Monetising the dividual self: the emergence of the lifestyle blog and influencers in Malaysia 9781789201192, 1789201195

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MONETISING THE DIVIDUAL SELF

Anthropology of Media Series Editors: John Postill and Mark Allen Peterson The ubiquity of media across the globe has led to an explosion of interest in the ways people around the world use media as part of their everyday lives. This series addresses the need for works that describe and theorise multiple, emerging, and sometimes interconnected, media practices in the contemporary world. Interdisciplinary and inclusive, this series offers a forum for ethnographic methodologies, descriptions of non-Western media practices, explorations of transnational connectivity, and studies that link culture and practices across fields of media production and consumption. Volume 1 Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News Andrew Arno

Volume 5 Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account John Postill

Volume 2 The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication Valerie Alia

Volume 6 The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa Katrien Pype

Volume 3 News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions Ursula Rao Volume 4 Theorising Media and Practice Edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill

Volume 7 Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk Videomaking between Mexico and the US Ingrid Kummels Volume 8 Monetising the Dividual Self: The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia Julian Hopkins

Monetising the Dividual Self The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia

Julian Hopkins

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Julian Hopkins All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-118-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-119-2 ebook

This work is dedicated to Tze Yeng, Charlie and Neil. Every day, you make my life better.

Contents

List of Figures ix List of Tables x Acknowledgements xi Brief Chronology of Personal and Lifestyle Blogging in Malaysia Introduction. Anthroblogia: Participant Observation and Blogging in Malaysia

xii

1

Chapter 1. The Blog as Assemblage: Agency and Affordances

11

Chapter 2. January 2006: Blogwars, Hit Sluts and Authenticity in the Personal Blogosphere

28

Chapter 3.

46

The Blogger and Her Blog: (Dis)Assembling the Dividual Self

Chapter 4. May 2007: Assembling Genres

71

Chapter 5. Assembling Blogs and Bloggers

82

Chapter 6. April 2007: Voicy Consumers and Negotiating Networked Publics

108

Chapter 7. Assembling a Blog Market

123

viii | Contents

Chapter 8. January 2009: Negotiating the Authentic Advertorial 148 Chapter 9. Assembling Lifestyles

162

Chapter 10. October 2009: Regional Blogmeet

178

Conclusions. The Dividual Self and Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog

189

References

199

Index

217

Figures

3.1. Blog layout example.

49

3.2. Profile example.

50

3.3. A blog post with comments.

51

5.1. Publicising the myBlogS survey at a film premiere.

98

5.2–5.4.  Camwhoring – negotiating suitable photographs.

99

5.5. Blogger at blogmeet extends online anonymity.

100

5.6. BlogAdNet blogmeets often include free food and drinks. This coupon was part of the free offerings at one blogmeet. 102 8.1. ‘Saying it’, selected portion.

149

8.2. ‘Saying it’, selected portion – the hyperlinks are inserted in the text.

150

8.3. ‘Saying it’, selected portion – categories and tags.

151

9.1. Two BlogAdNet banners at events.

176

10.1. Bloggers photographing food, Singapore.

184

11.1–11.3. A shopping mall in 2011 where the ‘Offline blogshop’ offers products sourced from online blogshops.

194–195

Tables

1.1. Blog affordances.

18

5.1. Commenter typology.

87

6.1. List of characters.

110

7.1. Comparing Monetisers’ and Non-Monetisers’ habits in checking analytics and trying to increase audience.

136

7.2. Comparing Monetisers’ and Non-Monetisers’ habits in strategising the use of keywords and search engines. 136

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many people who have been part of this research and writing. First and foremost my sincere thanks goes out to all the bloggers who were patient enough to answer my questions and help me to understand their own perspectives. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the School of Arts & Social Sciences in Monash University Malaysia – particularly Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan – who have always supported and inspired me. A special thanks is due to Dr John Postill for his generous support and advice. The editors deserve a special mention for their patience and dedicated work that has improved this book. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my family in Europe and Malaysia, especially my partner Tze Yeng, who have consistently supported me with their love and labour – economic, domestic, mental, and emotional. The research for this book was supported by funding from the School of Arts & Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia.

Brief Chronology of Personal and Lifestyle Blogging in Malaysia

Year

Event

1998

Gengjurnal – a Malay blogger community – started either in 1998 or 2001 (varying reports)

September 1998

Reformasi Diaries – early proto-blog by Sabri Zain focused on political activism

2000

Absolutely Fuzzy – early blogger

2002

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Fajar Seluas Angkasa

2003

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Mat Jan

2003

Introduction of Google AdSense

14 July 2003

Project Petaling Street goes live

July 2003

The ‘2nd KotaRaya Blogger’s Meet’

July 2003

‘The Great Malaysian Blog List’ – 393 blogs listed

2004

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Sultanmuzaffar

October 2004

Jeff Ooi’s blog, Screenshots, attracts legal and political attention due to a contentious commenter

2004

Google AdSense available in Malaysia

2005

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Tokrimau

July 2005

Project Petaling Street 2nd Anniversary

2006

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Sera Honey

October 2006

Jeff Ooi publishes post condemning plagiarism in the New Straits Times

November 2006

PayPerPost and Review Me become available in Malaysia

2007

Gengjurnal – Best Blog Award: Saharil

Chronology | xiii

February 2007

BlogAdNet founded

April 2007

New Straits Times sues Jeff Ooi and Rocky; All-Blogs and Bloggers United set up in response

May 2007

Information Minister proposes that bloggers should be registered

19 May 2007

Bloggers United Meeting (BUM 2007)

May 2007

First BlogAdNet cinema screening

June 2007

First BlogAdNet blogmeet

July 2007

Umno announces that it is recruiting writers to fight a ‘cyberwar’

August 2007

The Star starts a regular Saturday section on blogs in the Living supplement

August 2007

Bangsa Malaysia – Blog House opening

November 2007

Google announces that it is cutting the Page Rank of blogs affiliated to PayPerPost

March 2008

General Elections highlight the influence of SocialPolitical blogs

March 2008

Information Minister wants to meet with bloggers

April 2008

Umno Youth says all candidates need to start a blog

May 2008

BUM 2008

August 2008

Debate regarding website blocking by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission 127 blogs and websites were blocked

September 2008

Najib Razak launches his blog

March 2009

myBlogS 2009 survey

April 2009

Najib Razak enters as new PM

May 2009

BUM 2009

October 2009

Blog Awards – BlogAdNet regional blogmeet in Singapore

November 2009

USA FTC introduces directives regarding disclosure

INTRODUCTION

Anthroblogia Participant Observation and Blogging in Malaysia

Working in a private college in Kuala Lumpur involves many late nights preparing lectures and marking work. Surfing the internet is an easy outlet for distraction, and in 2004 I found myself googling ‘blogs’ after reading about the latest online trend. At first, I became a regular reader and occasional commenter on a few blogs written by educators, and then I started to come across Malaysian bloggers who would talk about their life, politics and everything under the sun. I found the critical outlook on Malaysian politics refreshingly different from the self-censorship that dominates the mainstream media, and appreciated the antics, rants and insights into Malaysian life of a variety of personal bloggers. Taking the plunge, I started my own pseudonymous blog in 2004: it became a creative cathartic outlet, and I enjoyed the opportunity to write about whatever took my fancy. This freedom was helped by its anonymity, a decision I took because I was worried that my occasional comments on current affairs and politics may attract unwanted attention from the Malaysian authorities, my employers or my students. As time went by, I had some favourite bloggers and some regular commenters on my blog. There was a great diversity of bloggers, one of whom often provoked heated debates because of his religious comments and abrasive manner, and I would read his blog to gain insight into a different worldview and occasionally participate in the discussion. By 2006 – like an increasing number of bloggers by then – he had started monetising his blog by selling advertising space, and one day I realised I was actually contributing to his income by visiting his blog, something that I was not comfortable with. I became conscious that there was a new dynamic in blogging – the exchange of attention, previously only counted in visitor rates and incoming links worth bragging points, had now become translatable into money. My anthropological

2 | Monetising the Dividual Self

interest was sparked, and I found that – making a virtue out of a necessity due to a heavy workload – I could participate and collect data on blogs from my desktop. I had already noticed clustering of linked blogs, habitual commenters and clear subcultural patterns/socialities, but now I had a further question that I wanted to answer: how was monetisation affecting personal blogging in Malaysia? This book tells the story of the emergence of the lifestyle blog from the personal blog, from a time when blogging was a niche hobby of early adopters and making money from a blog was almost unheard of to a time when it became normalised and widespread. This transition occurred before the rapid growth and adoption of social network sites, and many of the activities recounted here prefigured those that were later to become specialised features of different social media platforms. Most of the bloggers we will encounter had started their blogs in the premonetised period and then embraced monetisation as opportunities proliferated. Others were also key industry players in the development of a market for blog advertising in Malaysia. This book draws on data from an ethnographic study that used on- and offline participant observation, a survey, as well as in-depth interviews and many conversations with bloggers and industry actors. This account starts with an early ‘blog war’ occurring in the Singaporean blogosphere and progresses through the expansion of blogging to a mainstream activity and the development of a significant new addition to the advertising and marketing industry in the form of the lifestyle blog. This book covers almost four years – in ‘internet years’ this might be seen as something close to an age, perhaps the ‘age of blogs’. While they were the cutting-edge means of online selfexpression and socialisation in 2006, this role has now largely been replaced by other social media such as Facebook, Instagram and others. However, as Rettberg (2014) argues, the blog format has now become ubiquitous and generic – while individuals have many more outlets for personal expression, blogs are now used on mainstream websites such as news outlets or corporate websites. They offer an easily accessible means to create quasi-permanent webpages with an opportunity for direct interaction with and between the readers via the comments. They have a direct descendent in video logs (vlogs), and we can see in blogging practices many of the specialised features that are promoted through social network sites (SNSs) today, such as Instagram’s focus on images and Facebook’s focus on sharing content on social networks. The bloggers in these pages would now often be described as microcelebrities or influencers; however, this book will focus on the term

Introduction | 3

lifestyle bloggers because of its focus on historical experience that is entangled with the medium of the blog.

Personal Blogging Personal blogs focus on the quotidian life of the blogger, as opposed to any specialised topic, and during the period this book covers, many tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of young Malaysians used blogs to express themselves, to consolidate and extend offline social relations and to make new relations online that often extended into offline relations too. A decade later, social media is an integral part of most Malaysians’ lives, and blogs have become a smaller part of the range of internet-based media in use. In the earlier stages, the most visible bloggers were Social-Political (SoPo) bloggers – self-nominated pundits and proto-journalists who write about current affairs. One went into exile following an arrest under the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA) that allowed detention without trial, and others became Members of Parliament in the elections of 2008 that brought sweeping changes to the political landscape, helped by blogs and other digital social media. Other notable SoPo bloggers are the Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir, the ex-Prime Minister, Najib Razak and senior opposition figures (Hopkins 2012, 2014b). These most visible bloggers were, however, in the minority; most bloggers were ‘personal bloggers’ who write about their life and thoughts, usually with small audiences. This disproportional interest in favour of SoPo blogs was reflected, both in Malaysia and worldwide, in the mainstream media and in academic research (Brake 2009: 22; Cenite et al. 2009: 589; Sifry 2008; Technorati 2009). Although most histories of blogging refer to Jorn Barger’s 1997 blog as the original prototype (e.g. Blood 2002a), there is an earlier ‘founding father of personal bloggers’ (Rosen 2004) – Justin Hall – who started in 1994 (Harmanci 2005; Israel 2011; Rettberg 2014: 12; Sandy 2011).1 It was a curious feature of most accounts of blogging that although personal blogging was recognised as predominant it mostly remained in the background – mentioned in passing, or as means to show the changes in what was seen as the central form – a public reflection on other material on the web (i.e. an annotated hyperlink), or discussion of current affairs. Thus Blood remarked that most blogs were ‘journalstyle’ rather than ‘filter-style’ weblogs (Blood 2002b: 11) but preferred to concentrate on the latter. Barger also obliquely referred to the increase in personal bloggers, saying that ‘you can certainly include links

4 | Monetising the Dividual Self

to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility’ (quoted in Ammann 2009: 284). The underrepresentation of personal blogs may have reflected a gendered approach that relegates the personal to the conventionally female and less powerful private sphere (Gregg 2006b) and a connected privileging of the democratising potential of blogs with regard to a political economy of the media (Herring, Kouper et al. 2004), where the political debates and aggressive posturing of political bloggers took centre stage. This helps to explain two early stereotypes that were common – the teenage female ‘Dear Diary’ blogger and the serious older male pundit (Gregg 2006b: 155). Thus, Herring, Kouper et al. concluded that not only has the role of females in developing blogging been understated but ‘more attention needs to be paid to “typical” blogs and the people who create them in order to understand the real motivations, gratifications, and societal effects of [blogging]’ (2004). Over time, a variety of blog genres have developed that mirror sectorial interests in the media, and much of the work of maintaining everyday relations has moved to SNSs. With hindsight, the predominance of personal bloggers can now be understood as a precursor to the widespread use of social media to maintain everyday relations and – for professionals – to garner an audience and leverage celebrity of varying degrees for commercial gain. Advertising has become the commercial foundation of the internet, and social media represent the commercialising of interpersonal social relations that is a central development of the early twenty-first century, a development that needs to be carefully and critically considered. Starting in a predominantly non-commercial blogosphere, this book narrates and analyses how a previously non-commercial sphere of online activity became interwoven with commercial imperatives. Bloggers and readers had to engage with these, negotiating the meaning of their changed relations that were now entangled with powerful commercial interests that targeted their interpersonal relations to channel them towards consumerism and a market strategy that depends heavily on extracting value from symbolic brands.

Ethnographic Fieldwork On- and Offline I have lived and worked in Malaysia since 2002, during which time I have worked as a lecturer, become a father, completed a PhD and focused on research into the role of social media in everyday life. All these experiences inform this book, but the anthropological tradition

Introduction | 5

dictates that the best way to learn about cultural activity is to participate in it, while always keeping one foot in a systematic analysis by means of varied methods of data collection and recording perspectives in fieldnotes. To this end, I started by creating a new blog – anthroblogia2 – to serve both as a base for my online blogging presence and a field diary of sorts where I could record observations and receive feedback from bloggers. This blog also serves as a companion to this book and occasional footnotes will link to relevant blogposts. For about three months near the beginning of my fieldwork, I systematically explored and categorised all the blogs I read. I purposely expanded my usual range of blogs by following links in comments and reading the blog posts that appeared in the ‘top ten’ posts of the BlogAdNet blog aggregator and recorded details such as the blog title, the name or pseudonym of the blogger, available demographic details, the genre, types of advertisements hosted, means of monetisation and so on. This content analysis of approximately 500 blogs was useful in building a more systematic understanding of patterns of blog usage and elements of the different genres, guiding me in how to construct my own blog and to develop questions for a survey. Based on this, I also started Tropical Gardening3 – an experiment in niche blogging to test monetisation techniques based on search engine optimisation (SEO) to pull in an audience and leverage it for income by selling advertisements, links and getting commissions on sales for Amazon.com. From March to April 2009 I conducted an online ‘Malaysian Blog Survey 2009’ (‘myBlogS 2009’) and gathered 553 valid records.4 Thirty-six per cent of these were ‘Blog readers’ (nonbloggers who read blogs), and the rest were active bloggers who had updated at least once in the previous three months. Fifty-one per cent of the bloggers were ‘Monetisers’ who were either making money from their blog or wished to and the remaining ‘Non-Monetisers’ stated that they had no intention of making money with their blog.5 When BlogAdNet started, I registered with them and took part in as many activities as I could. This included online competitions as well as offline blogmeets, of which I attended twenty-nine overall, and four blog-related events, most of which were organised by BlogAdNet. In combination with online blogging and interactions, blogmeets were an essential part of the fieldwork – they were the main means of meeting informants, and I would chat casually and ask questions, taking photos, observing and using a voice recorder to take quick notes before, during and after the events. It also contributed an important understanding of the offline context – for example, I was able to compare the offline experience with the ways in which it was represented online afterwards. Through these events, I was able to meet some key actors in the

6 | Monetising the Dividual Self

Malaysian blogosphere and requested their permission to track and record their blogging before conducting an in-depth interview with them. Most interviews were conducted between August and October 2009: seventeen semi-structured interviews of one hour or more, three brief interviews of about fifteen minutes each and two email interviews. All bloggers – except for some SoPo public figures – are pseudonymised, and permission was sought for verbatim quotes from blogs. All text taken from blogs is reproduced as was, without grammatical or spelling corrections. Where permission for direct quotes was not given and to avoid being identified via a search engine, quotes from blogs are paraphrased without changing the meaning. In some circumstances, different pseudonyms are used for bloggers to avoid their interviews being associated with extracts of blogs.

Book Overview The discussion in this book uses a mixed method analysis of all the above data, emphasising qualitative and interpretive analysis. The chapters follow a chronological sequence that intersperses ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1972) of key events with theoretical discussion and analysis. A thick description provides a detailed description of events that uses empirical data and contextual understanding to explain the layered meanings and inference of social interactions in a particular situation. The events were chosen to exemplify key aspects of the emergence of the lifestyle blog and can mostly be read as standalone chapters, although they use concepts that are developed and explained in the other chapters. Chapter 1 explains the theoretical framework that emerged during the fieldwork and introduces the three main analytical concepts and theories that are used: affordances, actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage. Drawing from ANT, it argues that blogs can be considered to have agency in their own right, and the concept of assemblage is used to conceptualise of the blogger and the blog as causally articulating together in a relatively stable configuration of machinic and expressive components. An example of this is how a blogger’s sense of their self begins to causally interact with the personalisation and interactive affordances of the blog, and a discussion of the relational self is developed. A central argument of this book is that we need to acknowledge the possibility that software intended for use in social interaction can influence the forms of interaction, and the concept of affordances is used to detail the processes of interaction of the blogger and the blog.

