quotes to invoke consciousness-raising. Drawing upon Kristie Fleckenstein’s visual antinomy, I argue that Laribee offers a thematic model for feminist counterpublic intellectualism. Lastly, I discuss the broader theoretical, pedagogical implications for the field.

As readership of fashion blogs has increased, so too has their influence on ordinary people, or so one would believe. The objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the perceived influence of fashion bloggers through examination of several industry-recognized “influential blogs” and a survey of blog reader’s perception of influence. This study seeks to identify the key elements of blog content that fashion bloggers must possess at a minimum to have any significant degree of influence on their readers. Four key elements have been identified as fundamental to having and sustaining influence among blog readers, in general; (1) Trustworthiness (2) Expertise (3) Personal Relevance and (4) Authenticity. A survey of 159 fashion students at Kent State University’s Fashion School was conducted to gain further insight into the fashion blog readers’ perceptions of influence in the context of these four key elements. The presence (or absence) of the four elements do appear to positively (or negatively) impact influence on a typical fashion blog reader or subscriber. The essential findings from the survey demonstrate that a blog’s influence remains linked to readers’ perceptions, particularly in the context of these four elements, and may well be evaluated and ranked on such key elements. This study also found that fashion bloggers are progressively more influential as a result of the interactive elements of prevailing social media platforms and the proliferation of digital technology, which tend to increase electronic word-of-mouth and further contribute to the fashion blogger’s level of influence. The practical implications are clear for fashion bloggers and personal style bloggers who strive to have any degree of influence on readers and subscribers to their blogs, as well as those who seek to attract and sustain an audience as a successful business model within the increasingly competitive world of fashion blogs.

This Master’s report represents the culmination of a self-study that lasted from January to May 2014, wherein I set out to evaluate the standing of Medium.com—an online communal blogging platform—as a contender in the participatory web. I conducted the original self-study with a fixed scope and a certain set of goals in mind. Based on feedback from my instructor and peers, however, I have endeavored to build upon my prior research by further analyzing my personal experience with Medium’s participatory aspects, taking my previous conclusions in a new direction, and using the benefit of a year’s hindsight—between the present day and the time when I finished the first version of this paper—to see how far Medium has come. This Master’s report, therefore, will be split into two parts. The first, entitled “The Original Self-Study on Participatory Web Activities,” will feature a complete and unaltered report of the original research I carried out last year. The second, “Another Look,” features a) a review of the updates Medium has implemented over the past year, which have allowed for greater discoverability for Medium’s published content and richer modes of interaction between its users; b) a snapshot of Medium’s userbase and incoming traffic as illustrated by data analytics; c) a revisiting of Medium’s participatory aspects and list of best practices for engaging with the service; d) a review of Medium’s competition; e) an updated conclusion that synthesizes the foregoing items. From these assessments, I have concluded that Medium is continuing to take steps to become the ideal communal publishing platform where anyone can publish and be discovered, and that the site is consolidating its status as a major player in today’s participatory web.

This Master’s report represents the culmination of a self-study that lasted from January to May 2014, wherein I set out to evaluate the standing of Medium.com—an online communal blogging platform—as a contender in the participatory web. I conducted the original self-study with a fixed scope and a certain set of goals in mind. Based on feedback from my instructor and peers, however, I have endeavored to build upon my prior research by further analyzing my personal experience with Medium’s participatory aspects, taking my previous conclusions in a new direction, and using the benefit of a year’s hindsight—between the present day and the time when I finished the first version of this paper—to see how far Medium has come. This Master’s report, therefore, will be split into two parts. The first, entitled “The Original Self-Study on Participatory Web Activities,” will feature a complete and unaltered report of the original research I carried out last year. The second, “Another Look,” features a) a review of the updates Medium has implemented over the past year, which have allowed for greater discoverability for Medium’s published content and richer modes of interaction between its users; b) a snapshot of Medium’s userbase and incoming traffic as illustrated by data analytics; c) a revisiting of Medium’s participatory aspects and list of best practices for engaging with the service; d) a review of Medium’s competition; e) an updated conclusion that synthesizes the foregoing items. From these assessments, I have concluded that Medium is continuing to take steps to become the ideal communal publishing platform where anyone can publish and be discovered, and that the site is consolidating its status as a major player in today’s participatory web.

