4 THE RISE OF A BLOG
BOX 12.4 THE RISE OF A BLOG
On January 20, 2003, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Eric Muller started a blog called “Is That Legal?” After two weeks and few visitors, he almost shut it down. Then on February 4 North Carolina Congressman Howard Coble said in a radio interview that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified. Muller, who just happened to have written a book on that topic with very different views, wrote a lengthy rebuttal on his blog, even though 15 newspapers showed little interest in the essay Interest on the blog exploded as it did on several other legal and public-issues blogs linked to it. Muller and others directly challenged Coble’s views that the internment was designed to protect the Japanese-Americans. Muller’s blog went from 35 hits on the day of Coble’s initial speech to almost 3,000 three days later. This allowed a far faster exchange of views than in most print media and far more detailed than possible on television or radio (Glenn, 2003).
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4. Finally, there is synchronous communication, which can be one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many and includes chat rooms and instant messaging. These are very popular forms of communication among pre-teens and teens but also among most segments of society. Chat rooms are organized around certain themes and allow users, for the first time in history, to find people like themselves without the issue of physical location being an issue. If someone suffers from an extremely rare disease, for example, there is probably a chat room as well as a bulletin board to act as a support group.
Another capability which computers bring to traditional print and broadcast journalism is the ability to digitally alter photographs. With modern technology, a photograph can be so totally changed as to be completely unrecognizable. The ethical boundaries are fuzzy here. Although few would have problems with digitally cropping a photo to remove irrelevant background, how about digitally composing a photo to put people together who never were in that particular place at the same time? No doubt
a national leader would object to an altered photo of himself shaking hands with a terrorist, but what about altering a student group shot for a university recruiting brochure to make it more ethnically diverse than the original photo was? This actually was an issue at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an African American student was digitally pasted into a photo of a football crowd scene to make it more ethnically diverse (Jacobson, 2001). Is this misrepresentation in a recruiting brochure? The student was in fact a UWM student and could have been at that football game, although in fact he wasn’t. See Wheeler (2002) for a careful discussion of this issue.
The use of theories and research methodologies of mass communication to study such computer-mediated communication is a fairly recent phenomenon. See F.Williams, Strover, and Grant (1994) for some early possible theoretical perspectives on new media and Mundorf and Laird (2002) for more recent conceptualizing. For example, Papacharissi and Rubin (2000) examined people’s uses and gratifications for Internet use. Ferguson and Perse (2000) compared the uses and gratifications involved in watching television and using the Internet. Mastro, Eastin, and Tamborini (2002) looked at how use of the Internet arouses users and how they can use that medium to arouse or calm themselves. Sometimes even technical aspects of the Internet can have measurable effects. For example, Sundar and Wagner (2002) found that the speed that an Internet image is downloaded affects physiological arousal; slower-loading images produce higher arousal, as measured by skin conductance, although this is also affected by how inherently arousing the downloaded image is.
There is disagreement in the literature about whether Internet use is associated with social isolation or loneliness (Cole, 2000; Kraut, et al., 1998; McKenna & Bargh, 1999). Overall, Internet use is typically more social than
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television viewing, in part due to social options like chat rooms and instant messaging. The strongest evidence for social isolation comes in the minority of the population who spend a very large number of hours online; effects of Internet use on social isolation are much weaker or nonexistent for moderate users. The question of Internet “addiction” was examined by LaRose, Lin, and Eastin (2003). They argue that the sort of compulsive Internet use often popularly characterized with the addiction metaphor can better be conceptualized as deficient self-regulation. People who extensively use the Internet at the expense of other activities and relationships are poorer than most people at monitoring and regulating their own behavior, although their behavior is not usually as disturbed as those who fit the clinical definition of addiction.
Numerous questions about computer-mediated communication remain. Why do people use e-mail and how does it complement traditional communication means like the telephone and writing? What do they get from instant messaging and visiting chat rooms? How do they use list- servers? How do they search web sites? How do they make friends on-line? See Box 12.5 for a closer look at the last question.