Introduction | 7

The role of software as both material platform and malleable technology is acknowledged through conceptualising affordances as ‘cascading’ from a priori affordances to emergent affordances. The first of the thick descriptions in Chapter 2 details a ‘blogwar’ in what was the predominantly non-monetised blogosphere of January 2006. Using detailed content and textual analysis, it describes how an anonymous ‘hate blog’ was created by ‘BlogQueen’ to disparage ‘IronLady’ and ‘AntiBlogQueen’. The author was widely suspected (and later confirmed) to be a leading personal blogger at the time, and she is still now a leading social media celebrity in Singapore and Malaysia. This blog and the debate that developed are used to explain key components of the premonetised personal blog genre such as authenticity and the tensions arising from the anonymity affordance. This discussion leads into Chapter 3, which describes both the structural components of blogs and bloggers’ practices that combine to enable expressions of the ‘dividual self’ through the personal blog genre and interrogates the concept of authenticity based on a unitary concept of the self. In this chapter, we meet many of the main characters whose interviews and blogs were important to the fieldwork. Chee Keong, Haliza, Magdalene, Nicky, Tommy and Ibrahim were leading ‘A-list’ bloggers, each with their own distinctive style and daily readers in the thousands. Chee Keong was infamous for no holds barred accounts of recreational drug use that eventually led to his arrest and detention, and Tommy was probably the most popular personal blogger at the time with a trademark comedic style. Haliza, Magdalene and Nicky were proficient personal bloggers, publishing affective accounts of their lives and discussing fashion and food. Haliza’s life as a mother was central to her blog, Magdalene’s witty and genuine chronicling of her everyday life marked her out, Nicky’s zest and flair for fashion was to become her career, and the success of Ibrahim’s fan blog led to a job with Malaysia’s leading cable TV provider. Adeline and Jaymee were longstanding ‘old school’ bloggers whose voice was influential, although they did not have as large an audience as the A-listers. Andrew, Stephanie and Thomas were of a newer generation, having started with the knowledge of monetisation as an option, and Stephanie had been successful in getting funding and support for her travels by blogging about them. Alvin and Rachel differed by being older and with a more professional motivation – Rachel supported and publicised her writing activities with her blog, and Alvin was more of a newcomer to blogs but already an established columnist in a national newspaper with significant name recognition. The next thick description in Chapter 4 focuses on an early ‘blogmeet’ in May 2007. Although it focuses mostly on SoPo bloggers, it also

8 | Monetising the Dividual Self

shows how bloggers were grappling with the intersection of on- and offline activities – demonstrating the development of genre as social practice. While SoPo bloggers were gathering and claiming to represent all bloggers, reactions from personal bloggers and government-aligned interests showed how different genres were triggering the reorganisation of assemblages spanning on- and offline activities. Most of the data relate to the SoPo bloggers, but Tommy also makes an appearance here, and material from personal bloggers is also used. This discussion of bloggers organising around genres serves to introduce Chapter 5, which explores the ways in which blogs and bloggers interacted and developed collective practices that stabilised the emergent assemblages. This chapter interrogates the commonplace use of ‘community’ as a discursive term and proposes the use of socialities to understand collective action and how blog affordances such as interactivity stabilise on- and offline social assemblages. We meet James for the first time, a senior figure in BlogAdNet and – incidentally – Magdalene’s future spouse, whose courtship and eventual proposal were detailed on both their blogs. Chapter 6’s thick description is focused on a blog that reviewed the new blog advertising networks in April 2007. ‘Reviewer’ is the main character, but James, his colleague Chang and Peter – the founder of AppAds, BlogAdNet’s competitor – feature prominently. There was an unexpectedly rapid take-up of the blog advertising networks’ services, and through a series of blogposts and their attendant comments, a networked public emerged debating matters of common interest and tensions occurring over probable ill-intentioned manipulations of the anonymity affordance. As in the blogwar in Chapter 2, the importance of consistent pseudonyms and online performances is again highlighted, as well as the ability of digitally literate actors to manipulate and decode automated actions by software. Chapter 7 then develops a theoretically and empirically informed overview of the processes by which blogs and their audiences both disrupted and were integrated into the existing advertising market. Using the ANT concepts of the ‘economy of qualities’ and ‘voicy consumers’ (Callon 1998a; Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002) as well as anthropological approaches to consumerism and markets, it highlights the importance of the ability to measure audiences, how BlogAdNet responded to the limitations of this, and the central role of bloggers’ affective labour that encourages the development of parasocial relations by their readers. It draws on interview material from James and Andy – both working with BlogAdNet – and we also meet Sebastian for the first time, a public relations consultant who had a reputation as an expert in the newly emerging blog

Introduction | 9

advertising sector. Interview material from Xi Ving and Faizal is used here for the first time; they were newer bloggers who arrived with clear models of blog monetisation already present, prefiguring the current environment where younger social media users can visualise themselves as professional social media influencers. By January 2009, when the events of Chapter 8 took place, blog advertising was commonplace. The thick description describes how the construction of a fictional romantic narrative for an advertorial was misinterpreted and became contentious. The main characters are Shi Han – a noted blogger who thrived on a ‘bad boy’ image – and his unwitting target Mei Chan. Through a detailed discussion of the advertorial and its accompanying comments, questions of how authenticity is negotiated and integrated into the parasocial relations that centre on the blog as assemblage are laid out. Advertorials are paid blog posts that weave advertising messages into the habitual stream of blog posts and as such epitomise the new lifestyle blog genre. Chapter 9 draws upon the previous chapters and explains how the process of blog monetisation culminated in the emergence of this new genre. BlogAdNet emerges as a central influence – providing income and creating opportunities for bloggers to meet and model marketing-oriented activities. When we understand economic markets as a cultural phenomenon we can see how the social relations enabled with blogs become commodified, and the textual enactment of the relational self through the blog enables a calibrated authenticity that continues to leverage parasocial relations. In hindsight, the October 2009 regional awards blogmeet described in Chapter 10 represented the high point of the blog as the leading form of social media. The scale of the blogmeet was unprecedented and demonstrated the maturity of the form and the interest by the marketing sector. The blog awards ceremony mirrored mainstream media awards ceremonies and represented a convergence of a previously fringe medium that gained legitimacy through its ability to be reconfigured as an advertising platform. The chapter also sees how BlogAdNet was expanding regionally and having to grapple with different sociocultural contexts. Finally, the conclusion of the book reflects upon the current state of social media celebrity and the way in which the emergence of the lifestyle blog sheds light on the phenomenon of the social media influencer and the ubiquity of social network sites.

Notes   1. Justin Hall no longer blogs, but some of his work can be seen here: http:// www.links.net/vita/ (last accessed 2 October 2018).

10 | Monetising the Dividual Self

 2.  3.  4.  5.

http://julianhopkins.net. http://tropical-gardening.blogspot.com/. http://julianhopkins.net/index.php?/plugin/tag/survey. All percentages from the survey are rounded to the nearest per cent point.

CHAPTER 1

The Blog as Assemblage Agency and Affordances

As with other media, the entanglement of technology, society and culture is at the core of an analysis of blogs, and this chapter discusses how my baseline theoretical approach guided by actor-network theory (ANT) and Bourdieuian field theory developed. As my fieldwork progressed, I struggled with defining blogs in a manner that took into account their specific technological features without using deterministic explanations of emerging practices, and this led me to the concept of affordances first proposed by Gibson (1977). This concept explains how animals encounter objects as material cues for action, and bloggers also encounter blog interfaces as material in this sense. However, as will be discussed below, the coded software ‘features’ are in fact themselves afforded by other technologies. Therefore, I have distinguished between those affordances that were inherent to a practical definition of blogs and those that were more identifiable as contingently emergent blogging practices. Another important development followed the invalidation of my initial expectation, based on Bourdieu’s discussion of the ‘fundamental law’ of cultural fields (1993), that a dialectical movement would emerge between groups of bloggers who stood by the fundamental principle of authenticity and those who ‘sold out’ to advertisers. This did not happen, and while seeking to integrate technology, media, social practices and agency, I came to appreciate the usefulness of the assemblage perspective, a model that emphasises rhizomatic multiplicities of causally related components rather than the relatively bounded dialectically driven spheres that a Bourdieuian approach implies. The model that emerged is methodologically driven by ethnography and ANT, outlines a typology of blog affordances, and is framed in an assemblage approach. It is proposed as a heuristic model for anchoring

12 | Monetising the Dividual Self

analyses of blogs that also has a potential for being applied to social media in general.

The Blog Medium: Affordances,  Actor-Network Theory and Assemblage What most users encounter in practice as ‘the internet’ is a series of variously interactive webpages displayed on a web browser, or apps on their mobile device. To the everyday user ‘the internet’ is as relevant as phone wires to a fixed line user – it only becomes relevant when it does not work. The internet is more usefully seen as a repository and distribution mechanism for a variety of media that can be identified by the modalities afforded by their interfaces and by associated practices. For example, a web forum offers written word and visual modalities – this would describe most web content, but forums are distinguished by the practice of engaging in threaded conversation and a broadly egalitarian access to interactional space. Podcasts, however, employ audio modalities only and correspond more to the classic one-to-many broadcast model. When defining blogs we need to therefore understand both the modalities and the associated practices. In early works, blogs were classified as a genre (with sub-genres) operating through the medium of the internet. Plotting a continuum of ‘web genre[s] [along …] three dimensions of comparison … frequency of update, symmetry of communicative exchange, and multimodality’, Herring, Kouper et al. (2004: 10) described the blog as a hybrid genre bridging the gap between more static webpage communication and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). Expanding from Blood’s three ‘types’ (‘filters, personal journals, and notebooks’), they used five ‘blog types’ in their study: Personal journal, Filter, K-log, Mixed, and Other (Herring, Kouper et al. 2004: 2–6). However, Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht highlighted the difficulties inherent in classifying an emergent mediatic form, saying that the ‘extraordinarily diverse content of blog posts would seem to burst the bounds of a single genre’ (2004: 230). As the debate developed, other approaches that also took into account the specifics of blog affordances suggested that blogs were a medium themselves. Teachout argued that a blog is ‘an end in itself, a medium whose distinctive properties arose from the opportunities for personal expression that it offered’ (2005: 45), and boyd (2006) argued that comparing blogs alongside other genres (such as a diary) obscures the specificity of blogging practices that shape the blog as medium. Emphasising cultural factors rather than ‘technologically

The Blogs as Assemblage: Agency and Affordances | 13

defined’ boundaries (2006: para 36) she argued that blogs ‘allow people to extend themselves into a networked digital environment’ (2006: para 32). Using a metaphor of paper, television or radio, she notes that blogs support the expression of many genres – journalistic, diaristic and so on – and concludes: ‘blogs are not a genre of communication, but a medium through which communication occurs’ (2006: para 58). Defining the blog was an early challenge during the fieldwork, and the reminders from both boyd and Teachout to integrate sociocultural uses of media technologies into the definition of a blog was important. Their arguments affirm the limitations of defining a medium by its technical properties, but not their irrelevance.

Relational Affordances The concept of affordances is increasingly used in studies of digital media (Baym 2010; Evans et al. 2017; Jenkins and Carpentier 2013; Wellman et al. 2003), and others have applied it more specifically to social media (e.g. Germann Molz and Paris 2013; Gibbs, Rozaidi and Eisenberg 2013; Hsieh 2012; Treem and Leonardi 2012). In analyses of blogging Graves lists some of ‘blogging’s journalistic affordances’ as: ‘many eyeballs’, ‘fixity’, ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘editorial freedom’ (2007: 340–42), and Al-Ani, Mark and Semaan provide some general descriptions of blog affordances – ‘forming communities, expressing identity, receiving support from others, and expressing views of the war’ (2010). Others such as Luehmann (2008) and Herring, Scheidt et al. (2005) use the term but do not develop it in detail. Discussing the uses of blogs for teaching, Tan and Sale also do not engage with specifics of affordances as a concept, referring to Wellman et al. (2003) and arguing that the ‘[m]ost significant [affordance] is the capability for ongoing organized knowledge building, incorporating the integration of a range of hyperlinked multimedia’ (2010: 2). The concept of affordances tends to be used imprecisely (Evans et al. 2017), and the frequent use of a prefixing qualifier also suggests there is ambiguity in how it is understood, suggesting that there is a need for a more detailed theoretical consideration of the term (Hopkins 2016a). When cognitive psychologist Gibson invented the noun ‘affordance’, he explained that it ‘implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment’ (1986: 127) where an object offers the potential to be used in various ways, but different animals cannot use it in the same way. For example, a pond’s surface affords support to a water strider insect but not to a human – hence, ‘an affordance of support for a

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species of animal [has] to be measured relative to the animal’ (1986: 127; original emphasis). Affordances are thus relational. They are inherent in and limited by physical properties of the object, but they are only empirically relevant when actualised through interaction with other actors or actants. In a frequently cited article, Hutchby addresses the perennial technodeterminist debate by arguing that affordances offer a ‘“third way” between the ([social] constructivist) emphasis on the shaping power of human agency and the (realist) emphasis on the constraining power of technical capacities’ and defines affordances as ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’ (2001: 444). The appeal of affordances stems from the need to avoid positioning technology as determinative of particular sociocultural outcomes, or situating the use of technology as completely socially constructed, and thus merges with the debates around sociotechnology (e.g. Pfaffenberger 1992). Recalling MacKenzie and Wajcman’s argument that there is a place for a form of ‘“soft” determinism’ (1999: 4) that acknowledges the limitations and directional pressures that technologies place upon their uses (see also Schroeder 2018), Graves suggests that the ‘real power of the concept of a technological “affordance” derives … from the way it hints that potential exerts its own pull’ (2007: 335). The verb ‘to afford’ means that it is not the outcome alone that we look at but also the technology and see what it allows and/or suggests. Thus, in using affordances we do not ignore the way in which technologies can, and often do, put users on particular paths. For example, discussing telephones, Hutchby suggests that ‘there may be specific forms of interaction’ that have developed as a result of ‘a complex interplay between the normative structures of conversational interaction and [telephones’] communicative affordances’ (Hutchby 2001, cited in Hutchby 2003: 585; original emphasis). More recently, Schrock has argued that conceptualising ‘communicative affordances’ and avoiding an exclusive focus on features adds to the study of communication by allowing comparison over time and across specific technologies – for example, affordances of wearable technologies may ‘carry over from mobile media’ (2015: 1239), and, in turn, the portability of mobile media has some similarities with printed books (2015: 1236). He also argues that whereas Gibson’s approach was focused on the direct perception of utility based on immediate needs, utility can also be perceived in relation to goals that precede the use of a medium – for example, using a social network site to announce the birth of a child – in other words, affordances often develop from pre-existing sociocultural practices. Understanding affordances with relation to perceptions of utility that derive from our human ability to reflect

The Blogs as Assemblage: Agency and Affordances | 15

on our situation, set ourselves a goal, and recalibrate our actions as we advance towards it, re-emphasises human agency and helps to explain both how users may adapt new technologies to existing practices, as well as follow new practices suggested or framed by these technologies.

Affording Software This process of adaptation is especially relevant when considering the iterative development of software, and an extra layer of complexity is introduced to the use of affordances as an explanatory tool because the interface that presents itself to the blogger is itself afforded by a combination of soft- and hardware that the coders use to develop the interface. We can look at the mouse cursor that was a significant development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), a design approach that transformed the popular accessibility of personal computers (e.g. Norman 2013: 20). A computer’s affordances exist independently from what the screen shows (Norman 1999: 40), and the GUI is the primary mechanism by which the uses of computers are signalled to users. These signals are interpreted through cultural lenses, and it is interesting to note that Gibson did not limit his discussion of affordances to the physical environment, noting that the ‘richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are [for humans] provided by … other people’ (Gibson 1986: 135). These rich and elaborate sociocultural environments are diverse and subjective, and the coded affordances built into programs are also created by people with diverse social, cultural, economic and political intentions. In addition, software can be easily updated and changed, and this malleability suggests that digital media is a uniquely human technology – perhaps the most human of all technologies – that can be considered alongside other abstract human creations such as language or art. However, the user would not know the meaning of the changing cursor unless she was already familiar with the use of the mouse, or at least a touch screen. This highlights the relevance of literacies – the ability to ‘read’ such signals and act upon them. Thus, Norman also emphasises relationality and notes that the ‘presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting’ (2013: 11). In this example, the affordance exists because the web browser has been coded to identify and signal hyperlinks, combined with the ability of the user to respond to the visual cue by clicking the mouse. Whereas considering how software is developed reminds us of the social malleability of (digital) technology, considering digital literacies emphasises the limitations to uses in everyday practice.

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A small minority of software users may be able to hack into software and change it, but for most users the interface has a utilitarian materiality with which they engage as ‘worldly artefact[s]’ (Hutchby 2003: 586), using the features as given, and without seeking to change them. This fundamental difference of software as materiality suggests that there is a need to adapt Gibson’s original approach.

Qualifying Affordances It is notable that the meaning of ‘affordances’ is often taken for granted – sometimes to the extent of not defining it nor referring to leading sources such as Gibson (1986) or Norman (2013). In addition, the frequent use of a prefixing qualifier for affordances suggests a need to refine the concept, as implied by Hutchby’s distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘relational’ aspects of affordances. For example, ‘social affordances’ seems to have been first used by Wellman et al. (2003), who loosely define ‘internet social affordances’ as things that ‘can influence everyday life’ (2003) and do not refer to Gibson. Germann Molz and Paris (2013) and Hsieh (2012) have also recently argued for the use of ‘social affordances’ to explore the interaction of social media and particular types of mediated social relations. Germann Molz and Paris argue that ‘possibilities for togetherness are shaped, but not determined, by the technologies flashpackers [recreational travellers] use on the road’ (2013: 18) and note that ‘social affordances … afford certain forms of sociability’ between flashpackers and relevant others (2013: 5; original emphasis). Addressing the digital divide, Hsieh (2012) notes that the ‘social affordances of ICTs are technologically bounded and socially constructed’ and uses the concept to explain both the limitations of social media and how social networking advantages are only afforded to those with particular digital literacy skills deriving from their social context. Gibbs et al. also use a qualifier, describing ‘“strategic affordances” … that draw on organizational members’ desires for strategic ambiguity’ (2013: 105). From the field of human-computer interaction, Sun (2004) points to Brerentsen and Trettvik for whom affordances emerge ‘as activityrelationships between actors and objects’ (quoted in Sun 2004: 56). Sun distinguishes between ‘instrumental affordances’ that emerge ‘from use interactions in the material context’ and ‘social affordances’ that are ‘the affordances on the activity level emerging from use interactions in the socio-cultural and historical context’ (2004: 57). The ‘instrumental affordances’ recalls Hutchby’s ‘functional affordances’, and the important recognition of the ‘material context’ is echoed in Treem and

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Leonardi’s argument that ‘the affordances of one technology are often the same or similar across diverse organizational settings because the material features of the technology place limits on the kinds of interpretations people can form of it and the uses to which it can be put’ (2012: 146; emphasis added). These points highlight the agency of non-human technologies, a key aspect of the concept of affordances that is sometimes overlooked in favour of emphasising the cultural adaptation of technologies (e.g. D. Miller 2016: 37–40). It also points to a link with actor-network theory that we will return to below. Recent work by Evans et al. (2017) has distinguished between ‘features’ and ‘outcomes’ and argued that these are mediated by affordances. In this argument, features are often mistakenly identified as affordances, but here I will argue that it is also possible to see these features as affordances in themselves, albeit in relation to a different context. Technologies have limitations that need to be identified – these do not determine outcomes but may help to explain patterns of use within and across different sociocultural contexts. A blog is an interface designed by humans and as such the ‘features’ – such as the modular architecture of plug-ins or the ability to create hyperlinks – are all in effect afforded by a combination of microprocessor technology and binary coding language that developed through historically contingent processes that can be investigated in their own right (e.g. Berners-Lee 1996; Ceruzzi 1999). This latter point is important when we consider digital technologies such as social media platforms that are explicitly designed with particular sociocultural relational outcomes in mind (e.g. Bucher 2013). Hence, ‘features’ or ‘properties’ of a software platform are in fact affordances that are enabled by an underlying level of the technology – an idea echoed by Michael, who discusses possible ‘cascades’ of affordances, whereby the use of one technology affords the use of another (2000: 112). A skilled coder could manipulate these affordances, but in practice most people engage with media technologies as users, taking the ‘features’ as given, without seeking to change them. Therefore, these ‘features’ could be termed ‘foundational’ or ‘a priori’ affordances, because they are a necessary precondition to the types of affordances that the user can develop – with, for example, the hyperlink becoming a means to engage in associations and develop socialities with other bloggers and readers online. These emergent affordances are the ones most relevant to an anthropological study of blogging, as they can be used as an empirical lens to shed light on the interaction of technology and people in emerging practices, socialities and genres. Table 1.1 proposes a typology of the different affordances that was developed during the fieldwork, along with associated blogging practices.

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Table 1.1 Blog affordances. Blog affordance Affordance

Explanation

Storage

• Memory is automated • Bloggers often speak and expanded. of using their blog to • Archives and search store memories. functions make re• A new reader can go trieval easier. over old posts and get an idea of the blogger over time. • Practically unlimited storage means multiple blogs can be created. • Simultaneous copies • This enables multiple readers to access the of blog content are available to multiple blog simultaneously, readers. to see the same content, and to interact via the comments. • Original content is prized, and unattributed duplication is condemned. • Undisclosed postfacto changes of posted material are usually disapproved of. • A range of media mo- • The overall style and dalities are available. design (colours used, At least one (typically fonts, header, etc.) written text) is necesare important as exsarily used. pressions of taste and in indicating genre. • Photos and/or pictures are usually present.

A priori affordances

Perfect reduplication

Multimedia

Related personal blogging practices

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A priori affordances

Modularity

Hyperlinking

Emergent affordances

Anonymity

Disembodiment

• A blog is constructed • It is easy to add and through relatively ausubtract components tonomous blocks of – for example: advercode, each of which tisements, hyperlinks, enables particular hits counter, music functions and meplayer, etc. diatic displays. The most fundamental module is the blog post. • Incoming links • The blog requires increase overall hyperlinking intervisibility of the blog nal to the website to maintain structural due to search engine algorithms. consistency. • Reciprocal linking is • It is possible to conan important social nect to other sites practice and nonquickly and simultareciprocal linking an neously, inserting a indication of relative blog into a network status. of potential relations. • Linking is not as widespread as often assumed. • Ostensible anonym- • Most bloggers are ity is easy to achieve. identifiable through However, most their own choice. internet users can be • A stable pseudonym, at least, is required traced, given the appropriate resources for sustainable social (usually limited to relations. specialised opera• Anonymity is sometimes used strategitors or government cally – for example, agencies). in commenting on blog posts. • Social interaction • This enables funcis possible without tional anonymity. physical collocation. • The use of photos, profile descriptions and consistent performance is important to stabilise relations.