This study examines secular mommy bloggers, a group of women who blog about the difficulties of being a nonbeliever parent in a predominantly religious society. In this study, I explore the rhetorical dimensions of four separate blogs by investigating how each mother builds identity within her personal blog and how her sense of identity enables her to construct individual ethos. Furthermore, I illustrate how the individual ethos of each blogger contributes to a group ethos representing the entire secular parenting community. Ultimately, I show how these mothers rhetorically set themselves apart from other nonbeliever/secular groups.

This multiple case study explores the ways in which Latina/a immigrant children make sense of immigration by reading critical multicultural texts and blogging. As U.S. immigration policy shifts have created more punitive policies for immigrant adults, these changes place both documented and undocumented children in difficult situations. With many children born in the U.S. as citizens, these families are identified as "mixed-status" families because of the rights and privileges that immigrant children and parents are afforded or denied (Capps & Fortuny, 2006). What appears to be missing from the research around immigration status and children of immigrants is how literacy, in particular digital literacy or blogging can play a role in the understanding of immigration. Studies have illustrated that critical literacy discussions often help facilitate Latina/a immigrant youth's understandings of the multiple communities and larger social spaces and their identities. Moreover, blogging also gives students an opportunity to express themselves in a way which will make them feel comfortable, which is not always possible in a classroom setting (Bloch, 2011, p. 159). The questions guiding this study are: How does reading critical multicultural texts around immigration issues and discussions in computer-mediated discourse communities help children make meaning of a larger social issue like immigration? and (2) How do children use computer mediated discussions to deepen their understandings of literature? Three lines of inquiry guided the research: social constructivist learning theories (Gee, 2004; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978), critical literacy theory (Lewison, Flint, & Van Sluys, 2002: Luke, 2012; Luke & Freebody, 2012), and transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1978, 2005; Smagorinsky, 2001). Participants in the study were third grade Latina/a students. Data sources included students' blog posts, audio recordings of classroom discussions, student writing samples, field notes, and interviews. Constant comparative approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1965) was used to analyze the data. Findings demonstrate that discussions and blogging afforded students a space to deconstruct the complexities surrounding immigration and immigration policies. Students' gained a greater sense of agency when disrupting the status quo and taking action on such issues. The broader implications from this study highlight the need to use varied modalities and formats when working with culturally diverse students and critical multicultural texts.

This thesis describes the results of research conducted to explore whether the well-established types of motives in uses and gratifications theory can be expanded, especially in the study of social media, to incorporate motives gleaned from other theories, specifically impression management or self-presentation theory. The research conducted explored whether motives drawn from impression management theory and from uses and gratification theory can be identified among individuals writing personal and professional blogs, how bloggers articulate their motives for blogging and whether different motives might obtain for each.

Copyright infringement within a Pinterest generation is growing at an alarming rate. This study sought to explain the phenomenon of stealing on Pinterest through a study of social interaction and perception thereof. The author found that the overall concept of interaction was widely misunderstood, along with the current copyright laws, leading to a broken sense of ethicality among the Pinterest generation. Through this study the impact of peer interaction, in compliance with the standards of Bandura's Social Learning theory (1977), was reviewed and found applicable to the Pinterest generation today. This study proved it relevant to further research the ethical and moral compasses of the Pinterest generation in an ever-growing digital age.

This thesis explores the ethical rules and regulations bloggers employ to protect their online communities. Rather than analyzing actual blog posts, as done by previous research, this paper focuses on comment policies in 100 feminist blogs to see how these policies reflect the ethical norms bloggers endorse and the ethical violations they encounter in the comments. Additionally, a survey of 113 feminist bloggers reveals how this subgroup of bloggers defines, communicates, and enforces the norms established in their comment policies. By comparing and contrasting the findings with existing research and theories, this study aims at answering the question of how comment policies get translated into reality and whether they appropriately address the moral dilemmas in this area. While the policies generally deal with relevant ethical violations, this study’s findings suggest that policies should particularly emphasize bigotry, prejudice based on privilege, and fat/slut/victim shaming.

