Barry Wellman has suggested that Western, developed societies are increasingly moving from the "little boxes" of bounded, localized communities to the fluid, shifting interconnections of "networked individualism." He has also suggested that this shift should influence the development of software which better reflects and facilitates people's changing uses of computers and communications networks. (Wellman 2002) In this paper I examine an emerging online genre which provides one example of such software, providing a communication forum for the networked individual.

My analysis is based upon research on LiveJournal, a system which allows people to keep daily diaries or journals which other participants can read and within which other participants can include responses in the form of comments. I spent over a year participating on LiveJournal, during which I kept my own online journal and read and commented on others' journals. The paper is also based upon face-to-face or telephone interviews with 30 LiveJournal participants.

LiveJournal is a type of weblogging ("blogging") system. Most media coverage and scholarly research on blogging has emphasized it's emergence as a form of amateur journalism. However, most journals on LiveJournal take a more personal form, resembling (and sometimes referred to as) personal diaries. While some do use LiveJournal to link to and comment on stories of the day, most report on the mundane activities, conflicts, and triumphs of their day-to-day lives.

Unlike some weblogging systems (although several are beginning to offer similar features), LiveJournal allows participants to make individual posts (several per day, if desired) to each of which multiple people can make "comments" or responses. LiveJournal participants can also designate groups of "friends" (as the software names them) who have greater or lesser access to more or less private posts. For instance, as a LiveJournal participant, I can designate a post "public," making it readable to anyone who happens across the site, or I can designate a post "friends-only," which allows only a group I have specifically designated to read the post. I can also create separate groups within my "friends list" and direct specific posts to specific groups (excluding specific other participants). I can also create "private" posts, which only I can access. Participants can also view each other's friends lists and can easily compare their own contacts and connections with those of others.

These features put each LiveJournal participant at the center of a network of other participants whose access to their writings they control. But rather than the strictly person-to-person communication envisioned by Wellman as the ideal typical communication form of networked individualism (see e.g., chart on p. 10, Wellman 2002), the members of an individual's network can see and respond to each other's responses to a post, forming temporary and shifting "groups" centered on each individual poster. Through their participation in conversations on other people's journals, participants can also learn of "neighboring" networks and can expand their own.

I argue in this paper that Wellman's concept of "networked individualism" provides a useful analytical tool for looking at some emerging forms of online communication. However, using LiveJournal as an exemplar of his ideal type, I also take a critical look at what networked individualism means to individuals and relationships, and consider the limitations and affordances of this particular forum, particularly as they relate to questions of community online.

References

Wellman, Barry. 2002. "Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism" Pp. 10-25 in Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches, edited by Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar and Toru Ishida. Berlin: Springer.

About the Author(s)

Lori Kendall is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purchase College, SUNY. The topics she has written on include: gender and other aspects of online identity, online community, and online research methodology. Her book "Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub," an ethnography of an online group, was published in 2002 by University of California Press.

There has been a recent and important shift away from technological and/or informational determinism in theories regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs) to an examination of how ICTs are actually used by society and the value of the large volume of information that they make so readily accessible. Essentially, the focus has shifted away from how ICTs can deliver information and solve problems to how the amount of that information is so large that it changes how we understand, use and create it. As Scott Lash would assert in his Critique of Information, too much information has made previously useful information useless. The question has now become: "How can we make information understandable and useful" - or in other words, "How can it be made into knowledge?"
Paralleling the shift in theoretical focus has been the development and increasing prominence of new technologies that facilitate knowledge creation and sharing. One such technology that has become widely used by everyone from teenagers to professional journalists is online journaling services, or "blogs." Blogs combine personal journal keeping with community bulletin board systems. Furthermore, blogs are an example of how the new informational climate has created the need for new methods of knowledge creation and understanding the world.
The focus of this paper will be to examine the blogging service LiveJournal (LJ) as a new site of knowledge creation and sharing. I will conduct this epistemological study of LJ while using the traditional media as a point of comparison. I will also examine how uses of knowledge can alter its usefulness For example, the traditional media's profit orientation will mean that they create and use knowledge in a different way than users of LiveJournal. However, as the traditional media have been written about exhaustively, I will only use them as a counterpoint to my analysis of LJ, rather than providing a full examination of both.
My analysis will take on a number of parts: how LJ works; who uses it and why; a brief overview of the traditional media in relation to blogging and LJ; and how LJ functions as a site of knowledge creation and sharing as well as what kind of knowledge is produced.