Emergent affordances

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Affordance

Explanation

Accessibility

• For any computer • Maintaining a populiterate person with lar blog requires regaccess to the internet, ular updates. Owning the barriers to starta computer will help ing and maintaining substantially. a blog are minimal. • The practically un• One person may limited opportunity communicate to for creating blogs millions of people fosters individualism for the same cost as and mitigates argucommunicating to ments based on the public good. one person. • Free blogging platforms are supported by advertising revenues and the provision of other services. • A blog can be main- • Group blogs are a tained by a single small minority of person, therefore blogs and often aseliminating any sociated with profesformal gatekeeping sional organisations. process. • The ability to represent oneself through a blog in such a manner that people develop a holistic sense of the blogger as a person. • It is possible to have • A blog without endirect interpersonal abled comments is interaction via a blog, rare, and comments particularly in the are often answered. comments area. However, there are • Interaction also many ways of interoccurs passively, as acting with readers: readers leave traces email, instant messagin server logs. ing, social network sites, etc.

Personalisation

Interactivity

Related personal blogging practices

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Actor-Network Theory By allowing agency for both human and non-human actors/actants, as well as ‘non-individual[s]’ (Latour 1998), Actor-Network Theory (ANT) usefully complements the concept of affordances. The term ‘actor-networks’ encompasses the interaction between components (networks) and the agency of those components (actors/actants), both as separate entities and as a whole actor-network. Instead of assuming pre-existing structures that have ‘already been assembled and [act] on the whole’ (Latour 2005: 43), ANT focuses on empirical traces of these interactions as a means to analyse emergent phenomena, and the discussion of affordances above outlines one way of doing this. In addition to an economic analysis based on ANT (in Chapter 7), this book uses three key concepts from ANT. First is the ‘actant’ – ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ (Latour 2005: 71) – this encompasses human and non-human agency and will be used to refer to a blog in particular, as well as other components. All actors/actants may be intermediaries that ‘transport meaning or force without transformation’, or mediators that ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour 2005: 39). There can be complicated intermediaries (e.g. a computer) and simple mediators (e.g. a conversation), and vice versa. Claiming that a particular technology is ‘neutral’ would be an example of casting it as an intermediary – however, for ANT there are very few intermediaries, because connected actants in networks engage in ‘translation’. This is a central concept in ANT, also called the ‘sociology of translation’ by Callon, who describes it as a process ‘during which the identity of actors, the possibility of interaction, and the margins of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited’ (Callon 1986: 206). Latour describes translation as ‘a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting’ (Latour 2005: 108); that is, there are relations of causality but the process is recursive – both creating and produced by the intersection of particular nodes. The second is the idea of the ‘obligatory point of passage’ (Callon 1986: 202), whereby a particular component of an actor-network may be uniquely placed so as to provide a constitutive means of translation that may occur within, or between, actor-networks. The obligatory points of passage may be non-human artefacts – such as the blogging platform required to maintain a blog – or otherwise – such as a new citizen’s oath to the constitution. An example could be a household’s

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wireless router – this becomes an obligatory passage point that connects a household to a plethora of entertainment, news, services and so on. The implications of this are multiple, but in the first instance it creates a dynamic around which other actants need to negotiate positions – such as when parents restrict a ‘grounded’ teen’s internet access. Finally, depending on the level of analysis, one may focus on particular actor-networks or ‘black-box’ them – i.e. take their overall impact as given and not look into the particular components. In this case, they may become the obligatory point of passage for another actornetwork that is the focus of analysis. For example, a blogger needs access to a computer – as discussed above, a computer is a collection of artefacts with contingent agency and affordances, but for the purposes of this study I mostly ‘black-box’ the computer to focus on the emergent affordances. Noting that ‘ANT offers a precise and non-functionalist account of how actors become established as powerful through the stability of the networks that pass through them’, Couldry (2008: 101) approves of the insights ANT offers but argues that it is not able to provide a basis for a media theory because of its ‘insufficient attention to questions of time, power and interpretation’ (Couldry 2008: 107). Similarly, Eyal (2006) also argues that ANT does not properly account for power differentials – something that is implicitly recognised by Latour when he argues that the ‘two tasks of taking into account and putting into order have to be kept separate’ (2005: 207) and that ANT can only do the first task properly, setting the stage for an effective political engagement in the second (Latour 2005: 207; see also Hopkins and Thomas 2011). ANT therefore implies an empirical and inductive methodology, one that sees traces of emergent collective activity in observable events but does not lead to an objectification of a purported social entity that is projected back onto groups that are being studied. Instead, it is understood that the actors themselves are best placed to understand the intricacies of complex social interaction that they constantly engage in.

Assembling Affordances On a first, horizontal, axis an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal

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transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; emphases in original1 The methodological usefulness of ANT can be fleshed out theoretically with the concept of assemblage, and there is a lot in common between both Latour and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, although they barely mention each other.2 Deleuze and Guattari’s theory also opposes essentialism and dichotomies, allowing for the integration of a multiplicity of actors/actants, often visualised as being on a ‘flat’ plane that avoids presuppositions of predominant force or metastructures. Although they did not address social sciences directly (Brown 2009), their ideas have been fertile in social-scientific analyses (e.g. Collier and Ong 2005; Jensen and Rödje 2009a; Poster and Savat 2009). The description of an assemblage that opens this section (above) provides much of the basis of what is used here to explore the effects of monetisation on personal blogging. It describes a contingently assembled group of heterogeneous components, coalescing around axes of content and expression, and territorialisation and deterritorialisation. Assemblages are multiplicities of heterogeneous components that resonate through their causal relations. An assemblage has no more properties than those that emerge from the causal relations of its parts, and those properties exist only as long as that particular force of territorialisation maintains a ‘plateau’, ‘a continuous self-vibrating region of intensities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 24). Assemblages are thus relatively stabilized, emergent consequences of causally interlinked components. Although dynamic, assemblages have a certain amount of iterative regularity, perhaps in the manner of a spiral, and may stabilise and reproduce themselves through ‘territorialising’ movements. The vertical axis, of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, relates to the constant process of mutation and change of any assemblage. The (re)territorialising forces stabilise the assemblage, by reducing or regularising the differences along the horizontal axis, and excluding deterritorialising influences. This can happen in a spatial sense, such as building a fence around a portion of land or a state, thus legitimising and delegitimising particular types of behaviour and/or affirming its monopoly of force within a given territory. It ‘also refers to nonspatial processes which increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage’ (DeLanda 2006: 13) – for example, the ethnic homogenisation of a neighbourhood. However, they also contain ‘deterritorialising’

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movements that lead to ‘lines of flight’ – forces and desires that spin off, ‘cutting through’ existing configurations, and capable of forming new assemblages (DeLanda 2006; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). These deterritorialising forces are those that ‘destabilize spatial boundaries or increase internal heterogeneity [for example …] communication technology … which blur[s] spatial boundaries of social entities by eliminating the need for co-presence’ (DeLanda 2006: 13). The horizontal axis of ‘expressive’ and ‘machinic’ poles lie ‘in reciprocal presupposition’ (Bogard 2009: 16), consisting of incorporeal components and material bodies and/or actions, respectively. This resembles the conventional division of material and immaterial or technological and social – in this book, this axis will be understood in terms of the reciprocal relation of the text on the blog and the coded materiality of the blog. Affordances can be used to develop a closer understanding of these relations and complement the concept of assemblage. For example, Savat notes how technologies may open or close off fields or forms of action and thought (2009b: 3), and DeLanda argues that it is possible to ‘distinguish … the properties defining a given entity from its capacities to interact with other entities’ (2006: 10; original emphasis). These capacities may or may not be exercised and have unknown potential given that their future positioning with regards to other entities will actualise new capacities. Within the context of the relatively stabilised assemblage, the components react with each other, and the affordances will limit – though not determine – how these bodies interact in particular configurations and produce particular contingent emergent properties. Recalling the discussion above about the cascading of affordances, DeLanda also argues that there can be a ‘series of differently scaled assemblages, some of which are component parts of others which, in turn, become parts of even larger ones’ (2006: 18). Using assemblage as an analytical tool also helps to model change, conceptualised as rhizomic. This describes the movement of connections between components of assemblages – the rhizome has multiple nodes, each capable of generating new rhizomes with unpredictable direction and progression that depends on interactions with its environment (Colebrook 2003: xxviii). In this respect, the a priori affordances are considered as obligatory points of passage – nodes in the rhizomic analogy – being defining and generative discrete components of heterogeneous networks. Thus, by understanding the movements between the nodes, we can shed light on the ways in which certain media promote or prohibit particular forms of social interaction. The rhizomatic perspective inherent in assemblage theory would suggest that any particular affordance is contingent and may come to the fore

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at any time – sometimes entirely unexpectedly, but it can also be more predictable. Understanding how the affordances are actualised brings us to the contingent, sociocultural context – that is, an assemblage, and Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that ‘tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible’ (1987: 99) resonates with this relational conceptualisation of affordances. As a counterpoint to rhizomic movements, Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘arborescent’ movements, which have roots that feed a stabilised trunk that grows in a distinct direction and has a relatively predictable outcome and form. Each can be part of a process of territorialisation or deterritorialisation, depending on their relative direction, and they are not ‘opposed models’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 22) – there is no dualism, not even between arborescent and rhizomatic processes that can each include the other. Nonetheless, each has a different mode of communication, and system of circulation, which has a direct impact on the organisation of the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). DeLanda discusses social assemblages, which ‘at the very least involve a set of human bodies properly oriented (physically or psychologically) towards each other’ (DeLanda 2006: 12); these can be limited to faceto-face interactions but also extend to the shared consciousness of a nation state. They include many other elements such as particular technologies that take on expressive roles and play a role in forming the relations between people. Non-material components can be linguistic (e.g. expressions of loyalty, or myths of legitimacy), or behavioural (e.g. the practice of obeying commands in public or displaying status via material possessions). Assemblages have emergent properties that are only possible because of the particular configuration of the heterogeneous components, and social assemblages ‘have objective existence because they can causally affect the people that are their component parts’ (DeLanda 2006: 38). Thus, we can identify social assemblages through their effects. Referring to concepts of weak and strong ties, he notes that denser social assemblages are more able to provide resources and constrain activities in contrast to more dispersed assemblages, making the former more likely to become recurrent. Nonetheless, despite the existence of objective, emergent, assemblages it is important to address the particular causal relations at the appropriate scale of operations, avoiding the recasting of an essentialised ‘society’ (for example) that categorises and arranges all of its constituent components. Thus, ‘assemblage’ is useful because it not only allows that both human and non-human components have agency, but it also emphasises how the world is built of many clusters of interlocking mechanisms, components connected through causal relations that are not restricted

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by predetermined spheres such as ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ dimensions, or materiality and immateriality. Discussing Facebook, Bucher uses assemblage and emphasises its dynamism, explaining it ‘as a formation and process of assembling rather than a static arrangement’ (2013: 481) and implies the relevance of affordances by noting how ‘by organizing heterogeneous relations in a specific way, [Facebook] constitutes a productive force: it makes new relations possible’ (2013: 481). These arguments parallel the way in which affordances and assemblage are conceptualised here, also speaking to how affordances in software can be explicitly constructed to produce certain use outcomes. Hutchby argues that affordances allow a way to imagine ‘the interface between human aims and the artefact’s affordances’ (Hutchby 2001: 453). It is proposed here that assemblage can be usefully seen as this ‘interface’ that builds a dynamic model of materiality and human agency, and that, within the concept of assemblage, affordances also provide a ‘diagrammatic function’, mapping the possibilities and limits to relations between non-necessarily related factors (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

Conclusions This chapter has outlined the theoretical framework that emerged during fieldwork, serving to focus an analytical lens on how blogs were enabling bloggers and readers to interact with each other and providing entry points for the development of a sophisticated marketing and advertising system that leverages parasocial relations and the quantification of social interaction. The framework links affordances, ANT and assemblage. The advantage of using affordances is that it avoids positioning technology as determinative of particular sociocultural outcomes or situating the use of technology as completely socially constructed. ANT provides a methodological guide to complement the basic ethnographic participant observation approach and emphasises the agency of non-human actants. It is complemented by Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage that enables the integration of power relations in a model that posits the simultaneous interaction of the textual and technical components of blogging activity. Affordances are introduced as a way of refining, or specifying, some of the processes that link causal relations in the assemblages. For example, the expression of authentic affect that is central to the personal blog genre is afforded by the personalisation and interactivity enabled through the blog interface. Each blog post marks a different

The Blogs as Assemblage: Agency and Affordances | 27

event in the personal blogger’s life, and the reader experiences these over time and alongside their own life events. The single blog post, typically a standalone webpage, is a structural element of the blog that enables the collection of reader statistics for advertising purposes and lies at the intersection of machinic elements of the blog and expressive text that indexes the blogger as an authentic person. A point not usually noted in discussions of affordances is the possibility of the agency of the non-material components. To develop this point, we can refer to assemblage and ANT that situate human and non-human components together in dynamic heterogeneous networks, shedding light on how people’s choices and range of actions are inherently connected to the other components and how non-human components draw upon and limit other components. Agency is distributed across the components and not assumed to lie solely with humans. Affordances and these theoretical frameworks thus fruitfully complement each other. The objective limits of technologies allow us to suggest that the same technology may promote similar affordances in different sociocultural contexts. To ignore this possibility is to posit a relativistic relationship with materiality where only the abstract and symbolic relations that define human interaction are to be taken account of, suggesting an infinite number of potential affordances could emerge from any technology. Humans do often use symbolic objects where the physical properties are irrelevant – such as an idol – but affordances relate in some way to tangible properties that enable action. However, where technologies do not have similar uses in different sociocultural contexts, something that can easily happen, this can be used as leverage to explore particular cultural patterns. Thus, in the exploration of the monetising of personal blogging that follows, the introduction of advertising also demonstrates a reterritorialisation of new media, a reintegration into ‘old media’ patterns – underlining the ways in which affordances are shaped by existing power relations and sociocultural systems.

Notes   1. A abstract visualisation of an assemblage can be seen here: http://julianhopkins.net/index.php?/archives/311-Visualising-assemblage.html.   2. Jensen and Rödje note that Latour is directly inspired by Deleuze and Guattari ‘to which ANT owes a great deal’ (Jensen and Rödje 2009b: 2).

CHAPTER 2

January 2006 Blogwars, Hit Sluts and Authenticity in the Personal Blogosphere

In the development of shared online social spaces, it is worth noting that users – and particularly early adopters – become experienced in developing and negotiating emerging social norms online, as well as becoming used to the contingent and often ephemeral social contexts. These norms become established as recognisable textual genres that tend to replicate themselves, and drawing upon Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen’s description of genre ‘as an interdisciplinary concept [that] connects texts and social organization’ (2010: 948), this chapter demonstrates how the patterns and themes observed in a blogwar can be used to analyse the personal blog as a genre and connects this to the relatively stabilised interactions of the bloggers and readers. This lays the basis for a further discussion in this book of the changes that occurred during the monetisation of personal blogging. As a specific form of computer-mediated conflict, falling within the genealogy of studies of ‘flame wars’ (see e.g. Lea et al. 1992), a ‘blogwar’ happens when bloggers launch sustained personalised criticisms of each other in their blogs, with readers often participating in the comments and/or in their own blogs. A ‘hateblog’ – created exclusively to attack another blogger and usually anonymous – may also be used. Taking a cue from Joinson and Dietz-Uhler, who point to the ‘value of identifying cases of virtual communities as they react to potentially community-threatening events’ (2002: 286), analysis of the blogwar was done in order to gain insight into negotiated norms of practice in the ‘blogosphere’ – the contingently imagined collective space populated by blogs, bloggers and blog readers. This chapter describes a blogwar that occurred in the Singaporean and Malaysian blogosphere in January 2006, centred on a ‘hateblog’ called ‘The Vivacious Young bitches vs The Droopy old crone’

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(hereafter referred to as VYB). This was a short-lived blog that made personal attacks on a prominent blogger – IronLady – and was ostensibly written by AntiBlogQueen,1 an anonymous blogger known for creating a blog dedicated to criticising BlogQueen. BlogQueen was the most well-known of the three protagonists – garnering 15,000 to 20,000 visitors a day for her blog, attracting controversy for her unapologetic opinions, and receiving attention in the mainstream media too. Events unfolded when AntiBlogQueen discovered the blog and told IronLady; they both posted about it and rapidly accused BlogQueen (along with two other bloggers who played a minor role) of appropriating AntiBlogQueen’s pseudonym and creating the hateblog. Although BlogQueen never responded, new posts appeared on the VYB blog addressing some of the issues debated online, and she was seen as being involved in some censoring of the debate on a Singaporean blog aggregator, tomorrow.sg. After four days, all the material from the VYB blog was deleted, and the issue soon faded from view as bloggers moved to newer matters.2 At the time of the blogwar, social network sites and microblogging had yet to draw most of the casual audience away, and the personal blogosphere in Malaysia and Singapore was in its heyday. Although BlogQueen, and a few others, had started to be able to garner some income from their blogging activities, the process was in its early days, and the dominant modes of interaction and shared values were anchored around the personal blog genre.

Methodological Note Methodologically, a distinct advantage of this case study was the short life of the hateblog, which enabled a comprehensive analysis of the comments and blogs involved. Defining and limiting a research sample always involves some arbitrary delimitations of fluid and dynamic situations, and the blogosphere – with millions of blogs and intertextually hyperlinked dialogues – is no exception. In this case, a logical boundary was created by the deletion of the hateblog: it was created on 9 January, 2006, and the content removed on 12 January. Incoming links were traced using Technorati.com and the linked pages archived. After excluding duplicates and three blog posts in Mandarin (because translation was not available), 44 linked pages (including the original VYB posts) were collected, consisting of 32 bloggers in all. All of the relevant blog posts and comments pages were saved and used for analysis.3

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As far as possible, demographic details were extracted and tabulated; overall there was a roughly 50/50 split of male and females amongst bloggers, most blogs were in English, and most seemed to be by ethnic Chinese based in Singapore. Of the total 525 comments, 40 (7.6 per cent) of these were the blogger responding to comments in their own comment area, making them a significant voice in the ongoing conversation. These were removed from further content analysis, which left 485 comments. Most posts (68 per cent) had comments,4 but the centripetal attraction of the ‘prototypical member’ (Birchmeier, Joinson and Dietz-Uhler 2005: 109) was clear: 45.6 per cent of the comments (223) were on the IronLady posts and 28.3 per cent (137) were on the AntiBlogQueen posts. In all, there were 285 unique commenters. However, this figure includes 69 anonymous commenters, some of whom were probably the same person. Of the unique commenters, 110 had their own blogs, as evidenced by a link left with their comment. Based on a rough ratio of comments to visitors (1–2 per cent),5 there may have been about 30,000–40,000 visitors to the blogs over the period of the blogwar. However, many of these would be repeat visitors – roughly, one can estimate there was an audience of 5,000–10,000 for this blogwar.