This study of forty-nine Christian blogs explores how groups of bloggers in two case studies resist and/or perpetuate hegemonic gender ideologies online and where these bloggers draw authority from for these views. The findings reveal that bloggers are most likely to cite texts as sources of authority and are more likely to affirm authority (78.1%) than to challenge it (25.7%). The bloggers in my sample, who were majority male, use an array of strategies in their efforts to resist hegemonic gender norms. These included, but are not limited to, debating God’s gender, emphasizing women’s roles in the Bible, privileging equality in theological interpretations, redefining masculinity and employing satire and images to delegitimize hegemonic power.

iTrak is a combined mobile and web application that takes advantage of the GPS to allow travelers to share their experience while travelling. The application gathers GPS data and broadcasts it via a web interface or social networks such as Facebook to update user’s status during a trip. iTrak is also equipped with other features such as writing notes or recording video journals to offer a rich experience and provide an interactive diary, along with a real-time tracking ability, for travelers.

This dissertation refutes the notion that contemporary girls are uninterested in feminism by exploring how teenage girls are engaging in feminist activism as bloggers. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I analyze how girl bloggers produce feminist identities and practices that challenge hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal cultural politics. I employ feminist ethnographic methods, including a series of in-depth interviews with U.S. -based girl feminist bloggers and an online collaborative focus group, as well as a discursive and ideological textual analysis of girl-produced feminist blogs. Using these methods, I privilege girls' voices while proposing a model for conducting feminist ethnography online. In doing so, I demonstrate how girls' feminist blogging functions as an activist practice through networked counterpublics, intervening in mainstream and sometimes even commercial public space. I position this activism within a lengthy tradition of American feminism, analyzing how my participants remain in conversation with feminist history while simultaneously responding to their unique cultural climate. Finally, I argue that we must recognize the political importance of girls' feminist blogging by theorizing it as an emergent citizenship practice that makes feminism an accessible discourse to contemporary teenage girls.

The purpose of this study was to determine if online reflections through social networking affect students' sense of community and levels of perceived conceptual learning in Algebra I courses. Social constructivism, connectivism, and computer-mediated communication in relation to reflective practices form the theoretical and practical framework for the use of Web 2.0 technologies in this investigation. A quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design was used to examine Algebra I students' sense of community as measured by the Sense of Classroom Community Index, and perceived learning as measured by Perceived Learning Instrument. The sample consisted of 27 Algebra I students at a Central Florida middle school. There were 14 participants in the experimental group and 13 students in the control group. Both groups completed pre and posttest survey instruments for the independent variables of sense of community and perceived learning. The tests were separated by four weeks of instruction on Algebra 1 course content and participation in discourse through face-to-face and discussion board formats. Independent t-tests were employed in data analysis. The results of the study revealed no significant differences between experimental and control groups in relation to students' sense of community and perceived learning. However, the findings support curriculum design targeted to those concepts Algebra I students have the most difficulty with, and advance the understanding of students' cognitive development and feelings regarding comfort when communicating their mathematical thinking through Web 2.0 technologies.

iTrak is a combined mobile and web application that takes advantage of the GPS to allow travelers to share their experience while travelling. The application gathers GPS data and broadcasts it via a web interface or social networks such as Facebook to update user’s status during a trip. iTrak is also equipped with other features such as writing notes or recording video journals to offer a rich experience and provide an interactive diary, along with a real-time tracking ability, for travelers.

This dissertation refutes the notion that contemporary girls are uninterested in feminism by exploring how teenage girls are engaging in feminist activism as bloggers. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I analyze how girl bloggers produce feminist identities and practices that challenge hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal cultural politics. I employ feminist ethnographic methods, including a series of in-depth interviews with U.S. -based girl feminist bloggers and an online collaborative focus group, as well as a discursive and ideological textual analysis of girl-produced feminist blogs. Using these methods, I privilege girls' voices while proposing a model for conducting feminist ethnography online. In doing so, I demonstrate how girls' feminist blogging functions as an activist practice through networked counterpublics, intervening in mainstream and sometimes even commercial public space. I position this activism within a lengthy tradition of American feminism, analyzing how my participants remain in conversation with feminist history while simultaneously responding to their unique cultural climate. Finally, I argue that we must recognize the political importance of girls' feminist blogging by theorizing it as an emergent citizenship practice that makes feminism an accessible discourse to contemporary teenage girls.

