A few months ago, I posted the introduction to my MA thesis, "The effect of adding a zero: the blog and identity", and said that I'd post the full thesis after Digital Humanities.
I'd wanted to build a nice website around this material, to give a little more context to the research and supply some additional resources that other scholars of blogging and social networking could use in their own research. But who has the time? I certainly don't right now.
So instead, I've decided to post the thesis here in PDF format. A brief summary of the thesis follows, for those who haven't already heard me talking about it.
The Effect of Adding a Zero: The Blog and Identity [PDF, 1.7MB].
Abstract:
Critics of blogging have focused on the blog as a site of autobiographical discourse. Although this approach is useful, it misses a deeper discussion of the influence of the community around a given blog, the blogger, and the software itself in directing the growth of the blogger’s identity.
In exploring these influences, this thesis ties together an in‐depth look at the infrastructure within the blog and its influence in directing the type of content a blogger generates with a theoretical approach, using a combination of humanist and posthumanist theory to discuss the effects of encoding/decoding and subject position on a blogger’s identity.
Keywords: blogging, social networking, posthuman theory, identity theory, community
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