London.
The next presenter at Transforming Audiences is Stine Lomborg, examining blogging as a form of collaborative produsage. She focussed on three personal Danish blogs, and examined six months' worth of posts and comments for this study, as well as interviewing the authors. The produsage angle of this study examines blog-based communication as an ongoing collaborative development of a shared text; this is combined with socio-cognitive reception theory in which genre is seen as a socially distributed cognitive architecture. The texts themselves were studied using conversation analysis.
Stine began by examining communicative structures, and noted that most communications appeared to be dyadic, following a post > comment > response pattern and finishing with this third step. This points to certain implied conventions and user expectations of frequency, continuity, and collaborative engagement for this genre of blogging, and through adherence to these conventions, a mutual social presence is accomplished.
Such conventions are highlighted especially through cases of breaches of the norms: a disruption of the continuity of communication (through holidays or other absences) is noted and addressed in advance by the participants, for example - this functions a a way of repairing the breach, then, and of reassuring others of one's commitment to the shared conversation.
What is co-created in this context, then, is a shared sociable space; the main aim of the participants is in the first place to keep the conversation going, and so phatic elements of this conversation are especially important. Where they are able to do this, participants experience togetherness, and this is a highly social accomplishment.