The purpose of this study is to examine credibility as it pertains to blogging. While studies have traditionally considered credibility in the context of the material being created, this study examines source credibility in the context of the personality creating the material. Therefore, this study functions primarily as an exploratory study and seeks to present an understanding of source credibility from the perspective of the individuals participating in blogging communities cultivated by influential bloggers. An interview questionnaire was specially developed for this study. Ten participants were selected for this study. Eight of them are females, two of the participants are males. All but one of the participants are Caucasians. The study’s results show that support for attributions of credibility differing based on receiver gender and ethnicity does not exist. However, there was a difference in the types of credible behavior attributed to the bloggers in this study. Responses concerning the male Hispanic blogger indicate credibly behavior oriented toward providing depth of information, whereas responses concerning the White female blogger indicated an inclination toward a community-centric blog focused on providing a broad range of resources. Due to the limited sample size of this study, the ability to make general statements and infer statistical significance is limited, thus relegating this study to being only useful for exploratory purposes. This study’s results, data interpretation, implications, and possibilities for future research are discussed at length.

Blogs have become a staple for many online users as the world becomes more and more connected. Blogs are websites often maintained by individuals who comment on anything that interests them. They are diaries of sorts from which individuals can broadcast their thoughts and opinions to the world. Musician blogs are websites where musicians discuss their lives and craft. These blog present the writer’s opinions about their specific instruments, genre, group and many things. This study analyzes in-depth interviews with 20 musician bloggers to understand their motivations and satisfaction they receive from blogging. This study will analyze seven motivations for blogging: self-documentation, improving writing, self-expression, medium appeal, information, passing time, and socialization. The goal was to answer what motivates musicians to blog and what satisfactions do musicians receive from blogging. This is important because it shows that not all bloggers have the same motivations or satisfactions. Adviser: John R. Bender

This study examined the impact of a private classroom blog implemented as an instructional technology on student writing proficiency in a world language with the focus on formal writing. The nonequivalent control-group, pre-posttest design was used to determine if the use of the private classroom blog in teaching world language formal writing affected student writing proficiency with the specific focus on task completion, comprehensibility, level of discourse, vocabulary, and language control. This research study used a convenience sample of sophomore, junior, and senior students in a Georgia public high school. Independent raters evaluated students' writings using the Fairfax County Public Schools writing analytic rubric for level three. The researcher used ANCOVA to compare the posttest mean of the experimental group to the posttest mean of the control group in each category. No statistically significant differences were found between the two groups in any of the categories. Study limitations are outlined and suggestions for future research are included.

This narrative research study investigated the identity development process of a group of beginning teachers participating in Teach For America (TFA). The participants (n=3) were middle or high school teachers who had taught in high needs, low income urban school settings. They had also blogged on the “Teach For Us” blog hosting site about their experiences in the classroom as beginning teachers. Through the lenses of Sfard and Prusak’s (2005) narrative theory of identity and Mead’s (1934) social theory of identity and the role of the “Generalized Other”, narrative research techniques were used to analyze the stories found in their blog postings. Their stories show that these teachers were ill prepared for the realities they would face and that teaching in a challenging, high poverty, urban school setting was at times overwhelming. The duality and struggle between their Generalized Other concepts of a TFA corps member and who they were becoming as a teacher was found throughout their stories. The stories also show that over time, each became more confident in their abilities and in who they were becoming as a teacher. With this growth came more job satisfaction, yet each decided to leave their TFA placement schools after their second year to pursue other options. Themes include the struggles the teachers faced their first year, the transformation that occurred during their second year, the conflicts between their TFA identity and their teacher identity, the impact of high stakes testing and racial issues, and the cathartic nature of blogging.

