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virtually an object

amber arnold

What is an object?  In the traditional sense, an object is “something material that may be perceived by the senses” [1].  The common interpretation is that an object has a physical presence with which it can be touched, seen, and manipulated.  Objects are very diverse entities with properties and relationships to other objects in their environments.  A teapot is an object; it can be touched, seen, and manipulated, sitting on a shelf until a person is ready to put tea in it and use it.  It has a relationship with other objects in its environment – the tea placed in the pot, the teacup used in conjunction with the pot, and the person who owns and uses the teapot.  The teapot can even be passed on or sold to a new owner where it begins a new life and gains new relationships.  However, this definition excludes objects that are more ethereal like memories or data in a computer.  Can something that exists with no physical form be considered an object?  How about a blog?

Blogs are a type of website or electronic community in which items are posted and read by other people.  The blog entries are presented in the reverse date order of their posting to help regular readers find the latest entries.  A typical blog entry consists of a title, main text body (which can sometimes include pictures or hyperlinks), post date, and often a comments section (in which readers can post comments and/or questions about the blog entry).   The name “blog” is a shortened form of the phrase “web log”.  The person who authors a blog is called a “blogger” and the act of maintaining a blog is called “blogging”.  Blogs and blogging became popular in the late 1990’s when people starting creating online diaries or personal blogs.

The original blogger, the “Father of Blogging”, Justin Hall [2], started writing a personal account in an online journal in 1994.  However, personal blogs did not become widespread until hosted blog tools become available around the year 2000 because most internet users do not maintain their own permanent connection to the internet.
http://www.links.net/

All of this information exists as data on the server of the hosting website and has no physical form.  Exact copies of the original data can be made over and over without harming the original data, and it can be destroyed with no traces left to show it has ever existed.  These are properties that traditional objects do not share, so we ask the question: how is a blog an object if it does not respect the physical laws of matter conservation and if it can be replicated so easily?  Traditional objects can not have exact copies made of them and pieces are left behind upon their destruction.  Blogs are objects because of their relationship to the people who create them, the people who read them, and the way in which they influence the world today. 

Blogs are objects because they have relationships with the objects and agents around them.  In particular, blogs need computers and people to exist, and people have various relationships with blogs including authors, readers, commenters, or combinations of those three basic choices.

Blogs have rich precursors in the history of electronic communication, including chat rooms, email lists, Usenet, and bulletin board systems.  In these various electronic communities, people could post information and have others read it and comment on it creating “threads” or running conversations.  A typical example of a threaded electronic community is “Slashdot.com”.  These are examples where a group of people have a shared experience built around topics of interest.  But before electronic chat rooms and threaded discussions, people kept written records of their personal lives.  Diaries, memoirs, journals, letters, autobiographies, and letters to the editor have all been media in which people have strived to let the world know their views and share their experiences in life. 

The personal blog is the most common form of blog found on the internet today.  The wide success of personal blogs is due to blog hosting sites and the simple design of blogging tools.  A person with very little computer experience can create a blog and post entries with relative ease on sites such as livejournal.com, xanga.com, or blogger.com.  And other popular networking sites, such as friendster.com or myspace.com, have incorporated blogs into user profiles.  Personal blogs allow people to share details about their lives.

Topical blogs influence politics, media, personal opinion, and war, whereas personal blogs allow a person to connect with old friends and make new ones.  We first look at some examples of blogs focused on particular topics of interest to a broad population, and then we move on to explore blogs that are more personal in nature. 

The first widely popular blogs emerged in 2001.  Most of these blogs were about politics, a topic of interest to many people, but a significant portion of the appeal was the personalities of the authors who contributed the content to the blogs.

In the early 2000’s blogging gained rapid importance and earned their place within the discourse of society.  The first major influence was in politics.  In 2002, comments and issues brought up by bloggers helped force US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to step down as majority leader.  Senator Lott made comments at a party, attended by the media, with the intention of giving an implicit approval of racial segregation.  The media did not report on the comments until bloggers found other documents and interviews with the Senator that expressed similar views.  The sensation and controversy that started in the blogging world was picked up by the press and helped generate a crisis that required the Senator to step down from his position as majority leader.

Blogs have also played an important role in the Iraq war, also known as the “Blog war.”  The penetration and depth of coverage of the World Wide Web allowed people all over the world access to wide and varied reports of the war.  One of the most influential blogs during the war was that of Salam Pax, aka Salam Al-Janabi.  Salam was an Iraqi citizen who lived in the suburbs of Baghdad, worked as an interpreter for American journalists by day and blogged under a pseudonym by night.  He wrote about the war, its impact on him and his friends, the disappearance of key government officials, and his work as an interpreter.  His blog provided key information about the effects of the war on Iraq and those who were trapped in the fighting. 

The soldiers serving in the Iraq war have also played a role in the media and blogging about the war. Milblogs, or blogs kept by soldiers serving in the war or retired military personnel about the war, showed the world the war from the soldier’s perspective.  Most milblogs were personal accounts to keep friends and family updated but they showed that the war affected the soldiers in ways not understood before and allowed them to portray their roles more accurately than before. 

While some of the military blogs exist to present analytical interpretations of events in the war, the soldier’s blogs are more personal in nature, leading us to the largest group of blogs, those maintained by a single person to express their personality, keep in touch with friends, or share their feelings about events in their lives.

Personal blogs are diaries, news reports, places to vent, and places to explore new ideas.  These types of blogs allow people to express their emotions in ways that they could not before because of social restrictions.  Their emotional connection creates a relationship between them and their blog and connects them to their reader in way not possible otherwise.  People blog about anything from what they ate for breakfast to their religious and political views.  Blogs are a way to creatively express personal views and, sometimes, receive feedback from friends, family, and the occasional random reader. 

Personal blogs also give people with similar views, interests, or illnesses to connect with each other.  A person with cancer can create a blog to help them deal with what they are going through.  The blog allows them to help their friends and family understand their challenges, vent their frustrations and anger, and deal with their illness is a way not possible just ten years ago.  Their blog also allows them to connect with other cancer patients, talk about their illness, and help each other make it through the difficult times.

Blogs are never ending circles of exchange – a market of ideas, news, and unique viewpoints.  Blogs have a Maussian spirit to them.  They exist as ethereal data in computers but also allow for the dissemination of information to a wide audience all over the world.  Blogs reach people and audiences that may never have been the intended target and allow for a more critical exchange of information than traditional media allows. 

Blogs have changed considerably over time to become important social players and yet they have kept their original intention as places for people to express themselves.  Blogs can not be looked as just personal diaries or as static things.  They are ever changing collections of thoughts, ideas, and new ways of thinking.  They have accumulated importance in today’s society and changed the way in which the world communicates.  Despite the importance and popularity that some blogs have gained they will always be intricately tied to the original author.

We have illustrated through the examples in this paper that although blogs are virtual things in the electronic world, their role in the often emotional conversations of society cement their identity as an object and their importance in our lives.
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