The Personal Blogosphere The personal blog genre has roots in the personal diary (McNeill 2003) and focuses on the quotidian thoughts and experiences of the blogger, as opposed to any particular specialised topic. The blog may also be felt as an extension of their personal life, a means to maintain friendships, and for creative expression (e.g. Reed 2005, 2008). The lack of filters between the blogger and her blog means that, over time, there can be an accumulation of minor, quotidian, details that enable a regular reader to have a strong sense of the blogger as a person – something that rarely happens in other media. In 2006, there was a lively group of – mostly younger – Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers who shared aspects of their lives online and enjoyed writing, reading and commenting on each other’s blogs. In the blogosphere’s hierarchy the size of the audience was central, and BlogQueen’s large audience – as evidenced by a prominent hit counter on her blog – meant that she was an example that many hoped to follow. However, numbers were not everything, and a tension existed between the source of a personal blog’s attraction – a transparent window into another person’s life – and the opportunities that an online persona

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offered for dissimulation or exaggeration. There was thus a discourse that emphasised authenticity, underpinned by an ostensible disinterest with the size of the audience – recalling Bourdieu’s discussion of nineteenth-century French artists who rejected commercial interests as well as institutional influences and valued those who had ‘the appropriate dispositions, such as disinterestedness and daring’ (1993: 62–63). In effect, BlogQueen’s audience was due in a large measure to her lively style of writing, and willingness to be outspoken about contentious topics. For example, prior to the blogwar, she had both attracted support and raised the ire of many by suggesting that foreign workers be banned from certain popular areas in Singapore. IronLady was an older and less popular blogger, but she was also noted for her frequent use of expletives and straight talking, and in one incident had stated that she did not wish to be associated with BlogQueen. AntiBlogQueen did not have a personal blog but dedicated his blog mostly – as his pseudonym suggested – to criticising BlogQueen (the original name also directly referred to ‘BlogQueen’). He claimed to be a journalist in the offline space, and while some condemned his blog as a ‘hateblog’, a contemptible form of online trolling, he and others saw it as a principled stand – one that also served the wider purpose of building a respectable and relevant blogosphere. They each had their regular audiences. BlogQueen would usually have hundreds of comments on her blog posts; IronLady would have comments in the lower double digits; and AntiBlogQueen typically less. Most commenters did not seem to have their own blogs, though those who did would often extend these discussions onto their own. For many, the comments were valued for the contribution they made to the blog posts, and ad-hoc clusters and casual acquaintanceships that spread across blogs were formed through the comments.

9 January:  ‘We Speak UP because We Care’ The VYB’s first post appeared on 9 January, signed with AntiBlogQueen’s handle and titled ‘We speak UP because We care’. It was a mediocre ditty, disparaging the physique and character of ‘MetalLady’ – a thinly disguised version of IronLady’s handle. Part of the ditty read: Oh you, old saggy skank Sorry, we have to be frank Your face was run over by a tank Your parents must’ve played you a prank. (VYB-BP1)

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Much of it had crude references to IronLady’s supposedly aged and unattractive genitalia, and there was also a reference to her not getting onto a VIP list for a popular nightclub. Overall, it was a crude and blatant attempt to disparage her based on her age and appearance. Awareness of the VYB blog only spread after two days (see below), and by the time it was archived, there were only two comments left. One expressed support, saying ‘lol, fark this is eerily funny, eerie cos its true’ (VYB-BP1-C2), and the other castigated the author for deleting the original comments: Interesting, how things seem to have changed overnite. Where are all the COMMENTS? What happened? If U threesome really “CARED”, leave the “COMMENTS” where they belong … (VYB-BP1-C1)

By juxtaposing the somewhat oxymoronic reference to ‘caring’ in the title, with the deletion of the comments (that probably included strong criticisms), the commenter seems to be claiming a dereliction of care towards the commenters and/or readers. The comments were conventionally understood to be an integral part of blogs, and the comment suggests that by denying the reader’s response the blog is being reduced to a sole creation of the blogger, removing part of its meaning for regular readers and failing in some manner to reciprocate the attention provided by the readers.

10 January: ‘It’s Time to Tell the Whole Story’ The second VYB post, entitled ‘It’s time to tell the whole story’, lays out the context and rationalisation of the online attack. After a short leadin, it ‘reveals’ the author: Hello everyone, here’s a self introduction: I am [AntiBlogQueen]. That’s right, I appear to be [BlogQueen’s] archnemesis, but actually, I am obsessed with her to the point where I believe only I can write bad stuff about her. … So I started stalking [BlogQueen], and here’s her story. (VYB-BP2)

Ostensibly, this explains that AntiBlogQueen is obsessed with BlogQueen to the point of physically stalking her offline, and thus explains how he was in place to witness the exchange that is then detailed.

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BlogQueen and IronLady came across each other in a bar, and after a perceived slight by IronLady’s group, and BlogQueen’s perceived high-handed dismissal of them, IronLady shouted an angry remark and expletive at her. This last insult became the last straw and, the narrator reports, the PB blog was set up as a response. Also discussed is another perceived slight that preceded this blogwar. BlogQueen and IronLady had attended a photoshoot for a women’s magazine that was featuring the up-and-coming Singaporean female bloggers. As is common amongst bloggers, IronLady took behind the scenes photos – two of which showed BlogQueen being prepared for the bikini shoot. When these photos were included in her post about the event, there ensued a round of negative personal comments touching upon BlogQueen’s physique, her acknowledged use of Photoshop to edit her photos, and contrasting the unedited photo with her own self-presentation on her blog. BlogQueen asked IronLady to remove the photos and delete the comments offensive to her, but IronLady only removed the photos. Thus, the VYB post speaks to the role of commenters in producing content for a blog post, while pushing the responsibility for the distribution of their remarks to IronLady as the blogger: [BlogQueen] … said that out of politeness, no matter whose photo you post, you should not allow such rude comments to be made of it. It is basic courtesy. Now the fucktards who read [IronLady’s] blog replied and said that [BlogQueen] was self-centred, why should [IronLady] help her delete comments, honesty is one thing they like about [IronLady], etc. WHICH ARE ALL OUT OF POINT. (VYB-BP2)

While BlogQueen exercised the right to represent herself as she chose to on her own site, this agency did not extend to her representation on another blog. There, the comments were often concerned with maintaining an authenticity that depended on an equivalence between the on- and offline. Thus a theme of the discussion amongst the commenters revolved around a general contrasting of IronLady’s authenticity with BlogQueen’s inauthenticity – how the former did not use Photoshop or seek to delete unpleasant comments. The second post on that day is a rough drawing, purporting to show ‘[IronLady’s] all-purpose labia’. These are portrayed as being long enough so that it is possible to ‘Attach a cloth and it becomes a mop!’ (VYB-BP3).

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11 January:  ‘[IronLady] Has a HATE SITE!!!’ On the third day, there were four linked blogs, with 104 comments.6 AntiBlogQueen discovered the VYB blog, and blogged about it, explaining: While looking through technorati, I chanced upon this recently set up “Anti-[IronLady], Pro-[BlogQueen]” … blog. I was surprised to see “[AntiBlogQueen]” in the contributors’ column. (ABQ-BP4)

He also notes how his handle had been recently misused by someone in another blog, and refers to a recent post by BlogQueen specifically lambasting him. He quickly accuses BlogQueen, saying ‘[r]eading into the contents of that blog, you might realise that the writing (and drawing?) style resembles that of who else but [BlogQueen] herself!’ IronLady also posted that day, saying that ‘[AntiBlogQueen] emails to tell me that someone has used his name to set up a blog, and dedicates to hating [IronLady]’ (IL-BP5). She outlines her side of the story laid out in the VYB blog, confirming the main details of the interaction, as well as her own somewhat excessive behaviour, put down to stress and alcohol. Many commenters concurred in attributing the VYB blog to BlogQueen based on the style of writing, and the accuracy of the details of the offline encounters between BlogQueen and IronLady confirmed this first impression. The VYB blog was a good example of her trademark outspoken and abrasive style that was again successfully attracting attention. Two other bloggers remarked on this: In your case Ms. [BlogQueen], you chose to impersonate [AntiBlogQueen]. Smart, very smart. But I minus points because you didn’t even bother to disguise your writing style. (BlogA-BP1) Yes [IronLady] did uttered vulgarities, but hey, isn’t [BlogQueen] famous for that too? (BlogE-BP1)

Two significant points can be developed further here. The first is that of the close connection between the textual performance of the personal blogger and the impact of their presence online. It is worth noting that these early adopter bloggers rarely had any formal training as writers and few examples to base themselves on. Whereas the lack of any formal institutional control or editors meant that they had complete freedom of expression (excluding possible self-censorship), it also

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meant that they had to be motivated and disciplined self-starters. As a group and as individuals, they evolved personal styles amid emerging collective genre conventions in this ‘personal medium’ (Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen 2010). Thus, for a personal blog, which focuses on the blogger’s activities and thoughts, the voice in which it is presented is key to its ability to attract and maintain an audience. The second point that became an issue in the blogwar was the appropriation of AntiBlogQueen’s handle. In addition to the consistency of style, the other anchor for the stabilising of online relations is the handle – while anonymity is acceptable, the use of a consistent pseudonym in a disembodied context is necessary. Thus, using a person’s handle illegitimately threatens the means around which online collectives establish consistency in their social relations, undermining the blogosphere as a source of social meaning. The VYB blog was rude and made personal attacks that were either condemned or seen as amusing, while others saw it as part of the rough and tumble of online interaction. However, using another person’s nick is going beyond the pale in terms of online interaction.

‘[AntiBlogQueen] here’ A new VYB post appeared that day, titled ‘[AntiBlogQueen] here’. It was relatively short, and references to the ongoing drama in the blogosphere demonstrated that the author had been following the developing debate: I heard my last post got some traffic, yeah? Well, well, well. I think the most stupid thing someone can do, is to link people to an anonymous hate site. Just ask me, I’m a hate site owner myself! (VYB-BP4)

Readership in the blogosphere flows through hyperlinks, and the author is pointing out that IronLady and AntiBlogQueen have merely publicised something they disapprove of. The accusations that the author is BlogQueen are addressed: I am [BlogQueen]? Do not presume rubbish, Labiaface [i.e. IronLady]. I can be her friend, her mother, or her personal astronut. Don’t sprout nonsense you can have no fucking proof of. Writing style? Content?

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Can be all faked via other means. (VYB-BP4)

Finally, the author berates AntiBlogQueen, accusing him of being unable to attract an audience – an indicator of successful blogging – based on his own merits, leeching off BlogQueen’s readers and effective blogging skills: I forgot, I, [AntiBlogQueen], do not have readers. My “readers” are all [BlogQueen’s] who chose to dislike her. Wahaha, my do I flatter myself sometimes. (VYB-BP4)

Proclaiming the Blogwar Four other blogs link to the VYB blog on this day; they are mostly short posts announcing a ‘blogwar’ – the common use of the term suggesting conventional expectations. Some take sides, but others remain neutral, such as one blogger who outlines the situation very briefly and concludes: Wooo... [IronLady] and [BlogQueen] (& Gang) are having a “war” or [sic] some kind. [BlogQueen] & Gang setup this blog [link] to attack [IronLady]. … You can call me chicken, but I am not on anybody’s side. (BlogC-BP1)

12 January: The Smoking Gun January 12 saw thirteen posts linking to the VYB blog, and 181 comments, marking the peak of the blogwar. AntiBlogQueen presented new evidence linking BlogQueen to the VYB blog, and the VYB blog – in its last post – laid the blame at the feet of the audience.

‘[BlogQueen] – The Exposé’ In ‘[BlogQueen] – The Exposé’, AntiBlogQueen follows up from the previous circumstantial evidence with convincing evidence based on screenshots from a blog aggregator called Bloglines. A reader, who preferred to remain anonymous, had noticed some of BlogQueen’s posts appearing there with AntiBlogQueen’s name and emailed the screenshots to AntiBlogQueen. This smoking gun was received with glee by

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many commenters, who discussed how this might have happened. The most likely explanation was offered by a commenter, who had also blogged about the issue in his blog (BlogA, above): Me thinks it’s more carelessness than anything. She must have logged on previously with the “[AntiBlogQueen]” nick and then closed the browser. The next time she came back on, the cookies would have restored her session, but as “[AntiBlogQueen]”. (ABQ-BP2-C3)

IronLady also blogged about this new development, linking to AntiBlogQueen’s post. The same commenter as above, now appearing on her blog, then added some more detail during an exchange of technical forensics amongst commenters. The first commenter starts by disagreeing with a statement quoted from IronLady’s post: [IL-BP2-C4] said... In Blogger, though you cannot change your sign-in account ID, but you can change your ‘Display Name’. Can change one lah … … [IL-BP2-C5] said... … Yeah, you can change it, but it’s still the same account. The account id is the primary key for the user database. Therefore, all blog entries (pages and what-nots) are linked to it to facilitate easy and fast page-refresh. Now, even if you changed your User ID, it’s still tagged to the account as long as the User ID does not already exist. When you post an entry, it captures your entry, the User ID, and Display Name. Furthermore, if you realize, Bloglines basically pulls the RSS and/or entry based on the account (URL) you’re seeking. When it pulls the entries, it post [sic] everything you ask for and that includes the Display Name. … [IL-BP2-C3] said...what you say is logical. but i just checked - her “real” [BlogQueen] blogger profile number is diff from the “[AntiBlogQueen]” one. I wonder though … maybe she accidentally gave the “[AntiBlogQueen]” account access to her real blog (ie. team member) and accidentally posted as that???

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Ah who the fuck knows and cares lah....it’s HER! My brain hurts. :P (IL-BP2)

In another example of the potentials of cross-surveillance using automated traces of digital activity, IronLady used the time stamps on blog posts to develop a narrative of BlogQueen’s blogging activities on the night the VYB blog was created: You actually posted the Hate Site Owner & Day Job entry (3.06am), denouncing people who start hate sites, then sneakily proceeded to write on your Hate Site for [IronLady] (6.36am)?!!! WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU? (IL-BP2)

The discussion demonstrates how commenters use the comment space to interact amongst each other. It also shows how digital literacy often develops through trial and error and collaborative exchanges, and that these skills can also be used to monitor other users. Overall, it seems that when the VYB blog was opened, the accounts were linked together in some manner. Due to default settings, and the integration of Bloglines with the Blogger platform, the appropriated handle was displayed when BlogQueen connected posts from her own blog. It is an example of how default settings and functionality aimed at facilitating the use of online software can act in unintended ways.

tomorrow.sg tomorrow.sg was a local blog index, and one of the editors was BlogQueen. This role included monitoring the automated publication of links and extracts from registered blogs. At the end of his exposé, AntiBlogQueen adds: P.S. As [BlogQueen] is an editor at tomorrow.sg, trying to get this published there will be futile. You guys can help [IronLady] and me spread the word by linking to this Exposé. (ABQ-BP2)

This theme was also picked up elsewhere, for example with a commenter in another blog saying: psst, I tried submitting [AntiBlogQueen’s] expose to tomorrow.sg. Let’s see if the editors will publish it or not. (BlogA-BP1-C7)

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This concern was apparently justified, and another blogger noted that AntiBlogQueen’s exposé was removed from tomorrow.sg. The blogger also highlighted apparent discrepancies in editors’ statements as posted on the site. She quotes from one editor who stated ‘Censorship of relevant comments/trackbacks is not practised/endorsed by all editors’7 and contrasts this with BlogQueen’s comment, also on the site: I don’t see why we should promote a site which propagates hate, and includes copyrighted photos of myself photoshopped with cum on my face. Not only me... Of SXG, of XXXXX Sia... and some others. Do you? Fuck freedom of speech – such websites should never have seen the light of day. :) Please put yourself in my shoes - if you were me, would you allow the trackback of this website? Speak reason. (BlogQueen, quoted in BlogD-BP1)

Both Bloglines and tomorrow.sg operated on similar models, using automated signals from registered blogs to publish extracts and links to new blog posts. Whereas the Bloglines automated system tripped up BlogQueen, with regard to tomorrow.sg she was able to bypass this programmed barrier because of administrative access. This highlights the importance of considering not only how platforms have programmed limitations on most users, but also the possibility of self-interest leveraging privileged access. An example of this was noted in the Egyptian protests in 2011, where a leading figure’s Facebook page was kept online due to the personal connections of the owner (Bratich 2011).

‘Hate site?’ ‘Hate site?’ was the last of the VYB posts. It addressed itself directly to the audience, towards whom the author pushes the blame for publicising the hateblog: Haha... Thanks for bringing so much traffic here, people! Well, the authors of this site set this up, and take note of one thing - we never publicised the site. …

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It was written cruelly yes, but who can it hurt if nobody reads it? Notice how throughout the site there is no mention of [IronLady’s] real moniker? Even if anyone wanted to search for her there will be nothing for her to search about. Too bad, someone was vain enough to search for his own nickname, and found this page. Impersonating him? Christ, you people are so very dumb. How the hell is it plausible that [AntiBlogQueen] is the writer? … Well hate site this isn’t. It is just a simple webpage for personal bitching. Remember, you guys are the ones who made it a hatesite. (VYB-BP5)

The disingenuousness of this argument was transparent, as was argued by two bloggers who responded to the post: THE HATE SITE set up by 3 ladies which is meant for their personal bitching purposes. THEY HATE [IronLady]! Well, read it and you will know. Since, it was meant to be private, the blog shouldn’t been view by the public? LOL. Blogger.COM has a setting to make your own blog private or public. Ahlamaks! [Expressing indignation] YOU owners have forgotten about it?’ (BlogE-BP1) Now doesn’t it sounds silly to you? Do you mean to say that if you publish it but don’t publicise it, nobody will know? Hello?!? It’s a public domain! (BlogB-BP1)

Through their daily practice bloggers can gain a deepened awareness of media processes, and there is a deeper theoretical implication in the suggestion the audience created the hateblog. As opposed to many media genres, the personal blog is – like a diary – able to perform its ostensible primary role without an audience, and compared to some media such as the telephone and social network sites, there is no required dyadic reciprocity. The author is in effect referencing concepts of the active audience, and whereas this was conventionally understood in in terms of interpretative agency, on the internet the audience can actively produce their own content as well as redistribute other content through hyperlinking. Drawing upon Katz and Lazarsfeld, Ruddock has argued that the ‘mass-communications circuit’ is ‘completed’ by active audiences when they ‘act like opinion leaders through social media’ (2013: 149). The presence of an audience changes the blog, through

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the comments, through the influence on the blogger and, as we shall see, through the potential they have as a market for advertisers.

Entertaining the Audience Whereas some of the audience reflected on the ethical implications of the hateblog, a common reaction was the pleasurable anticipation of an entertaining spectacle. Thus, announcing a ‘Cyber Catfight across the Border!’, one blogger also accuses BlogQueen of creating the blog, lists some reasons and finishes with a comment ‘Let’s hope this will turn out interesting…lol’ (BlogJ-BP1). Other similar remarks were: I so love this … Its like so entertaining … better then them hollywood gossip sites that i’ve been reading. (BlogF-BP1) This is just like a FOC [free of charge] drama serial. With me munching my popcorn celery (RIGHTTTT..) and watching everything unfold. I think many people are doing the same thing -- they like to watch bitch fights happening, then they take sides with whoever they think is right, but wouldnt want to be caught dead being the lead in the drama. (BlogG-BP1) Oooh, I love a good catfight. This is really interesting. Of course, I am just going to stand by the sidelines and watch the action. *rubs hands in glee*. (BlogH-BP1)

13–18 January: Winding Down From the fifth day onwards, the blogwar petered out, and no more blogs were found to be linked to the VYB blog after 18 January – in all, there were 22 linked posts (mostly on days five and six) and 221 comments (95 of which were on one of IronLady’s posts). Although the proof was convincing, BlogQueen’s silence, and the deletion of the posts in the VYB blog, meant that there was little forward traction. IronLady blogged one more time about it on the 13th, reporting that she had received personal confirmation from a reliable informant that BlogQueen was directly involved in the hateblog, which may have been planned before the fateful evening encounter at the bar. She also commented on the removal of AntiBlogQueen’s blog post from tomorrow.sg.

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There were eight other linked posts that day, most of which either stood on the fence or remarked on the entertainment value of the blogwar. At least two bloggers chose not to use the precise handles of the protagonists in their posts, instead using easily recognisable adaptations. This was probably in order to avoid appearing in search, and thus perhaps finding themselves embroiled in the hostilities. The importance of the search engine was also highlighted in the last VYB post, which also mentioned not using IronLady’s real name and criticised AntiBlogQueen for being ‘vain enough to search for his own nickname’ (VYB-BP5). However, others responded in a manner that underlined the importance of the search engine: My dear, I think you do that too [i.e. search for one’s name/handle]! Don’t you? No? Come on... Who are you trying to deceive? (BlogB-BP1) Ai yoo [expression of exasperation], who doesn’t search for own nickname? (BlogD-BP1)

The second blogger quoted above was one of those who avoided using the actual names, but nonetheless a hostile exchange between two commenters occurred on her blog: [an anonymous entry] woah. such long entries. are u trying to write some lit essay here? i appreciate ur effort in summarising whatever’s happening in the blog scene but it sounds like u are typing all these so that when people google it online, they will chance upon ur page. plus the fact that u seem like an attention seeking whor* who searches for ur own name online, that just proves what this entry is for. this is sucha real, pathetic, desperate attempt to market ur blog [BlogD-BP1-C5] said... Anonymous: you really get around hor. Every freaking blog I’ve read about this.. er.. little event, you’re there!!! And always saying the same thing... defending [BlogQueen], then accusing others of trying to get attention and fame from this whole sad affair. Are you telling us that we can’t blog or write about it? Cus if we did, we’re only attention whores or trying to drive traffic to our site?