This dissertation examines the construct of literacy sponsorship within the context of online literacy practices of soldiers blogging from Iraq and Afghanistan between 2008 and 2010. While existing treatments of the literacy sponsorship construct are situated within print-based modes of textual production, I argue that the new media context poses significant complications for current assumptions central to the construct; namely, that individuals pursue literacy practices as a means of socioeconomic empowerment, and that institutional definitions of literacy reproduce institutional ideologies. The case of military blogs is of particular import given current Department of Defense efforts to maintain information security during wartime. Additionally, this study extends current understandings of sponsorship by situating the study of sponsorship within actual discourse practices of sponsors and soldiers. This study draws on a multi-method approach of data collection and analysis in the forms of document collection from the Department of Defense, email interviews with nine currently deployed soldiers, and textual analysis of the soldiers’ blogs. The research design, in the form of a case study, provides a framework in which researcher-generated data and participant-generated data are compared. Data analysis for this study takes the form of three conceptually overlapping parts; analysis of the development for regulations that authorize soldiers’ blogging practices, comparative analyses of soldiers’ rhetorical knowledge about their blogs and blog post content, and a sample case study of one soldier’s blogging practices. Results from this study reveal individuals acting on behalf of the sponsoring institution to read and regulate soldiers’ blog content maintain idiosyncratic processes for doing so. These disparate forms of sponsorship are in part due to the new media context, which allows soldiers to define their own rhetorical situations, and which makes identifying soldiers’ blogs for review problematic. The rapid proliferation of and diverse rhetorical functions for blogs complicate and are complicated by the sponsor’s conception of the blog as a textual form. Thus, the sponsor-sponsored relationship in this context requires redefinition.

This thesis demonstrates the need for standardized online corrections policies through a critical analysis of several news outlets' current corrections policies, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and Christian Science Monitor. An examination of why corrections policies are necessary, including a look at the ways the internet has changed modern journalism, prefaces this critical analysis. There is an ethical discussion of how certain online corrections policies do or do not support the traditional journalistic principles of accuracy, transparency, accountability, and credibility. Finally, a typology was created to rank several news outlets' current online corrections policies. Ultimately, it was found that the emergence of online journalism has affected the way in which journalists correct their mistakes. The transitional timeframe, in addition to the lack of a guarantee that readers will ever return to an online news article (or even the news outlet’s website in general), means that mistakes and their ensuing corrections can quite literally become lost in cyberspace. These changes indicate that it is time to address the issue of how best to deal with corrections in online journalism. Moreover, it was found that the current state of online corrections policies is a wildly inconsistent situation, and some sort of standard is vital to the journalism industry.

This project looks at the convergence of trends in craft and blogging to evaluate its potential as a platform for activism. As the craft movement has evolved away from the rigid boundaries of its past, a subculture of young women and men have embraced craft for its Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethics. A vast network of makers in and outside the U.S. comprises the indie craft movement, which channels ideas about sustainable living, anti-consumerism and the feminist reclamation of domesticity into handmade objects. The indie craft movement springs from the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s and is enhanced by a succession of new Internet technologies. Blogging’s rise to ubiquity in the past decade provides indie crafters in disparate locations with disparate craft knowledge the ability to connect online. Craft blogs offer tutorials, inspiration and advice to their followers. The craft blogosphere’s power lies in its ability to connect people through mutual creativity, making it an ideal platform for craft-related activism, or craftivism. Craft blogging offers crafters a forum for collaborative or replicable projects that can raise awareness about a cause or invoke action to end unjust practices. Craftivism blogs lead to meaningful change in a community when engaged bloggers share information. Therefore, this project includes a reflection on creating the blog Craftivista, which features craftivism-related speakers, events and projects in the area around Oxford, Ohio.

The purpose of this project was to examine my role as a journalist covering a community of interest through the creation of a website that enriches dialogue about the barrel racing and rodeo community in the Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia region. The website provides a space for works of journalism that cover barrel racing events and issues in the area, and my research included a thorough analysis of the role of community journalism in a community that is both virtual and regional.

With the development of free and easy-to-use software programs, blogging has helped turn Web consumers into Web content providers. Blogging provides distinctive insight into comprehending e-consumer behavior explicitly with respect to social networking and information searching behaviors while facilitating a state of flow. The objectives of this study are to identify determinant dimensions of blogging motivations and flow, and to investigate the hypothesized relationships of the motivational blogging behavior. Analyzing data (n = 432) from a southwestern university, results reveal the critical dimensions of motivations, behaviors, and flow in blogging. Upon extending Hoffman and Novak's (1996) flow model, 14 out of 26 hypotheses were confirmed regarding the significant impacts of blogging motivations and flow on blogging behaviors. The findings revealed that the desire for information, enjoyment, and loyalty are the primary drivers for experiential blogging behavior. Specifically, information-seeking is the decisive motivation to urge experiential and e-shopping behavior concurrently. This study shows that indulgence and telepresence in flow might play pivotal mediating roles to promote the goal-oriented e-shopping behavior resulting enjoyment and loyalty-seeking motivations.

