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Much has been written about the potential impact of the blogosphere
on future patterns of global, national, and local public
communication; blogs and other forms of distributed, networked,
non-mass mediated discussion and engagement may fundamentally
reconfigure the conventional model of the public sphere as it was
formulated by Habermas and others during the second half of the past
century. However, for all the anticipation of a networked society to
come, there is as yet little more than speculation about the shape
of the future mediasphere, and the impact of blogs is often still
documented by anecdotal evidence rather than thorough study. An
increasing number of researchers have begun to examine the internal
structures of the blogosphere, however, both in terms of its
demographics (see e.g. Rainie, 2005) and in terms of the topical
fields and genres now emerging (see e.g. Bruns & Jacobs, eds.,
2006). Additionally, the increasingly distinct blogging practices
within specific national, ethnic, and subcultural communities are
attracting growing attention (see e.g. Russell & Echchaibi,
2008), and the trajectories of bloggers through the blogosphere over
time are beginning to be traced (Kirchhoff, Bruns, & Nicolai,
2007). Major national and international events provide an important
opportunity to study uses of blogs and document their impact on
domestic and global publics. The role of blogs in covering the
events of 9/11, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or the 7 July 2005
bombings in London has been well-noted; news and political blogs
have also become increasingly instrumental in local and national
election campaigns. Our project aims to develop a rigorous and sound
methodology for the study of this networked public sphere: using a
mixture of quantitative analysis, data visualisation, and
qualitative evaluation which builds on emerging blog network mapping
tools (see Bruns, 2007), it aims to locate the key nodes in the
Australian political blogosphere, examine their role as opinion
leaders for the networked public in Australia, and investigate the
interrelationship between the political blogosphere and the wider
Australian mediasphere.
The conference presentation can be found at Slideshare.
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citation
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Bruns, A., Wilson, J. A., Saunders, B. J., Highfield, T. J.,
Kirchhoff, L., & Nicolai, T. (2008). Locating the Australian
Blogosphere: Towards a New Research Methodology. In , pp.7.
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