It is likely that the commenter found the blog through a Google search, or was maybe tracking links to the VYB blog. A central theme for the personal blog genre brought up here is epitomised in the phrase ‘attention whore’ – this is accusation that a blogger will do anything

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to gain readers, and thus depart from an authentic account of their own life and feelings. In another blog, the accusation of developing a strategy ‘cynically conceived to attract traffic’ (Reed 2005: 237) was also levelled at BlogQueen: *Shrug* maybe the traffic for the “celebrity blogger” has been dipping recently after the racist entries and her latest entries. (I guess you do have to execute some form of marketing plan if you find a popularity dip ;) (BlogI-BP1)

On 15 January, AntiBlogQueen made his last post on the question. It was mostly an update on the tomorrow.sg issue, with more screenshots sent to him by an anonymous contributor, showing how the trackback on tomorrow.sg had been removed and then replaced. He also detailed, with screenshots, responses by the two other purported authors of the VYB blog. In the comments, most supported AntiBlogQueen’s efforts, with some vituperative pro-BlogQueen ones. A few commented on the VYB being empty, leaving no more cause for complaint. There was also some discussion of it appearing in mainstream media.

Conclusions In appropriating another blogger’s handle to launch a vicious personal attack on IronLady, BlogQueen’s guilty silence suggests that she knew that she had gone beyond the pale. However, despite predictions of her imminent public shaming and demise of her blog, she emerged mostly unscathed and to this day remains one of the pre-eminent Singaporean social media celebrities. An analysis of the blogwar illustrates several key points with regard to the personal blog genre. The importance of personal style, as the underpinning of the online persona and the basis upon which parasocial relations develop, was evident. This style is understood in terms of authenticity, which in the blogging field has three main components: a stable pseudonym embodied in a blog; a consistent rhetorical style that incorporates language, multimedia use and visual design; and a paradoxical position of disinterest regarding the audience. Although the size of the readership is the most important single measure of a blogger’s relevance to the blogosphere, this paradoxical disinterest raises an important contradiction that is expressed in the term ‘attention whore’ or ‘hit slut’ (Clark 2002; see also Reed 2005: 237). However, apart from its symbolic role, and reflecting Ruddock’s

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argument regarding how audiences and opinion leaders in social media complete the ‘mass-communications circuit’ (Ruddock 2013: 149), the audience is also formative of the genre in important participatory ways: by (re)directing flows of readers through hyperlinks; co-creating blog posts through contributing comments; participating in connected conversations in and across blogs; and, writing in their own blogs. Prototypical central figures, with distinctive personal styles and different ways of managing comments, were seen to exert a centripetal pull on the production of the genre. However, they were not in control of the discussions of the overall audience, some of whom engaged with moral themes that spanned on- and offline values, negotiating norms for the emerging sphere of online interaction articulated through the personal blog genre, while others sat on the sidelines and took pleasure in the entertaining spectacle. The technical ability to be anonymous, and easily appropriate another’s handle, was demonstrated. Belligerent commenters also used anonymity to insult and question the motives of participants. However, for BlogQueen, this freedom was undermined by another source of agency – the automated activities of web platforms intended to perform routine tasks for human actors and in so doing make choices for them too. The ways in which the evidence was stored, distributed and discussed demonstrate how developing and sharing digital literacy is also part of the stabilisation of the genre. Finally, and importantly, it was seen how the simmering online and offline disputes carried on until one hostile offline meeting sparked the creation of the hateblog, which was then used as a basis for more online attacks. Although the blogwar was mostly situated online, the relevance of offline contexts, moral values and situations was clear.

Notes  1. Although AntiBlogQueen’s identity or gender is still uncertain, most bloggers and commenters assumed he was male. For ease of writing, AntiBlogQueen will be referred to as a male.  2. In 2008, BlogQueen admitted in her blog that it was her and two other bloggers who created the VYB blog. She will be referred to as the author in this chapter.  3. This was done while working at HELP University College, Malaysia. Thanks to Tan Yee Ping and Hong Li Li for their invaluable help in coding the data, and Carroll Moreton for temporarily reducing my workload and giving me some valuable space.  4. Only one blog did not have comments enabled, 11 had no comments, 16 had less than 10 comments (mean: 2.8), and 13 blogs had comments ranging from 11 to 95 (mean: 39.1).

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 5. This is based on the author’s own comparison of actual visits to his blog posts, and comments.  6. At the time of writing, there has been some minor corruption of the data, however the error is not likely to be more than a few units in either direction.  7. Although this could be read as meaning that some editors do practise censorship, this is most likely due to inaccurate English expression.

CHAPTER 3

The Blogger and Her Blog (Dis)Assembling the Dividual Self

Personal bloggers can dispense with gatekeepers and express themselves through the blog’s multimodal a priori affordances – addressing an audience, but often also addressing themselves too. This chapter discusses how a blog and blogger exist in a mutual relationship where, although the blogger has more agency, the blog itself acts autonomously and may suggest or limit certain forms of expression, to a degree domesticating (Latour 2004: 38) the personal blogger in terms of daily practices and reflexive self-actualisation. As we saw in the previous chapter, the disembodiment and potential for anonymity also allow more latitude in terms of diverging from an habitual offline performance, creating a tension with regard to readers’ perceptions and expectations of authenticity. A discussion of genre, understood as not only a conventional textual composition but also a means of actualising social relations, will demonstrate how the personal blog genre and subgenres develop through the entanglement of personal agency, social interaction and blog affordances, as well as affording a reflexive learning position for the personal blogger regarding different modes of self-actualisation. Underlying these entangled threads of agency is another assumption that needs addressing – that of an essential self that can be expressed, or distorted, through the blog. In internet studies, an early development of this argument explored the psychosocial potentials of the ‘flexible self’ (Turkle 1996: 261). However, this focused on online roleplaying contexts, whereas personal bloggers explicitly connect their online presence with their offline lives. The process of ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1956; Hogan 2010; Ytreberg 2002) offers insight into the mechanics that translate the inner to the outer orientations of facets of a person’s affective and social selves. This chapter will draw from these and consider anthropological debates regarding

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the ‘dividual self’ that developed from a concern with avoiding the imposition of the western category of the ‘individual’ on non-western sociocultural contexts – in India (Marriott, cited in Wagner 1991: 172), and in Melanesia for Strathern’s ‘partible’ person (1990: 324), and Roy Wagner’s ‘fractal’ person (2008). These studies show how alternatives to the unitary self predate the internet; however, here I will argue that it is also useful for understanding blogging and draw upon Deleuze’s (1992) argument in the context of digital technologies, where he proposes the ‘dividual’ as an alternative to Foucault’s individual subject, formed in a disciplinary society. The other aspects of the wider assemblage such as the audience, other blogs and bloggers are bracketed out for the moment. In the following chapters, the blog will be placed in the context of other blogs and bloggers and then in the context of monetisation.

The Assembled Blog Creating a blog is as easy as opening an email account, and there are many pre-designed themes as well as ‘plug-ins’ (i.e. modular components) available – Figure 3.1 shows a typical blog layout, taken from one of the blogs used for participant observation. In the Profile (Figure 3.2) bloggers are encouraged to present themselves directly to an audience and are prompted to customise the header, subheading and sidebar – which are constant in every page of the blog. Overall, the design choices made reflect the blogger’s self-presentational inclinations, are shaped by the blogger’s own creative and technical capacities, and influenced by other exemplary blogs (H. Miller 1995; Vaisman 2006). Although most bloggers do not manipulate the template (Papacharissi 2007: 30), a blogger’s confidence will grow with her experience and skill, but specialised skills are needed to transgress the limits of the templates and manipulate the underlying code. For example, Jaymee’s blog was initially set up as a birthday present by another more knowledgeable blogger, and she was able to customise her blog to some degree thanks to her ‘office full of programmers’. Similarly, my brother, who is an IT professional, helped me on many occasions with my blog. The different modular components, each programmed and semiautonomous, are assembled through the blogging platform’s overarching code. The defining module is the blog post – displayed on the main page in reverse chronological order, either in their totality, or as an initial portion linked to the full post. It is usually accessible via a unique URL, making it into a standalone webpage that is indexable by

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search engines. A typical blog post contains text, image(s) and may also have embedded video; the comments are below, displayed in threads or in sequential order, each with a time stamp and the name of the commenter, some of whom leave a link to their blog or profile. Most comments occur soon after the post is published, and usually the blogger will answer at least some of them, and on occasion he may also choose to delete or edit comments answered (Baumer, Sueyoshi and Tomlinson 2008). The sidebar conventionally contains a link to the profile; a blogroll (links to other blogs); ‘widgets’ – small applications with a limited function such as a hit counter; navigation links for the blog archive; ‘buttons’ – small images that announce an affiliation to particular portals or causes, services, or perhaps awards; and, often, advertisements (Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004a; Schmidt 2007a). Thus, many of these components are also connections to other assemblages: the blogroll connects to other blogs, while the relations evoked by the buttons cross on- and offline boundaries in both semiotic-expressive and machinic (when hyperlinked) connections to political causes, charities, blog collectives, commercial websites and so on. When a new plug-in is added it can have effects throughout the blog, demonstrating the contingent dynamism of the blog assemblage. This is most evident when a new component is dysfunctional, conflicting with others and impeding the smooth function of the blog, requiring the blogger to remove the plugin or seek other solutions.

The Perceiving Blog The basic definition of a blog as ‘a frequently updated webpage with dated entries, new ones placed on top’ (Blood 2002a: ix) is still sufficient to distinguish a blog from other websites, though now the great majority of blogs also have comments enabled and use a variety of media modalities. Following boyd (2006: para 1), the blog is understood here as a medium, within which there are various genres. The blog is a necessarily dense assemblage in that there should be few or no redundant parts and is therefore relatively more stable and opportunities for action are more circumscribed (DeLanda 2006: 35). The blog has ‘non-human expressivity’ (DeLanda 2006: 14) when it perceives and reacts to stimuli provided by data flows, continuously reacting and changing even without the blogger’s input: accumulating traces of incoming traffic (displayed in the counter); fending off potential hack attempts;

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Figure 3.1 Blog layout example (created by the author).

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Figure 3.2 Profile example (created by the author).

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Figure 3.3 A blog post with comments (created by the author).

allowing or disallowing comments; displaying advertisements; and updating its software in ways that may remove or add new functions. The most extreme example of this would be ‘splogs’, which are automated and able to draw content from RSS feeds in order to appear to search engines as if they are regularly updated (Kolari, Finin and Joshi 2006).

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These dynamic relations can have an important impact on the readership of the blog through the search engine algorithms. For example, Google’s ‘Page Rank’ and automated web crawlers interact with the blog independently of the blogger, categorising and presenting the blog to online users in ways beyond the blogger’s control (Jarvis 2009; Segev 2008; Vaidhyanathan 2011). Bloggers learn to adapt to this environment, researching and discussing techniques to improve a blog’s visibility – thus Ibrahim explained how he used headlines that referred to recent items in the news to help his blog appear in searches. Whether coming via search engines or from regular readers, the audience is measured by a web analytics counter, the operation of which is also mostly beyond the blogger’s control (Bermejo 2007: 105 ff.). Apart from the comments, and meeting readers in person, this is the only way for the blogger to become aware of her audience and, as such, translates what could otherwise be a personal diary into a public medium. The counter is also an essential component of the monetisation of blogs. Similarly, the moderation of comments can also be done automatically. Thus Rachel, whose blog focused on books and writing, described an episode with a troublesome commenter and said that ‘what’s good now is after putting the comment moderation on and then taking it off is that his comments get stuck in the filter whereas everyone else’s get through … now the filter still remembers, and it still filters him’. Magdalene and Stephanie’s blogs’ popularity meant that these types of commenters were commonplace, and they also mentioned how their blogs blocked commenters for them. Adding another dimension to the comments, Jaymee explained that she used a system that used cookies to remember commenters and thus ‘I can go and check who is on my blog right now, I know that they are there [even if] they just choose not to leave a comment.’ These two examples show how the software developers have provided automated solutions to aspects of emerging blog socialities (see Chapter 6). However, while Jaymee had made a choice to use the tracking function, the others expressed ignorance of how the commenter continued to be blocked but were satisfied with the outcome. It is common for a blogger to open the blogging interface and find that a feature has been added or taken away. This reflects an aspect of web activity where, more than in other fields, users have learned to expect change as a default and to accept less control over interfaces that are provided for free. It takes effort and time to learn all of the intricacies of the software, and in most cases the new interface will ‘domesticate’ (Latour 2004: 38) the blogger to a certain degree – thus blogs territorialise blogger practices but are also manipulated by

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software developers in response to bloggers’ experiences and the commercial objectives of the blog platform owners. Most bloggers experience the blog, to varying degrees, as an objective, autonomous actant.

Emergent Blog Genres Having introduced the structural elements of a generic blog, where machinic connections can be traced through hyperlinks and coded commands, we can now turn to the expressive aspects of the blog assemblage through a discussion of genre. As Miller and Slater noted, ‘technology always becomes material culture, observed in its context of employment as particular genres’ (2000: 193), and genre here is further understood as a concept that encompasses conventional textual compositions produced within a medium, as well as the way they reflect and constitute particular communicative patterns that stabilise particular social contexts, thus organising people and practices – what Feuer calls the ‘ritual approach’ (1993: 145) to genre. Genre has been used to analyse blogging in a few ways. Describing blogging as ‘an emergent genre of speech tied to particular modes of sociocultural production’, Doostdar (2004: 660) describes how the deliberate use of ungrammatical and ‘vulgar’ language was used in blogs in order to challenge claims to authority based on the formal use of language, state censorship and moral discipline. The notion that blogs could foster western-style liberal democracy converges with this idea of genre – however, although Malaysian ‘social-political’ (SoPo) blogs were sometimes denounced as a ‘Western’ mode of communication, there was a distinctly Malaysian approach that promoted ‘responsible blogging’ that emphasises consensus and the avoidance of ‘sensitive’ issues (J.-E. Tan and Zawawi 2008: 55). This negotiation of a localised blog genre can also be seen in China (De Vries 2009) and Korea (Kim 2007), demonstrating similar processes. Thus, an analysis of genres needs to take into account the technological and social contexts, as well as the way in which they may act as de/territorialising influences. The role of genres in expressing sociocultural trends is also seen in the development of reality television (RTV), argued to be related to a search for authenticity in a postmodern world (Rose and Wood 2005). Linking blogs and RTV, Miller and Shepherd (2004) argue that the blog is an evolution of rhetorical-social trends epitomised in RTV, and Stefanone and Lackaff offer the interesting finding that RTV viewing is linked to an increased likelihood of blogging (2009: 977).

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An early analysis of filter blogs added a structural dimension – the production by an individual or a ‘community’ – to the type of content, which has either a topical or personal focus (Krishnamurthy 2002). Later, Lomborg proposed classifying blog genres1 based on ‘content, directionality and style’ (2009: n.p.). The ‘directionality’ axis locates blogs in terms of the relative position in networks, the monological or dialogical interrelationships and strength of ties. Although he notes that personal blogs can be monologues or engage in ‘highly engaged dialogue’, rendering the directionality moot with regard to defining the personal blog genre, this axis is nonetheless useful to map the relative influence of popular personal blogs, which are embedded in asymmetrical networks characterised by a lack of reciprocal interaction and weak ties. Schmidt (2007b: n.p.), using a structuration approach, describes the ‘social action’ of blogging in terms of ‘three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code’, around which ‘groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management’ emerge. Recalling the argument made here regarding non-human agency, he points to the way in which the ‘analytical dimension of code’ is often overlooked ‘although changes in functionalities and features might have a great impact on blogging practices’. Similarly, Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen argue that genres develop through a decentralised process of sharing ‘conventions and expectations’ that have been ‘fundamentally transformed’ by the ‘technical affordances of the internet’ (2010: 956). Referring to the ‘emerging genre’ of the ‘online diary [i.e. personal blog]’ (2010: 956), their argument echoes Graves, who states that ‘genre can be considered part of the mechanism of emergence’ and sees genres as a ‘manifest set of communicative affordances’ (2007: 343). A genre can therefore also be understood as assemblage (e.g. Drott 2013), drawing upon the affordances of the medium and the communicative practices that develop through mediated interpersonal interaction. In assemblage terms, the blog-as-code is the machinic assemblage; on the other pole, in ‘reciprocal presupposition’ (Bogard 2009: 16), is the collection of signs, expressions and enunciations that constitute the expressive manifestation of the genre. The territorialisation of a genre operates in its effectiveness as a communicative actant and the way in which its iterative expression influences textual conventions and socialities. New bloggers learn from other bloggers – especially popular prototypical figures – and choose particular styles and conventions. For effective communication, there needs to be a congruence of textual practices, and thus there is a centralising tendency. However,

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lines of deterritorialisation cut through this, through rhetorical means (Doostdar 2004) and new technologies (Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen 2010: 954). There are many possible lines of flight, and the discussion in this book focuses on how blog affordances were suitable for the development of monetised personal blogging.

An Overview of Blog Genres This section overviews the different blog genres as a means of contextualising the particularities of the personal blog genre within the blog conceived as a medium (Bruns and Jacobs 2006: 2–3). The prototype blog was a webpage with curated hyperlinks and a short commentary – epitomised by Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom that started in 1995 (Blood 2002b: 7). These were mostly known as ‘filter blogs’ and became closely associated with journalism and political content (Adamic and Glance 2005; Harper 2005; Wall 2005). As web users became more proficient at navigating the web themselves, and curating tools became more efficient (e.g. RSS feeds, Google search), some of the initial raison d’être for blogs disappeared. However, by then the blog had come into its own, spawning a variety of genres (Dibbell 2002: 72) and replacing the ‘home page’ as the most customisable personal medium online. In spite of an initial professional rejection of blogs, and mutual disdain between bloggers and journalists (boyd 2006: para 21; Rosenberg 1999), the jblog (journalist blog), produced by a mainstream media organisation or a professional journalist, is an example of how mainstream media outlets eventually integrated blogs into their production (Matheson 2004; Robinson 2006; Singer 2005). Politicians’ blogs enable politicians to access their public directly, bypassing mainstream media filters (Coleman and Moss 2008; Hopkins 2014b; Park and Jankowski 2006; Park and Kluver 2007b, 2007a). ‘K-logs’ or ‘knowledge blogs’ (Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004b) relate to specialist knowledge such as religion (e.g. Teusner 2010) and could alternatively be called hobby blogs, such as those focused on knitting (L. Wei 2009), travel (Germann Molz and Paris 2013; Karlsson 2006), food, photography, cars and so on. Academic blogging (Gregg 2006a; Hopkins 2009; Mortenson and Walker 2002; Saka 2008) falls in this category, sometimes destabilising existing textual production regimes (Halavais 2006: 122–23). In the commercial sector, corporate blogs are created by a company as part of a marketing or public relations strategy (Bannan 2008; Cook 2006; Van der Wolf 2007); and problogs (professional blogs) are characterised by their focus on income generation, rather than self-expression or other motives, and deploy a combination of advertising, multi-level marketing and sale of information to

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generate income (Charles 2008; Starak 2007; Tozzi 2007b, 2007a). At the time of the fieldwork other emergent blog genres were blogshops and parenting blogs (aka ‘momblogs’), which have become more widespread now (e.g. Abidin 2015b). This proliferation of genres demonstrates the ways in which blogs, through the accessibility, personalisation and interactivity affordances, can support a wide variety of rich relationships and loose groups clustered around particular interests. Bloggers can easily write what they want, when they want, and engage directly with their audience. Different actors seek to leverage different affordances – thus politicians and corporations focus on projecting personable images and enabling direct interactive loops, while probloggers exploit the opportunity that hyperlinking offers to attach readers to their affiliate networks or advertising statistics.