This study explored why individuals write personal blogs and the influences of blogging on their lives. Four structural equation models that specified the social and psychological process of blogging were tested in this study. The models included four major components: personal characteristics, blogging motives, blogging behaviors and blogging social outcomes. A total of 412 bloggers recruited online completed the survey questionnaire. A factor analysis revealed nine salient motives for writing personal blogs: self-documentation, information sharing, entertainment, emotion regulation, communication with existing friends, formation of new friendships, identity exploration, pass time and self-presentation. Significant associations between these motives and demographics, including gender, age and education, were also identified. The results of the structural equation modeling suggested that public self-consciousness was positively related to the self-presentation motive, which was in turn positively related to self-presentation in blogs. In the same vein, social anxiety was positively related to the motive to form new friendships, which in turn was positively related to the number of new friends made via blogs and the quality of new friendships. Social anxiety was found to be negatively associated with the number of new friends made, the number of existing friends communicated with, and the quality of existing friendships maintained through blogs, but positively related to the quality of new friendships established via blogs. Self-disclosure was positively related to the number of new friends made, the quality of new friendships and the quality of existing friendships. The mediation effects of blogging motivations and self-disclosure on the relationships between social anxiety and blogging social interaction outcomes were also tested. The content analysis of the responses to an open-ended question indicated that the majority of the respondents believed that blogging had positively influenced their lives. The major benefits of blogging reported by the respondents included keeping in touch with family and friends, making new friends, improved social interaction, writing and thinking ability, expanded vision, emotional relief and social support, identity exploration, and documentation of daily life. Interpretations of the findings, and implications for understanding the social use of the Internet, were discussed.

This study examines the emergence of place blogging as an online genre designed to foster a deeper sense of place and to share local knowledge. Focusing on a period between 2003 and 2006, it spotlights a transitional moment in web culture when the relationship between online life and offline life is undergoing an important shift. The bloggers highlighted in this study offer a ground-level view of how ordinary writers and readers participate in the transition to what Eric Gordon calls "network locality," a condition in which the experience of place is increasingly mediated by networked technologies. Because networked life creates an information-saturated environment in which place must compete with everything else for an increasingly scarce resource--human attention--place bloggers redefine blogging as a way to more deliberately and regularly invest attention in place. To do so, they remediate older genres to create a blogging style that differs from the political and technology blogs that were popular at the time: some draw on nature writing and diary writing (essayistic place bloggers) while others tend to draw more heavily on genres of local journalism (journalistic place bloggers). A rhetorical analysis reveals how genre remediation offers place bloggers a range of strategies for managing the flow of attention between self, place, and audience as they interact around digital objects in the network. These insights offer important contributions to scholarly conversions interested in examining how online forms of rhetoric continue to evolve and how our ideas about place are adapting to life in a networked society.

This is an exploratory attempt at understanding motherhood as layered, conditioned, and multivalent against the background of the one-child policy in China. Through close readings of blogs maintained and posted by Chinese mother bloggers at www.sina.com.cn, I foreground the complexities of their subjectivities. What is significant about blogs for the purpose of my study is that they are increasingly being used by networks of middle-class urban Chinese parents, and specifically by women. Drawing mainly from Michel Foucault and different schools of feminist thinkers, subjectivities are understood as fluid, constituted, and becoming. Therefore, this dissertation highlights the interconnectivity between Chinese nation, the discourse of population in China, Chinese women and their children, and the nexus of power and knowledge in the age of biopower. It also centers on the normative, constitutive, and regulatory power of gender and sexuality on Chinese mother bloggers as exemplified by their glorification of motherhood and everyday practices in nurturing and disciplining their young. However, in the midst of conforming and reproducing dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, Chinese mother bloggers are also engaged in the technology of the self through the diligent act of blogging, thus fostering new modes of existence and relationships and exerting their agency in context.