This paper reports on Mapping the transition from page to screen, a one-year research project (2002-3) funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board's new Innovations Awards. It facilitated examination and analysis of a unique body of material, the trAce membership and discussion archive, alongside a programme of experiential research involving a collaboration between Kate Pullinger, a print-based author keen to investigate the potential of electronic literature; Sue Thomas, originally a print-based author but now working in both media, and the trAce team of specialists. Pullinger's engagement with the project was a combination of training and support as she learned how to read and create works in the digital medium. Online writing is poised in a very transitory moment in its own development. It currently stands outside most English Studies and at this point it is not yet known what contribution, if any, it will make to English Literature. Nor is it known how New Media Writing will affect the way writers approach the making of texts, or the way they are read.

Our Research Questions were:

1. Is it possible to identify common key moments of change for a writer moving to writing online?

The internet has provided a new creative environment for the writer. When trAce was founded in 1995 very few writers were working with experimental computer texts, but today the practice is growing rapidly. This project proposes to capture a fleeting moment of literary revolution when authors are developing a new kind of writing and finding new ways to read it. Currently, there appear to be two specific ways in which writers engage with the internet, with an increasing amount of migration between them. For the purposes of discussion, they can be divided into two groups:

Group A uses the web purely as a distributive and communicative tool. They conduct research, publish their work online, and gather in communities where critical and social interactions occur. They come from a print-based background and their focus is upon the individual author.

Group B contains writers and artists from a range of disciplines including literature but also the visual arts, film, programming, science and engineering. Their work appears in digital formats rather than print. Their interest in the web is as a medium for new forms of artistic expression and their projects are often collaborative and/or feature public contribution and interaction.

2. Is it possible to identify common key skills which must be acquired for this to occur and what kind of support is required to facilitate it?

Although Group A writers use technology on a regular basis, they often consider themselves to be unskilled in this area and have little confidence or interest in programming or building their own websites. Group B writers tend to be self-taught, keen to experiment with new hardware and software, and prepared to fail. Kate Pullinger's experience as a 'control' subject, coupled with data from the existing archive, will help to identify a model of good practice for supporting writers new to online writing.

3. Are the opportunities for collaboration provided by the web causing a significant move away from the single-authored text?

The methods of [B] are sometimes similar to those of TV and film, based around a production team of specialists. We will seek to quantify the spread of collaborative works among writers who formerly worked alone.

4. How can writers using the medium as [A] be brought to work with writers and artists utilising the medium as [B]?

TrAce has already managed a number of online mentoring projects and the archives will help to identify best practice for that and other kinds of collaboration and support relationships. Our interviews with web-based writers will seek to further identify their views in how this might operate to best advantage.

The project ran from March 2002-February 2003 and produced a short online guide to the differences between print and new media literature plus a practical online toolkit of support materials for writers new to the medium. This paper outlines key issues which arose during the research period and proposes further areas for investigation.

About the Author(s)

Sue Thomas is a novelist and founder and Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre. She has managed numerous significant web-based creative writing projects including the creation of the trAce Online Writing School and the development and management of the trAce Online Writing Centre itself. Her books include the novels 'Correspondence' and 'Water', plus an anthology of contemporary short stories 'Wild Women'. Most recently her writing was featured in 'Reload: rethinking women and cyberculture'. Her online work includes a 'web-configuration of Correspondenc'e at Riding the Meridian; 'Imagining a Stone' at Ensemble Logic and Choragraphy; and 'Lines' at Lux: notes for an electronic writing. With Teri Hoskin, she co-edited the 'Noon Quilt' website and book, and she recently completed 'Essaying Virtuality', a study of virtual life. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/suethomas/