The Personal Blog Genre and Subgenres Personal bloggers were frequently underrepresented in academic studies of blogs, despite constituting the majority of bloggers (Brake 2009: 22; Cenite et al. 2009: 589; Lövheim 2011). In 2008 Technorati defined personal bloggers as those who ‘blog about topics of personal interest not associated with [their] work’ (Sifry 2008), and this nonexclusive self-categorisation constituted 79 per cent of the total respondents. The 2009 Technorati survey classified most respondents (72 per cent) as ‘Hobbyists’ (defined as those who do not make any money from their blog), and their most likely topic was ‘Personal musings’ (Technorati 2009). The uniting element of the personal blog is the uniqueness and explicit subjectiveness of the content that indexes the personality and experiences of the blogger. A personal blogger may talk one day about their dog, the next day about something they bought and, following that, an argument with their partner. Understood to be a realistic account of the daily thoughts and experiences of the blogger, the personal blog genre descends from the personal diary (McNeill 2003), but it differs fundamentally in that it is made available online to an indeterminate audience, who may leave comments. Personal blogs can trace their genesis back to Justin Hall in 1994 (Israel 2011), and although it is useful to distinguish the blog genres for analytical purposes, in practice individual blogs overlap and develop in their style and topic matter as the blogger’s life and interests change. As we shall see later, the commercial interest in blogs results in a narrower definition of a genre in

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order to deliver industrial outcomes (e.g. Altman 1999). What follows is an overview, derived from observation and content analysis, of some of the most common types of posts seen in personal blogs. These can be seen as subgenres that are not only expressive forms but also correspond to particular types of social or personal occasions, reflecting the role of the genre.

Subheading The optional subheading is usually a description of the purpose of the blog, or an idiosyncratic statement.2 Bloggers typically make no apologies for any bias or partiality in their blog, and the foregrounding of this subjectiveness can be seen in the following examples of subheadings: my life carved out in words (BlogK) Life is like a storybook... Every storybook has its own tale... And this is the story about Harry. (BlogL) ...shameless disgusting silliness! (BlogP) my views, my life, my rules! love me for who i am. (BlogM) This blog is created with ‘end’ and ‘beginning’ in mind. End in the sense that all bad stuff must come to an end. And so, it is then the beginning of all the others. It may be one hell of a roller coaster...but that’s life from my perspective. (BlogN)

The Rant The rant presents itself as a spontaneously emotional reaction – for example, the title of a post by MaBlogger states that she wants to rant even though it’s a Sunday and starts with a warning that the post will be a long rant (BlogO-BP1). The explicit use of the term ‘rant’ demonstrates that readers are expected to recognise the subgenre, and it is usually written as a cathartic stream of consciousness, although the asynchronous character of blogging means that it can be very carefully thought out.3 In the next example, Jaymee attacks Valentine’s Day as being commercialised and often insincere: If you want to be romantic, take her out for a picnic lah. Put your house in her name. That’s romantic. Open a joint current account, sign all the cheques and give her the cheque book. That’s really fucking romantic. (Jaymee-BP1)

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The Random Post The random post may ramble across a few topics, providing a good exemplar of the rhizomatic personal blog. Again, the apparent spontaneity may be calculated, but it may also be a response to pressures to post something within a limited time. As with the rant, it is a recognised subgenre – for example, Adeline has a category on her blog which is ‘Random Musing’, and one post by GeekMonk opens by saying ‘This is gonna be an oldskool style blog post with some shitty pictures I uploaded to Twitpic from my phone and a load of random jabbering, so there you go’ (GeekMonk-BP1).

The Personal Reflection Personal reflections are the closest to what one would expect to find in a personal diary. They usually take a considered tone, relating their thoughts and formative personal experiences. Examples would be talking about a partner, hopes for a job, attitudes towards recycling, or friendship; another common form of this subgenre is the ‘Review of the year’ post, which highlights posts from each month of the past year, commenting and reflecting on them. However, overplaying this may result in being too ‘emo’ – i.e. overly introspective – and the negative connotations of the latter are sometimes acknowledged by an apology or by downplaying its importance. Thus, in ‘The long emo post’ Maango writes, ‘Because it is very long so i hide it. Click to read’ (Maango-BP1). Another example is a short post by Thomas, entitled ‘Denial Escapada’, where he makes a cryptic reference to ‘the haunting past’ and asks: Or i am actually in denial all these while, denying the past and trying to convince myself that i’m fine with it and everything will be fine eventually ignoring the fact that IT WONT BE FREAKING FINE AT ALL. Sigh. Its always at these times. ALWAYS. The times when i cant afford to have these. Darn. -comments off- (Thomas-BP1)

Some interviewees explained that turning off comments is done so that they do not have to field any questions on the topic. This begs the question as to why make it public at all, and boyd’s discussion of ‘social steganography’ (2014: 65–70) explains that social media users may post coded messages intended for a limited audience. In effect, responding to a question about the above post, Thomas said that for ‘very personal’ things, he ‘will write it in a way that, mmm, not many people will understand it’. This circumscription of personal

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revelations was also reported by Nicky, who said that she has a second blog ‘that’s password protected; that one [is] all for myself. But I’ve stopped writing on it because I’m not so emotional anymore!’ In addition, Nicky has a third blog that is not password protected, but only some friends know about it, and she reported taking measures to prevent it appearing in search engines, such as breaking up recognisable keywords or names with an asterisk. These examples highlight the selective recounting of personal experiences and thoughts; not only are overly introspective posts considered less suitable for public consumption but content is shared in a calculated manner – especially by the bloggers with larger audiences.

Social Occasions The myBlogS survey that returned 553 records in April 2009 showed that the most common blogging topics were ‘Friends’ and ‘Events’, and these events often result in social occasions posts that recount, usually with photos, meeting friends, dining out, attending a wedding, clubbing and so on. Thus, in an example that also highlights movements between on- and offline interpersonal relations, Chee Keong recounts meeting another blogger, who has a chronic disease and uses her blog to help raise money – there are some photos of them at the restaurant; he plugs her cause and shows some bottles of vodka that a reader of his in the USA passed to her to give to him (Chee Keong-BP1). References to family would come under this category too, but most personal blogs did not discuss family much. Younger bloggers were more likely to do so, and some of the interviewees noted that they blogged less about their family as their readership grew, to respect their privacy and avoid negative ramifications – thus Nicky recounted that her mother, a schoolteacher, was embarrassed by revelations on her blog that pupils read. A notable exception to this was Magdalene who often featured her family, who would also leave comments in her blog. She explained that her parents ‘were always very involved’ in her blog as she had initially started her blog to keep in touch with her family and friends when she went to university overseas. Although she explained that she could not write everything she wants because they read it, she also reflected that maybe she blogged about her family because ‘now that I am working …, there are so many things that I cannot blog about, so my family is the only thing that I feel really comfortable blogging about because there is nothing to hide there’. Another version of the social occasion subgenre is the post-blogmeet post (Chapter 6) that reinforces the connections

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made at blogmeets and enhance status by showing photos with wellknown bloggers and/or other celebrities.

Camwhore Post The camwhore post focuses on pictures of the blogger, by herself, or with others. It is particularly popular amongst female bloggers, who often display their clothes and other fashion choices. Reflecting the conventional and gendered use of the term, while on a trip to Japan Maango posted ‘Camwhore Japanese style 101’ and talked about a Japanese boy who: is the master of all camwhoreness. All bimbos pale in comparison. This person can come up with 100 difference poses and 100 different expressions in 10 shots. And this person is not even a girl. (Maango-BP2)

Although the term ‘cam whore’ originates from people who supply pornographic or erotic performances via webcams (Senft 2008: 89– 91), in the Malaysian context it refers to posing for photos – perhaps excessively and with the suggestion of being bound to the demands of the camera. In one instance, Andy, a self-described ‘camwhore’, found himself having to explain the term to non-Malaysian readers of his blog (Andy-BP1). The term itself carries a certain ironic reflexivity, and, like the ‘emo post’, excessive camwhoring is a mark of poor taste, and a frequent criticism of Stephanie was that she had too many photos of herself in her blog, although the blog was meant to be about travelling.

Consumer Post In the consumer post, personal bloggers discuss a consumer good or service such as a camera, a restaurant or a movie. Talking about food is a very common Malaysian pastime, and the popular food reviews will include photos and details of the food outlet. In another example, Adeline blogged about a satisfactory experience with a hairdresser; the post included photos of her getting her hair done and a glowing recommendation: The service was outstanding. Jojo was a joy. She patiently listened to my hair predicament and then told me what she could do. She was never once patronising and best of all … none of those product pushing bullshit. (Adeline-BP1)

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The consumer posts formed the basis of the advertorial that is discussed in detail in Chapter 8.

Filler Post More than half of the survey respondents indicated a blog should be updated a few times a week, and personal bloggers feel a pressure to update regularly. Alvin explained: ‘If you go to my blog, you’ll see certain days where there’s this one picture there and three lines, [then you’ll] know, “OK [Alvin struggled back there]!” hehe.’ These pressures result in the filler post, and a clear recognition of this subgenre is seen in Chee Keong’s blog use of a ‘Filler post’ tag to label posts, and in one example posted a picture of a cat sitting on a car, with a one-liner about public transport (Chee Keong – BP2). Explaining a related strategy, Haliza told me that she would divide up posts when she could; for example, mentioning a new necklace and skirt in two posts rather than one.

Living with Personal Blogging The ways in which personal blogs reflect bloggers’ myriad experiences, ranging over topics from intense, physical or emotional experiences to passing interests and ephemeral internet memes, exemplify rhizomatic expression in blogs. Reflecting the role of genres in facilitating and stabilising blog socialities, the personal blog subgenres become a shorthand for types of life experiences. Those relating to collective experiences (e.g. blogmeets, social occasions) are more likely to stick to formulaic patterns – such as photos of people there and expressions of satisfaction – but the personally oriented posts (e.g. the rant, personal reflections) see a greater variety of expression more directly related to the blogger’s subjectivities. However, the personally oriented posts also follow conventional patterns, and the explicit recognition of certain types of posts demonstrates the mutual construction of even these personal modes of expression. Later, we shall see how some of these subgenres became relevant to monetisation and how the relations that are maintained and developed through this genre become the focus of advertisers. The subgenres also evidence the meshing of the blog and the blogger, wherein the personal blogger presents parts of her life in her blog and also brings the blog into her offline life by exploring ways of transferring affect to the blog. The pressure for regular updates – sometimes

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directly requested by the interactive audience and serving as evidence of the autobiographical nature of the personal blog – means that bloggers are continually wringing their daily life for content, integrating the prosaic into the creative process of blogging and experiencing events through the filter of blogging possibilities (Reed 2008: 397). Thus, at one blogmeet a blogger explained to me that he felt a need to blog and would look for things to blog about during the day, and his daughter often served the purpose; at another blogmeet a blogger told me that he had abandoned his previous blog because he had not been able to provide regular updates but that joining BlogAdNet was good because it gave something to blog about. I also felt this pressure and found that sometimes the mental framing of a particular scene as a photograph could inspire a blog post that would form in my mind as a series of photos and text while I was simultaneously experiencing an event – thus ‘collaps[ing] the moment of stimulation with the moment of posting’ (Reed 2008: 401). The means of expression afforded by the blog may thus influence or circumscribe the offline activities undertaken – i.e. some choices in daily activities may be made on the basis that they can lead to ‘bloggable’ material.

‘I Blog for Me’ and the Principle of Independence Most bloggers espouse the principle of ‘I blog for me’, meaning that their personal blog is ostensibly a disinterested and self-directed account of their thoughts and ideas, with readers being incidental (Lövheim 2013: 620; Reed 2005). However, this begs the question of why they put it online, and I asked this of most interviewees. To this, I had varying responses: some had (or had tried having) a separate password-protected blog or did the occasional password-protected post; others explicitly acknowledged the ‘narcissistic’ element and discussed the apparent contradiction of making a ‘personal diary’ public. For example, Alvin said: I know we always say this that – ‘you blog for yourself’ – but it’s starting to become you’re blogging for other people. So it’s like a diary, except that it’s no longer like the dear diary that you have for yourself … it’s a record of the things that you think people want to see … why do you blog if you don’t want to, you know? Because then you make it [private] right?

To understand the way in which a blogger relates to her blog, it is useful to start with their motivations for blogging. In the myBlogS survey

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results, making money, politics and professional reasons were the least important reasons, and a desire to write, a memory device and hobby were the most important. Due to a possible misinterpretation of the ‘hobby’ category (i.e. that blogging itself can be understood as a hobby), it is also worth mentioning the fourth most popular reason – ‘To help me understand more about myself’. A number of the freeform ‘Other’ reasons given explained blogging as a form of emotional release (see also Trammell et al. 2006: 711). The motivations of the interviewees were varied. Tommy started when he was moving back to Malaysia to be with his terminally ill father, and he thought that the ‘transition period would be an interesting part of [his] life’. Chee Keong mentioned his love of writing and photography and the narcissistic satisfaction of the attention he gets; however, he concluded by saying ‘even if there’s no one reading it, I’d still be doing it. … Because I, instead of … writing down a diary, I just write on the net’. Like many interviewees, Haliza had kept a paper diary when younger, but her reason for starting a blog was to document her experience in a reality TV show. Differently to the others, Stephanie started her blog as part of a project for a Masters dissertation, but links from popular bloggers boosted her traffic and motivated her to continue. Magdalene had also previously kept a diary and started blogging while waiting to start university overseas; she explained that, ‘when I went to the US, I kept blogging because like my friends wanted to know what’s happening to me.’ This experience, exemplifying the use of blogs to reinforce and retain existing relationships, was not uncommon, and one in ten of the bloggers in the myBlogS survey were students overseas.4 Although bloggers explain their primary audience as being themselves, in practice this included closer friends and maybe family. However, the interviewees also noted being motivated by the unexpected growth of their audience, although they varied in their opinion of how much this affected their blogging. A principle closely related to ‘I blog for me’ is what I termed the ‘Principle of Independence’. This is best exemplified in the rejoinder to critics and trolls: ‘If you don’t like this blog, start your own!’ This principle upholds the prerogative of the personal blogger to blog as she wishes, and the ease of blog creation means that the rebuttal can be seen as reasonable – in effect, any blog reader can create their own blog, marking blogs out as distinct from other forms of public media such as television or books.

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Blog as Memory One way in which bloggers blog ‘for themselves’ is by using their blog as a memory repository (Brake 2009: 152–57), making the blog part of their personal history – thus Magdalene said, ‘I wanna look back and read. I want to remember all the small things that may be funny, lah, you know, but you forget because it’s not that important.’ Echoing this, Nicky said, ‘[b]logging is a part of myself. All the things that I have forgotten, they’re all collected there.’ The sense of a continuous selfhood is dependent to a large degree on the ability to connect one’s present to the past, and this reflexive process that sees the blogger’s past self being reflected through the blog was also noted by Jaymee: it’s sort of a personal diary for me as well because sometimes I go back to my archive, I click and read on it and say, ‘Wow I have grown or not grown so much as a person’ … or ‘This is what I did’, ‘this is how I felt’ back then when I was holidaying in Redang or something.

Emphasising his poor memory, Andy explained that he had competed on a reality show and became worried about prejudiced voters: so I actually deleted quite a lot of blog posts that stated my sexuality openly … But … I regretted deleting those posts, because now I have no idea what I wrote back then … I would like to have those memories still.

Although Brake notes that the actual extent to which bloggers revisit their archives is open to question (2009: 153), the above remarks, as well as Nicky’s account of panicked anguish when she thought she had lost her blog, tends to underline the importance of the blog as a memory store. In another example, Alvin recounted how, after having let his hosting service lapse, he laboriously recovered blog posts from automated internet archives, and explained: ‘in retrospect yes, it’s definitely a storage space for information, and emotions as well.’ The means by which self-expression is afforded by the blog generate a movement between the blog and the blogger that resonate and form a particular assemblage that includes both of them as co-creators of a ‘self’.

Cathartic Blogging Apart from storing the past, personal bloggers also ‘brain dump’ (Reed 2005: 228) and use their blogging as part of their range of psychological

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coping tools, as reflected in some of the myBlogS survey free form answers: A blog is where I let out my feelings and it shouldn’t be judge by any party what so ever. To get things/thoughts out of my system. I blog to vent my creative and energy and also to provide my own personal views on matters. Apart from that, it is also liberating to know that you can actually affect the readers of your blog in a positive way.5

I experienced this as well, in a manner that also reflected the quotidian search for blog posts. While driving one day, I realised that the odometer on my car had reached 333,003 kilometres and thinking that it may be a useful blogging topic, photographed it. A few days later, I used it for a random post – but by then the meaning of the post had shifted, and it had become a means to dispel a feeling of despondency. Sharing my feelings ‘out loud’ was in fact cathartic to some extent, and I reflected that the experience of seeing my blog post online and knowing others may read it seemed to allow some of the same relief that sharing directly with a person might. In the event, a brief supportive comment left by a reader enhanced this relief. In other situations, the act of translating one’s thoughts into a form that allows meaningful sharing can re-present those thoughts from a different perspective – for example, a myBlogS survey respondent said that a reason for having a blog is ‘To get things out of my head and into a format I can analyse more effectively’.

Expectations of Authenticity The myBlogS survey showed a marked expectation that a blogger be ‘honest about his/her true feelings and thoughts’ (73 per cent agreed with this) and that they should be able to ‘learn something about the blogger as a person’ (62 per cent agreed with this). This chapter has so far demonstrated that this expectation that the blog be indexical of the blogger is not unreasonable, both in the sense that the personalisation affordance allows the blogger a channel of direct communication with her audience and also that bloggers use their blog to reflect upon themselves. To probe this aspect of personal blogging, interviewees were asked whether readers could get to know the ‘real you’ through their blog. In response, Alvin said:

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I do think that people can get to know me, but they get to know the external things, they get to know the tangible things about me – where I was, what kind of clothes I like to wear, what food I eat, what I don’t; I don’t think they can get into my head.

Commenting on Tommy, with whom he had attended university, he said: I tell you on record, he has never behaved this way before; he was as serious as you can get …. To a point I still believe that that’s not, a hundred percent who he is … [his blog is] one facet of his life.

Tommy’s reflection on the performative aspect of blogging seemed to confirm Alvin’s remark: I find a way to express myself … a different way through online, and I guess that’s the same with everybody. I’m not alone in that. So you can’t really say that I’m acting. Because if everyone’s doing it, … so … I think it’s just natural, human behaviour, to behave slightly different online and offline. (original emphasis)

Chee Keong also echoed the partial nature of the blog-as-index, saying that the readers usually get the wrong idea about me because what I write on my blog is what I want to portray about myself; I guess it is a fairly good representation, but only part of me, not the entire part.

He also reflected on how the on- and offline contexts had similarities in terms of fully knowing a person: No, … I don’t think it’s possible, because there are nuances in your personality that no one would know, not even casual friends would know, unless they’re really close to you. How you really feel, like what really bothers me … sometimes you don’t share that with the world.

In answering the same question, Andrew said: we have a different persona in our daily lives; when you’re at home with your wife, when you’re with your kids, with your boss. … ‘the world’s a stage’, everyone is an actor on it. So for the blogs, it’s a stage

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for them, it’s a place where they can vent out their anger, their frustration, they can be whoever they want to be.

Through their daily media-oriented practices bloggers can gain a deepened awareness of media processes. Here, in the Goffmanian-like responses above, we also see how the ability to finely hone impression management using blog affordances and being able to contrast other bloggers in on- and offline contexts foregrounds the more general role of performance in social life. Many analyses of presentations of the self online refer to Goffman’s ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions (Goffman 1956: 107–22) and the inability to read the full social context online.6 Hugh Miller (1995) commented on home pages, and later Brake discussed blogs, arguing that the mediated separation between the blogger and her audience requires accounting for the role of the medium (2009: 58–60). Hogan argues similarly, noting the inability to monitor synchronous responses to the performance, the presence of a third party ‘curator’ (e.g. a social networking site’s algorithms) that orders and filters the content, and proposes ‘the metaphor of an exhibition rather than one of a stage play’ (2010: 384). Thus, bloggers gain insight into how they can ‘construct themselves as subjects in a digital society’ but also selectively share aspects of their offline lives (Serfaty 2004, cited in Rettberg 2008: 12).