This study investigates blogging phenomenon by identifying the behavioral characteristics of bloggers. Specifically, this thesis seeks to develop comparative descriptive profiles of non-bloggers and bloggers that include perceptions and experience of blog opinion leadership, ongoing involvement within the blogosphere, innovation as personal traits, perceived credibility of blog, and general computer knowledge and skills. Results from the study indicate less evidence than expected of blogging behaviors as prominent Internet activities. Further, the distinctive behaviors of opinion leadership involvement by bloggers were observed, whereas bloggers were not much different from non-bloggers in terms of other characteristics such as innovativeness and computer knowledge and skills. The study also found that Internet users perceived blogs to be less credible than traditional media or other online forms. Suggestions for future study in blogging phenomenon are provided.

This study investigates blogging phenomenon by identifying the behavioral characteristics of bloggers. Specifically, this thesis seeks to develop comparative descriptive profiles of non-bloggers and bloggers that include perceptions and experience of blog opinion leadership, ongoing involvement within the blogosphere, innovation as personal traits, perceived credibility of blog, and general computer knowledge and skills. Results from the study indicate less evidence than expected of blogging behaviors as prominent Internet activities. Further, the distinctive behaviors of opinion leadership involvement by bloggers were observed, whereas bloggers were not much different from non-bloggers in terms of other characteristics such as innovativeness and computer knowledge and skills. The study also found that Internet users perceived blogs to be less credible than traditional media or other online forms. Suggestions for future study in blogging phenomenon are provided.

In the last decade, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has increased dramatically as a format for social interaction, particularly among adolescents. Despite this increase, little research has focused on the types of behaviors occurring in CMC. The purpose of this study was to address questions regarding adolescents’ CMC use (specifically ratings of use of instant messaging and blogging, and aggressive and prosocial behaviors engaged in while online), the relation between CMC behaviors and face-to-face behaviors, and the relation between ratings of use and both CMC and face-to-face behaviors. Participants were 484 7th, 9th, and 11th grade students who completed a survey about their CMC use and online and face-to-face aggressive and prosocial behaviors as agents and recipients of those behaviors. Most adolescents reported engaging in some form of CMC at least a few times a week. Females reported a higher rate of CMC use than males. Adolescents reported engaging in more online prosocial behavior than online aggression and endorsed being the agents of online behaviors more so than being the recipients. Males and females were similar in their reports of online aggression but females were higher in online prosocial behaviors. Engaging in online aggression and prosocial behaviors was related to engaging in corresponding face-to-face behaviors. Adolescents reported being agents of prosocial behavior and recipients of aggression and prosocial behavior more when face-to-face than when online. Seventh-grade males reported the highest rates of being recipients of aggression, across contexts. Eleventh-graders reported being the recipients of prosocial behavior less than 7th and 9th graders. Adolescents’ CMC use was related to all online behaviors and to face-to-face prosocial behaviors. CMC use predicted adolescents’ online behaviors above and beyond their face-to-face behaviors. Limitations of this survey study included limited generalizability of results because of the age and ethnic distributions of the sample and the lack of longitudinal data, which precludes conclusions about temporal directions of effects. Finally, important implications, such as parental supervision of online behaviors, and ideas for future studies were discussed.

It has been more than twenty years since Duncan Kennedy published his seminal 'Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy'. In it he called for a radical assault on the hierarchies embedded in American law schools. But that assault failed. Over the past two decades, the hierarchies of legal education have, if anything, become even more fixed, insular, and status-driven, even while the elites of the practicing bar have changed dramatically and become more open to outsiders. It is vastly easier for the graduate of a fourth-tier law school to become a partner at an elite law firm than it is to be hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at even a non-elite American law school. But law school hierarchies may be changing. Not as the result of a critical assault, but because vast changes in communications technologies have seriously eroded the control of information that is necessary for the survival of any non-functional hierarchy. In this paper, written for a symposium on blogging by lawyers and law professors, I revisit the insider world of Kennedy's 'LERH' and contrast it with the outsider-dominated changes being wrought by the Internet.