Blogging and the Dividual Self You can so tell when the blogger’s running something because they want to do or whether they have to do it. Or whether they just want attention, or not. So I try not to think about whether a reader likes it, I just put myself out there. — Nicky; emphasis added The concern with authenticity is a persistent thread in personal blogging, and there is a parallel between personal blogging and the modern centrality of the individual self, constituted through reflexivity, autobiography and self-actualisation, whose ‘moral thread … is one of authenticity … based on “being true to oneself”’ (Giddens 1991: 78; original emphasis). Keeping in touch with this authentic self provides a stable basis for achieving intimacy with others and is an important part of this ‘reflexive project of the self’ (Giddens 1991: 96). Similarly, the ostensibly authentic and consistent performance by personal bloggers stabilises their parasocial relationship (Chapter 5) with readers and thus,

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when asked for advice on how to be a successful blogger, the ubiquitous and paradigmatic counsel is to ‘be yourself’. However, interviewees also recommended strategies such as regular postings, selecting topics that interest readers, leaving comments and interacting with other blogs, and answering comments. There seems to be a contradiction here but only if seen through the lens of a representational logic that presupposes a fixed, unitary self and projects that onto those bloggers. As Nicky explains, blogging lays bare this assumption: I mean the blog is me … I’m the only one writing it. But … from reading other people’s blogs, I know that you cannot expect the same person to be what you perceive them to be … I’m not always like my blog, I’m not always like crazy happy, no I have my tired days as well, I have my days when I just wanna sit down and keep quiet. (op. cit.; original emphasis)

Blogging practices – including responding to comments, regular updates and accessible archives – resonate with what Hevern calls the blogger’s ‘dialogical self’ that crafts ‘multiple positions, both internal and external to the self’ (Hevern 2004: 330; see also Sanderson 2008), and which develop with the blogger’s life experiences, often visible through the blog. Drawing upon Gell, we can consider bloggers as artists who have shifting subject positions – they produce the blog, but the prototype, that which they are representing, is themselves and thus the blog is also an index of themselves; in addition, they address themselves as recipients of their own blog (Gell 1998, cited in Reed 2005: 225). Thus, the ‘process of constructing the self’ (Schmidt 2007b: 12) becomes both more reflexive and publicly apprehensible. Analysing the relationship of the blogger with her blog should avoid the presupposition of the unitary self that underlies the modern project of the authentic self, revolving around dichotomies between inner and outer orientations. Instead, we can think of ‘flat multiplicities’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 224) that draw together the blogger, the blog and the readers. Viveiros de Castro draws from Strathern, who argues for a relational conceptualisation of the self, where people are not isolated individuals making society out of the sum of their relations but are persons based on the existing relations that form their social context and themselves. Within those given parameters, they adjust, create or reproduce relations according to their intentions (Strathern 1991: 587). Related to this, in the context of Melanesian practices, she proposes a concept of ‘mediated exchange’, which says that ‘persons are able to detach parts of themselves in their dealings with others’ (Strathern 1990: 192). Her argument resonates with Reed’s observation

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that, ‘while individuals are happy to assert that “my blog is me”, they also insist that “I am not my weblog”’ (2005: 230) – that is, they are able to detach part of themselves into their blog. In an analysis more directly related to blogs, Deleuze has also argued that we have moved from a Foucauldian analogue ‘disciplinary society’ characterised by a series of contained observable enclosures to a ‘control society’ that is characterised by digital networks and control through access to nodes. While the Foucauldian ‘machine’ moulds a subject through disciplinary mechanisms, categorising and enclosing them in a series of discrete spaces (classroom, heterosexual, factory floor), the control society operates through the distributed network (Bogard 2009: 18–19; see also Hardt 1998). This results in ‘modulation’, which – like a frequency dial on a radio – regulates flows, opening and closing certain pathways for the Deleuzian ‘dividual’ self, generated as databases and networks that gather and reproduce aspects of the self throughout. As opposed to the individual, the dividual flows and shifts, expressing itself according to context and contingency (Savat 2009a).

Conclusions This chapter has argued that, from one perspective, a blog can be seen as an autonomous actant, interacting and expressing itself within the internet. The blog as a collection of code and machinic connections also enables the blogger to engage in reflexive practices that reveal the subjective construction of the self. Genre has been used to explain how affordances and conventional textual practices combine in social patterns of interpersonal interaction, reproducing social relations. I have also noted how the subgenre components of the personal blog are evidence of the meshing of the blog and the blogger, wherein the personal blogger presents parts of her life in her blog and brings the blog into her offline life by exploring ways of transferring affect to the blog. Using this approach, blog(s) and blogger(s) can be understood both as relatively autonomous actors but also as one assemblage, moving together through spaces of becoming. The ways in which this occurs relate to the affordances that conceptually allow for agency on both parts without assigning ontological primacy to either component. The personal blog genre is closely related to an understanding of an authentic self. However, there is a representational assumption here that depends on dichotomies between inner and outer orientations and assumes a consistent unitary ‘self’ that does not take into account the relational construction of the self. Personal bloggers not only

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recognise the constructed and selective process of self-representation in their blog but also its contingency. Thus, the fact that the blog is not the same as the blogger should not be taken to mean that it is therefore inauthentic but that authenticity, like the dividual self, is non-exclusive and dynamic. The blog affordances act as the virtual machine that modulates ways in which bloggers can rhizomatically extend relations both on- and offline and in the process enable reconfigurations of their dividual self that exists in conjunction with the other relational components, which include their blog and the mediated relations afforded by the blog. The latter also include relations with others – the readers, and other bloggers – and will be developed more in Chapter 5.

Notes  1. Because he classifies a blog as a genre, what he calls ‘subgenres’ are here called ‘blog genres’.  2. It is also relevant to note that the title and subheading play a significant role in the way the blog is indexed in search engines.  3. Steven Vrooman has discussed some of the antecedents in internet newsgroups (2002).  4. However, during the fieldwork period, the emergence of Facebook seemed to make this factor less important. In support of this observation, the Technorati 2009 ‘State of the blogosphere’ reported 34 per cent and 32 per cent of bloggers saying that they spent less time blogging due to spending more time on Twitter and social networking sites, respectively (Technorati 2009).  5. Quotes from three different anonymous respondents.  6. See Hogan (2010: 379) for a list of thirteen such works.

CHAPTER 4

May 2007 Assembling Genres

What follows is a thick description of the ‘Bloggers United Meeting 2007’ (BUM 2007), an early ‘blogmeet’. These offline gathering of bloggers in a blog-related context allow bloggers to extend and intensify their online relations in an offline context. Its civil society theme mostly attracted SoPo bloggers, but others were drawn by the opportunity to meet other bloggers as well as a desire to support Jeff Ooi and ‘Rocky’ (Ahirudin Attan), seen as bearing the brunt of a government pushback against blogging. The increasing popularity of blogging was leading to a more intense political spotlight, as well as a clustering of bloggers around genres, and these changes were articulated by participants, who also reflected on the merging of the on- and offline.

A Brief History of Blogmeets in Malaysia The first Malaysian Internet Service Provider (ISP) appeared in 1990, and by 2000 an estimated 15 per cent of the population were using the internet (Tong 2004: 277–78). One effect was to enable an enduring challenge to the government control of the mainstream media, first clearly evident during the 1997 Reformasi crisis (George 2006; Tong 2004). That period also saw Sabri Zain’s ‘Reformasi Diaries’, one of the earlier websites of a blog nature (i.e. personalised and diaristic), chronicling the events.1 Ibrahim, an interviewee who had made his name when his blog about a reality show and became a focal point for its fans, told me how an early group of Malay language bloggers organised around ‘Gengjurnal’ emerged in 1998 and lasted about five years, with annual awards a testament to emergent practices, but it faded away as the bloggers moved on to other priorities. The earliest English language

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personal blogger that I was able to trace was ‘Absolutely Fuzzy’2 who was blogging in 2000 and mentioned by Chee Keong as an inspiration. By 2003, the formation of the Project Petaling Street (PPS) blog aggregator, or ‘blogtal’,3 testified to the increased organisation of bloggers. Founded by ten prominent bloggers as a way of announcing their posts (this was before Really Simple Syndication (RSS) was available) and generating some advertising revenue, it quickly became a focal point for bloggers who could publicise their own posts and find other bloggers’ posts. The first trace of an offline blogmeet (for English-language bloggers) was reported by the owner of PPS in July 2003 (BlogQ-BP1 2003), and later the same month he posted some details from a directory containing close to one thousand blogs (BlogQ-BP2 2003). In June 2005 a feature article in The Star, a national newspaper, estimated that there were about ten thousand Malaysian blogs and profiled some personal bloggers (Cheang 2005). In the same month PPS’s second anniversary saw a well-attended blogmeet with bloggers from around Malaysia and included an awards ceremony (Chee Keong-BP3 2005). In late October 2006, Jeff Ooi, a leading SoPo blogger, published a detailed accusation of plagiarism by a senior editor of the governmentlinked New Straits Times (NST) (Ooi 2006). Rocky repeated the allegations in his blog and both of them were sued for defamation by the NST (Ooi 2007). This was perceived as an attempt to muzzle bloggers; there was a rapid mobilisation of support online under the banner of ‘Bloggers United’ that led to the formation of the National Alliance of Bloggers (All-Blogs), designed to represent and support bloggers (J.-E. Tan and Zawawi 2008: 24–29). The year 2007 thus saw a marked increase in public awareness of blogs, and the perception of bloggers as irresponsible rumour-mongers was to set the tenor for much of the government response to blogging: in March, the Tourism Minister said ‘All bloggers are liars, they cheat people using all kinds of methods’ (JerryWho 2007); and in May, the Information Minister suggested that there was a need to ‘classify web bloggers as professionals and nonprofessionals as a mechanism to prevent misuse of blog sites’ (Bernama 2007), a proposal that was again floated in 2016 (Hopkins 2016b).

A Meeting of Spaces BUM2007 was announced on a dedicated blog, and the word spread amongst bloggers. It was open to all, although a moderate registration fee of RM50 was required to attend the event held in a suburban private club. On arrival, we registered and received a name tag sticker on which

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some chose to write their blog names or online pseudonyms rather than their own name. Two books were on sale: a recent controversial book about the murderous communal riots of 13 May, 1969 and a self-published compilation of the writings of one of the organisers. The participants were mostly ethnically Chinese, middle-aged men, corresponding to the typical profiles of Social-Political (SoPo) bloggers (J.-E. Tan and Zawawi 2008: 42); a long table for the panellists faced about ten round tables, of which two were VIP tables – distinguished by a more elaborate table setting and table service later on. The attendees mixed and mingled, chatting and taking photos as they waited to start, though some chose to maintain their online anonymity by hiding their face when photos were taken. Although BUM2007 was not formally linked to All-Blogs, its recent formation coloured much of the evening. The ostensible theme of the evening was the relationship between the ‘fourth estate’ (mainstream media) and the ‘fifth’ estate (blogs) and both journalists and bloggers were in attendance. However, the discussions tended to be subsumed into a broader reflection on the meeting of on- and offline spheres. One of the first panel speakers was Tian Chua, the Information Chief of a leading opposition party (PKR), who said: I personally choose to blog not because I cannot put my press statement out, and normally my blog don’t have my press statement. So I’m trying to have a different identity in the cyberspace, but I increasingly find it very difficult because the physical world is more demanding than the cyber world. So increasingly what I write in the cyber world, is about my physical world… And I also find this meeting very interesting, because this is so conventional. This is a seminar of bloggers. Normally I think … the fact that we blog is because we don’t want to be seen, and if we wanted to communicate we should read each other’s blog instead of coming here.4

This intersection was also seen as somewhat involuntary by Marina Mahathir, an NGO activist, columnist and daughter of the then exPrime Minister, Dr Mahathir. She described how she became a blogger somewhat ‘by default’, and how she felt compelled to go online to start her own blog to counteract the false impression given by someone who was reposting her newspaper columns online but not responding to comments. She had previously thought that blogs were only for personal thoughts and ‘that the internet was a hostile world’. However, she explained that she received more feedback from her blog than

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from her column and that ‘most people [had] received [her] warmly in the blogosphere’. Her conclusion that she now found herself a bit ‘addicted’ to blogging was echoed by Haris Ibrahim, a human rights lawyer and activist, who called blogging ‘infectious’. Noting how the defamation case catalysed a bridging of the on- and offline together, Jeff Ooi argued that bloggers should ‘cross the bridge from cyber world to face-to-face’. Rocky, the Pro-tem president of All-Blogs, explained that although the ‘Bloggers United’ movement was inspiring, ‘something more formal’ – in order to ‘promote and protect’ blogging (one of the aims of All-Blogs) was needed, as online expressions of support were not enough. Another speaker, from an NGO for journalists, also pointed to the overlapping of the on- and offline – saying that newspapers were suing bloggers because the ‘mass media are scared of bloggers’. Online, in the post-blogmeet posts, the references to the on/offline theme were mostly about meeting people face-to-face for the first time. The following exchange, taken from a blog post and its comments, shows how online and offline interactions blend into each other: [Laura]… looked quite different from her pictures in her blog and I spoke to her in Hokkien telling her so. Anyway, I greeted her and was happy to finally meet in person the ‘adversaries online’ whom I have hated her guts for being a tad ‘Islamophobic’ and I told her so to her face. [to which she responded in the comments] methink you are too influence by menj to label me as islamaphobic. im not!! not at all! *upset* :( btw the picture on my blog was not photo-shopped at all lah. i looked different maybe because that was a younger me. now sudah tua [‘already old’] so it shows. anyway glad to meet you in person... my own ‘kaki lang’ [‘buddy’] (you know hokkien so you should know what that means). [and he said] I’m sorry if I have hurt your feelings but I was just expressing my thoughts out loud … I don’t hate you personally as we are all ‘Penangites’ and I even look forward to meeting you again in the next meetups so we can sit and chat about matters that we feel strongly about.

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I am happy to have met you at last and it really doesn’t matter to me how you look as I take everyone as they are. Be cool and have a nice day! (Guruman45 2007)

Bloggers tended to politely remark on how they enjoyed meeting other bloggers face-to-face, typically accompanying these with a link to the person’s blog. The latter is a valuable means of introducing one’s readers to another blog, as demonstrated by this comment from one of the organisers: ermm… how come my name got no link? oh because you don’t read my blog (thus dunno!). :( anyway glad to meet you again … Comment by [Laura] — May 22, 2007 @ 4:36 pm [the host blogger added the link, and responded to her:] Hi [Laura], Really sorry, escaped my attention! Congratulations on a successful event. Comment by Nik Nazmi — May 22, 2007 @ 9:04 pm (Nik Nazmi 2007)

Meeting offline was both an opportunity to meet other bloggers and to engage in debate, and gratitude was expressed to the hosts and sponsors of the evening. Reflecting the conceptualisation of blogs as a space personal to the blogger, online commenters also use similar language towards the blog host. For example, ‘FatCat’ wrote, ‘Sorry Eli Wong [she was the blog host], but I hv to pass a message to Desi Chong via your blog’s comments section here,’ and his message was answered in the same comments space (Wong 2007). In another blog post, a prolific and antagonistic commenter called ‘tigerball’ criticised ‘politikitty’, who answered vociferously and finished her comment with: sorry susan [i.e. the host blogger], i had to say it :) this tigerball is damn melebih [‘exceedingly’] bitching about me over here. just bloody do it over at mine if you have the monster balls. [tigerball made a few comments in response to politikitty, then the host responded to him] [Tiger], if you like to ‘engage and embrace’ politikitty, do go over to her blog :-). Not here, ok?

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[to which he answered] Noted and understood Susan……no more…promised….but I had to defend myself….can’t I? (Loone 2007a)

Arguments that the internet should be considered as an integral part of everyday life rather than a ‘virtual’ or separate sphere have become mostly accepted (Boellstorff 2016; Hine 2008: 8), and in the above discussions we can see how the participants were able to move easily between on- and offline interactions, using their pseudonyms on name tags, or linking to newly met bloggers in their post-meet blog post. The implication of some of the speakers was that political debate crosses the line into a public sphere, but for some this challenged a conception of blogging as being ‘personal’. This demonstrates how the genre practices integrated with offline priorities and conceptual fields of offline social life.

Defining Bloggers In 2007, blogs were just beginning to become a household name, and I often found myself having to explain what they were. Most would have an idea based on news stories about SoPo blogs; others identified them with narcissistic teenagers, or with people getting fired for blogging about their work. Officially, bloggers were generally framed as uncontrolled, dangerous and irresponsible politically driven free agents embodying all that is undesirable in an arena of unrestrained freedom. For others, mistrustful of official discourse and government intentions, they were individualistic free agents operating at the edge of the ‘known world’, where they were able to perform both beneficial and dangerous acts. This tension was a theme touched upon by the speakers. Referring to the recent proposal by the Information Minister, Jeff Ooi opened his speech by sarcastically wondering whether he was a ‘professional blogger or an unprofessional blogger’, but commented that he was a normal person, struggling against the ‘heavy dose of sedatives’ delivered by the Malaysian mainstream media. Tian Chua reflexively commented, ‘I’m not sure I can be called a blogger, I don’t think I am a blogger, but I do some blogging … I don’t think I’m making impact myself as a blogger.’ Rocky said that the All-Blogs’ Exco hoped that their members would be ‘all bloggers’ (original emphasis). The All-Blogs’ constitutional

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definition of bloggers, finalised two months later, was ‘bloggers are defined as blog owners’ (All-Blogs 2007).5 However, the Constitution had as one of its objectives to ‘facilitate the advancement of the blogosphere’ (All-Blogs 2007: Section 2.5), and as such, other non-voting classes of membership were allowed for: Corporate and Organisational Members representing businesses and associations; Visiting Members could be recognised based on ‘their contribution to the blogosphere’; and finally minors could also have non-voting membership (All-Blogs 2007). These classes of membership reflect the debates surrounding the establishment of All-Blogs: in particular, some commenters claimed stakeholder status based on their contribution and participation – with one prolific commenter describing himself as a ‘traveling [blogger]…. yes we are also bloggers…only differences we don’t own a house. .a blog.. like you all do…’ (tigerball quoted in Loone 2007a). The opportunity to remain anonymous as a protection against governmental repression, a definitional aspect of blogging, was offered to Associate Members, who could remain anonymous and be ‘elected … by the EXCO based on their blogs’. However, concerns were expressed in online discussions about the political leanings of All-Blogs and the consequences of formal organising: I would enjoy socialising no doubt, but in a relaxed atmosphere and not worried with political agenda or whatever agenda. I value my creativity senses and don’t wish to be pulled in any kind of structure, especially because we understand that blogging is personal. (ruby ahmad, in Pak Idrus 2007) I noticed subtle changes in bloggers from A to Z nowadays, especially after socialising face to face. If we cannot handle relationships, regardless of the contents, we might as well retreat into the safe world of cyber reality where everything is flat. Bloggers are just not ready for rules, regulations, presidents or even memberships. So why don’t you try doing without them? There might be less quarrels and break ups. (v9, in Loone 2007a)

In these reservations, we can see a preference for the personalised experience of decentralised online networks, where the voluntary participation is informal and it is easier for people to withdraw from interactions or choose not to engage in them – thus avoiding expectations of reciprocity. This may threaten existing power structures – as can be seen in the reactions of the government as mentioned above – but may also mitigate against conventional forms of political organisation (e.g.

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Bennett, Wells and Freelon 2011), such as the formation of All-Blogs. In this way, the SoPo blogs and personal blogs paths diverge, with the latter having an inherently social goal that implies at least minimal collective action and reciprocal obligations.

Competing Representations This was the first time I met Tommy, probably the most popular Malaysian personal blogger at the time. He arrived late due to a flight delay, and as we chatted he emphasised to me that he did not have a SoPo blog and that his readers were not interested in politics, although he had occasionally blogged about political issues. He was warmly welcomed by the other bloggers, taking pictures together and, in one instance, trying to recreate a famous pose he had done online. Later, an organiser commented (in his idiosyncratic style): Luckily you [the host blogger] … did not rite about ‘intimate’ bum2007 goings-on eh? WE will keep our private space and not go [Tommy] (wow! that guy reallly made it! That’s d spirit, Bloggers U.:) (marky 2007)

Like Tommy, he was referencing the differences in genre – remarking that they were not ‘personal’ bloggers, who would reveal conversations and intimate thoughts, but nonetheless he still saw Tommy’s presence as representing the ‘spirit of Bloggers United’ – a wider ‘blogger’ identity. The relevance of this group identity was questioned by a young non-SoPo blogger at the evening who told me that she did not feel represented by the leaders of All-Blogs. Similarly, another SoPo blogger wrote: ‘My chief reservation over All Blogs is that its pro-tem committee is chockerblock with socio-political (sopo) bloggers, living [i.e. ‘leaving’] no room for lifestyle, food, sex, fly-by-nite, IT and religious bloggers’ (poli101 2007). Four days later, Susan Loone, an active participant in the Bloggers United movement, but also a critic of All-Blogs’ motives, acting with ‘Ktemoc’ (a popular anonymous SoPo blogger), announced the formation of an alternative bloggers’ association – PABS (‘People’s Alliance of Bloggers’) (Loone 2007b); but in spite of a few statements over the next few months, it never gained traction. In July, a Muslim Blogger’s Alliance was founded, and the Pro-tem Secretary, Menj, stated that it was open to ‘all Muslims who are bloggers’, but ‘Liberal Islam heretics are not welcomed’ (MENJ 2007). These public sphere initiatives were paralleled by a move by a mainstream newspaper (and quasi-government party organ), The Star, to set up the All-Malaysian Bloggers’ Project (AMBP) blog directory. In

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announcing an inaugural competition, encouraging bloggers to sign up to a blog directory, an attempt to navigate between dominant and oppositional discourses was noticeable. On 21 May, it said: The AllMalaysian Bloggers Project (AMBP) is an project of the people behind the AllMalaysiainfo.com website, who all believe strongly in the freedom of speech… Your blog can contain anything – just as long as it’s not subversive. (quoted in CrazeeMagick 2007)

Then, two days later, the wording had changed to: ‘Your blog can be about anything – as long as it’s not unlawful, pornographic or in, er, bad taste’ (ibid.). By August, any reference to free speech, or legalities, had been removed, and the introductory paragraph was: The AllMalaysian Bloggers Project (AMBP) is managed by the dedicated team behind both The Star Online and AllMalaysia.info websites, the very same folks who bring you the news daily, and provide you with information at your fingertips. We work hard, but party harder. (AMBP 2007)

For some it seemed like an attempt to divert attention from the SoPo bloggers’ mobilisation efforts – ‘sarah lee’ said: ‘This is a weak attempt to force Malaysian bloggers to toe the line? Or maybe it’s making it easier to track bloggers? I’ll leave it up to your imagination’ (quoted in CrazeeMagick 2007). Others, such as a prominent blogger and exeditor, were explicit in their identification of genre: this is really a contest for personal bloggers -- those who blog abput [sic] their life, travel, etc.. they are looking for these bloggers to join in and get some publicity (and popularity among the like-minded) for their blogs. … Even if there is some sinister underlying motive – I’d tell them to go ahead with it. The bloguniverse is big enough for everyone … (Nuraina A Samad quoted in Ahirudin Attan 2007)

This emphasis on personal blogs reflected most blogs but was also a way of depoliticising them. In effect, AMBP received a positive reception from some non-SoPo bloggers, one of whom saw how blogs would increasingly play a role in marketing:

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So what’s in it for [AMBP]? Very simple - bloggers form a very powerful viral marketing voice. We hope to be able harness this voice to market/ promote our services/products. It’s not compulsory, of course. There’re NO compulsions in doing anything for us – you’re even free to criticise us to your heart’s content! (GeekMonk 2007)

As the impact of bloggers extended further offline, different social institutions were reacting by embracing, resisting or seeking to appropriate their potential influence. This integration of the on- and offline also demonstrated the diversity of bloggers with differing interests and motivations that mirrored offline dynamics. The initial widespread support for the Bloggers United movement had crystallised in the formation of All-Blogs. However, this more formal group was mostly seen as representing the SoPo blogs – highlighting the territorialising role of genres – and, in addition, those with diverging political interests attempted to form their own collectives. It is difficult to argue that any of them were particularly successful. All-Blogs did meet regularly, even obtaining a physical locale, and was often referred to in the mainstream media with regards to blogging issues; however, almost three years later it had yet to create its own website or be formally registered as a society and had lost many of its original committee members. Eventually, it was disbanded and replaced by a more pro-government organisation of limited impact (Hopkins 2012).

Conclusions This account of a blogmeet demonstrates the on- and offline connecting and complementing each other in different ways. BUM2007 was a means to prove and legitimise the investment that the participants made into their online identities and social relations. Although the real/virtual dichotomy was referred to, this was mostly in the context of collapsing that dichotomy, and the ‘coming out’ of blogging was associated in part with a ‘growing up’ of Malaysians, in an intersection of discourses of personal and social responsibility. Not all bloggers welcomed the changes, however, many of whom justifiably suspected the partisan motives of major players. Given their increasing numbers, the idea that all bloggers could be represented was always going to be difficult, and the clustering of bloggers around genres was becoming more evident. Whereas All-Blogs had relevance for those who saw a need to ‘protect and promote’ bloggers, particularly SoPo bloggers, most Malaysians were not interested in participating in

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politics. Over time I found that more and more people rejected an idea of the ‘blogosphere’, or ‘bloggers’, as a meaningful primary category – it seems that as blogging went mainstream it lost some of its uniqueness that encouraged the earlier solidarity amongst bloggers. However, in a broad sense, the legitimising goal of BUM2007, and All-Blogs, was achieved. Najib Razak, then Prime Minister, opened his own blog in 2008, and in 2009 the star speaker at the third annual BUM event was Dr Mahathir, the immensely influential then ex-PM, who had attracted a million readers in the first month of his blog that opened in May 2008. In addition, as this books details, personal blogs were to become significant participants in marketing and advertising campaigns.

Notes  1. http://www.sabrizain.org/reformasi/diary/index.htm(last accessed 2 October 2018).  2. http://absolutely-fuzzy.com/(last accessed 2 October 2018).  3. http://www.petalingstreet.org/(last accessed 2 October 2018).  4. The quotations from the BUM2007 blogmeet speakers are all taken from notes, or videos posted online. All quotations from other sources will be cited individually.  5. How this would work in practice is not clear; for example, anyone could start a blog one day, and ask to be a member the next.

CHAPTER 5

Assembling Blogs and Bloggers

Chapter 3 looked at the mutually constitutive components of the blog and blogger, and this chapter adds the comments and commenters to this dynamic assemblage. These contributions form the basis of extended parasocial relations that form around the hyperlocal assemblage centred on the personal blog, which is proposed as a dialogical medium. This chapter also critiques the presumption of community, which often hinders analysis and focuses instead on tracing causal relations through blog affordances that enable emergent socialities that stabilise social assemblages, both on the hyperlocal level of the personal blog and with regard to blogger collectives of varying types.

Affording Digital Socialities: The Ties that Bind Early research of the internet (e.g. Baym 1995; Jones 1997) often focused on ‘community’ as a means to challenge arguments that rejected online interaction as synthetic and essentially meaningless (e.g. Sardar 1996). These helped to establish ‘the status of Internet communications as culture’ (Hine 2005: 8; see also Castells 2010: 21–22), but an overreliance on an ill-defined ‘community’ as a means of explaining online social groupings has often meant allowing ‘implicit meanings to go on doing ideological work’ (Creed 2006: 47; see also Amit and Rapport 2002: 59–60). The latter is exemplified by Baym, who argues that ‘it matters less what we call it than how well we understand [community] … the methodological challenge [is] of how to bound the object of study’ (2007) – with this approach researchers enrol people into the ‘community’, drawing and naturalising boundaries and possibly overlooking how people are in multiple groups simultaneously or consecutively

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(Latour 2005: 28–33). Therefore, an uncritical deployment of community often leads to a presumption of community, obscuring the multiplicity and heterogeneity of online interaction. The methodological challenge is thus not to bound the object of study, but rather to find out what binds the subjective and heterogeneous components that present themselves as a contingently assembled body. In internet contexts, this means looking at how interactivity is afforded by a priori affordances and how interactivity is actualised in the assemblages. The establishment of the emoticons as a means to convey emotions and compensate for online disembodiment is such an example (Baym 1995: 152), but the ‘community’ that Baym described is better described in terms of the means of association (Latour 2005: 8–9) rather than seeking boundaries. The apparent boundedness of forums and email lists made earlier assumptions of a location-based ‘community’ more straightforward, albeit questionable. However, whereas these usually had centralised information distribution and moderation of practices (e.g. Bromberg 1996; Mnookin 2001), the blogosphere is atomistic in the first instance and characterised by multiple individually operated nodes – ‘I blog for me’ and the Principle of Independence are expressions of this distributed structuration. Nonetheless, studies of blogging have adopted a tendency to use ‘community’ as shorthand for emergent practices (Anjewierden and Efimova 2006; Efimova, Hendrick and Anjewierden 2005; C. Wei 2004). These approaches yield relevant results but suffer from a presupposition of ‘community’, and their methods may suffer from a bias that masks centrifugal tendencies and practices that would weaken the affirmation of ‘community’. In addition, neither of the above approaches included feedback from the bloggers themselves, regarding sentiments – or not – of ‘community’. Like culture, community is conventionally understood holistically but another approach is to dilute the term by narrowing its scope – for example, ‘communities of practice’ or ‘communities of interest’ (Castells 2001; Wellman et al. 2003; Wenger 1998). Regarding blogging, Schmidt (2007a: n.p.) proposes ‘communities of blogging practices’, which has the advantage of restricting the description of the collective phenomenon to shared practices, based on their subject matters and their means of interacting with other blogs and readers. However, the word community is mostly redundant here. There is no doubt that many bloggers in recognisable clusters participate and draw meaning from sustained online interactions with other bloggers and readers (e.g. Efimova and De Moor 2005). However, linking and conversations between blogs is a minority practice (Herring, Kouper et al.

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2005; Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004a), suggesting that the ‘community’ aspect of blogs is often overstated, perhaps as a result of social scientists’ interest in collective action rather than atomistic individualistic behaviour. As Postill lucidly states, ‘community merits attention as a polymorphous folk notion widely used both online and offline, but as an analytical concept with an identifiable empirical referent it is of little use’ (2008: 416). Deploying ‘community’ to bound clustering practices and people can be a question of power (Watson 1997: 102), and it has agency in the sense that it is used ‘to mobilize social relations’ (Amit and Rapport 2002: 20) – i.e. it can be used to bind people. Therefore, ‘community’ should not be ignored, but understood as a semiotic actant that exists in causal relations on a flat plane along with the blog affordances, bloggers and other assemblage components. Here I will focus on socialities as a means to attend to the underlying interpersonal and social relationships that may sometimes be expressed as ‘community’ but are experienced as interpersonal, emplaced and socially contextualised interactions (Pink 2008). Socialities attend ‘to the qualities of social relationships rather than their being part of a “community”’ (Postill and Pink 2012: 127; original emphasis), allowing an inductive and empirically based description of collective agential practices. The use of ‘smiley face dictionaries’ and the self-reflexive codification of developing modes of expressive communication amongst online soap opera fans (Baym 1995: 138) are an early example of the ‘digital socialities’ also identified in web forums (Postill 2008: 425–26) and in Twitter – where Postill and Pink suggest ‘hashtag sociality’ (2012: 131) as a specific mediated practice. Pink highlights the relevance of embodied and material practices – such as being seated around a table, or a new path in a neighbourhood park (Pink 2008) – in developing socialities, and the mediation of the ‘written word and computer interface’ is central to the ‘quasi-orality’ of web forums (Postill and Pink 2012: 131). Socialities are thus an effective way of describing the contingent set of practices that animate the configuration of a social assemblage, and blog affordances are key agential nodes of these practices in the blogosphere.

Hyperlinking and Blog Socialities Regularised patterns of interaction stabilise blog socialities, and in the use of hyperlinking we can see how these can develop along striations prompted by an a priori affordance. Blogrolls – lists of links to

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recommended blogs – were omnipresent in the Malaysian personal blogs I surveyed.1 Whilst they serve ostensibly as a personal recommendation to preferred blogs, the practice of ‘link-exchange’, a reciprocated hyperlink in the blogroll, was also motivated by a desire to increase search engine visibility. Thus, for example, I was once contacted via my blog and asked whether I would be: ‘interested in reciprocal blog exchange links with my blog …? This is good for SEO and page rank’. However, this practice may mark one out as a ‘n00b’ (a pejorative reference to a ‘newbie’ – someone new to blogging), and some bloggers label their blogrolls in ways that reference this: GeekMonk labels his blogroll as ‘Blogs I Really Read’;2 and others use labels such as ‘Friends’, or ‘Important bloggers’. Thomas, who had written ‘NOT.EXCHANGING. LINKS’ under his profile,3 explained that he had previously exchanged links, but: there [were] too many links … [now] I just link people I like to, that’s all personal friends … People would want to be interested in your circle of friends… If it’s too long, people won’t bother about that.

The practice of link-exchange thus reveals certain hierarchies and points to the significance of search engine algorithms in the pursuit of online visibility (see also Bucher 2012), demonstrating an intersection of socialities and affordances. There is also monetary value in links: GeekMonk had a category of ‘Other Sites’ that were paid for; and Maango – a popular lifestyle blogger – was unusual in that she directly offered to rent out links to people in her blogroll.4 However, contextualised links posted within a blog post are much more likely to be clicked on than blogroll links. For example, I had recommended some blogs – one of whom was Magdalene’s – in a newspaper interview, and I subsequently received at least 1,843 visits from her blog over one week, compared to the usual 1,000 weekly visits, because she mentioned and linked me in a post. Like most bloggers, I was able to track the provenance of the readers, and I followed convention by leaving a comment on her blog thanking her for the mention. The importance of these recommendations was also noted by Tommy, a very successful personal blogger, who explained how a particular post – a parody of popular bloggers – attracted their attention and their mentions pushed him ‘from a nobody to somebody’, following which he successfully retained and grew his readership.

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Comment Socialities The comments left in blogs are often part of their attraction, complementing the content of the post itself (Kenix 2009: 808; Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht 2004). The myBlogS survey showed that less than 15 per cent of the respondents ‘Rarely’ or ‘Never’ read comments, 80 per cent agreed that a blog should have a comments function, and a negligible number of blogs did not have comments enabled. Only 12 per cent of the respondents reported never leaving a comment, and 18 per cent had never responded to another commenter. While moderation of comments was understood as the prerogative of the blogger, minimal intervention is expected; 39 per cent of bloggers said that they ‘Never Censor’ comments, and the most common reason for those who did censor comments was ‘personal attacks on people’ (48 per cent). Only 7 per cent said that they censored comments because they did not agree with them. The ability to censor comments reflects a fundamental communicational asymmetry between blogger and commenters (Kenix 2009: 813), but for the personal blog genre, as opposed to SoPo blogs, engaging with readers on a personal level via the comments is an effective way of stabilising the relations that develop between the readers and the blogger, and reflects the emphasis on affect as opposed to reasoned debate (Lövheim 2013). Commenting patterns and expectations of reciprocation may also relate to coinciding offline friendships and/or feeling ‘a part’ of the blog (Baumer, Sueyoshi and Tomlinson 2008: 1117). A broad typology of commenters is presented in Table 5.1. They are categorised according to their level of engagement with the topic of the post, interaction with other commenters, and identifiability – the latter relates primarily to the anonymity affordance, and the former two to the interactivity affordance, but other affordances may be relevant too. This typology helps to understand the comment socialities that develop, some focused on the blogger, and some on the other commenters. Thus, while commenters may complement the post, they may also detract from it by criticising it – attracting ‘Defenders’ – or, as ‘Free Riders’, seek to draw traffic away. The most common way for a blogger to interact directly with her readers is by responding to their comments. Some answer all comments, albeit often with phatic one-liners such as ‘Cool!’, or ‘Haha thanks for dropping by’. For Chee Keong, responding to all comments ‘shows that you care about your readers … and you actually read the comments’. Increased readership makes this more difficult, and Tommy explained that he got too many comments to answer them all (see also Kim 2007: 19).

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Table 5.1 Commenter typology (http://julianhopkins.net/index.php?/ archives/196-The-10-types-of-commenters.html).

Description

The ‘Firster’

• Competes to be L the first to leave a comment • Usually the comment has no meaning apart from stating that they are the first • Normally restricted to high traffic blogs; though not on SoPo blogs

The Follower

• Doesn’t contribute anything new but lends visible support to whatever position the blog post has taken • Expressed in a genre-specific manner. For example, a SoPo blog follower expresses support for the political position, or the personal blogger gets positive comments on his choice of clothes

Identifiability

Type

Interaction

Engagement

Typology of blog commenters

M

H • Likely to be

Comments

tracking the blog via Google Reader or RSS

M M H • May overlap

with the Firster

Identifiability

Interaction

Engagement

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Type

Description

M H L

The Hater (aka the Troll)

• Will attack the blogger, usually with ad hominem remarks • Will engage with other commenters • Usually anonymous, possibly with a nick that reflects their stance (e.g. ‘Blogger_is_stupid’) • Stephanie and Rachel recount repetitive behaviour – someone constantly checking blog posts, immediately commenting, always attacking

H H H

The Engager

• The core of many blogs’ comment socialities – they take up points in the blog post, expand on them, or disagree with them

• Takes it upon himself to defend the blogger against negative comments, haters, etc. • May use reasoned debate or ad The Defender hominem • Will often invoke the principle of independence – ‘If you don’t like this blog, start your own!’

M H H

Comments

• Usually makes use of the anonymity affordance

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M H H

The Socialite

• Talks with others in the comments, often on matters unrelated to the blog post • Makes many comments

L

The Free Rider

• The purpose of the Free Rider’s comment is to attract traffic to her own blog • Some will make Follower-type comments and leave a link; or just bluntly ask for people to check out their blog

M H H • More relevant

The Hijacker

• May try to switch the topic to something else • May take over the role of the blogger: defending, answering other comments, interpreting the blogger’s intentions

L

H • This is generally frowned upon • Some comment sections can automatically display the commenter/ blogger’s most recent post • Hyperlinks being leveraged

to the SoPo genre

NB: L = ‘Low’; M = ‘Medium’; H = ‘High’.

Rachel emphasised the importance of responding to comments ‘if you want to have a well-visited blog and a very interactive blog’, but preferred a more ‘spontaneous’ approach rather than an ‘artificial’ response to every comment. Stephanie’s explanation highlighted the challenges of asynchronous communication, explaining that her initial practice of answering each comment as a courtesy became disrupted by travelling, and she worried about how selective responses might be interpreted: because it would be really odd if sometimes I respond and sometimes I don’t and then there will always be haters that comes in and says that, ‘Oh she responded yesterday, and you know I wrote about something today

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and she probably felt that whatever I say was true, and that’s why you know that’s why she never responded to me. (Original emphasis)

She felt that she had an unreasonable amount of negative comments, and worried that negative comments could influence a new reader’s perceptions. Thus, she had wanted to make [her blog] a free speaking space … but … when you have a lot of rumours, right, a hundred rumours might make it true. So, that’s when I started like you know moderating them … when I think … ‘I don’t really like this comment,’ I just delete it.

She was the only respondent to express this unilateral approach to unfavourable comments, and most took the stance as expressed by Ibrahim, who said: I’m OK leaving any good or bad comments from people who tell who they are … At least their name or address, their nick, nickname, that’s good enough for me – rather than just put ‘anonymous’.

However, he rarely deleted comments, only when ‘offensive language’ or ‘sensitive’ issues (i.e. that relate to race and/or religion) were involved. The operation of moderation is opaque, although deletions can sometimes be inferred from a mention in another blog, an orphaned follow-up comment, or by observation over repeated visits. There are usually some commenters ready to support such actions – rejecting the deleted comments as beyond the pale – whereas others may object. When comments are moderated, the pace of interaction reduces and commenters may be less motivated to comment because, as Jeff Ooi put it in a public forum in 2008, they do not get the ‘orgasm’ of seeing their comment immediately. A blogger may intervene in other ways, as in this example in a SoPo blog where the host blogger exposes a commenter using different pseudonyms, saying: while i respect freedom of expression, it falls upon me to note that ‘oky’, ‘i support war’ and ‘chong gin meng’ in this comment thread have used the same e-mail and ip [Internet Protocol] address.5

Thus, commenters may seek to exploit anonymity to simulate a number of voices, or, as the ‘Hater’ does, to leave vituperative comments – such as when Tommy blogged about splitting up with his girlfriend, and someone commented: ‘hahahahahaha..emo LOSERRRRRR!!!’6

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The prevalence of this kind of comment meant that bloggers often referred to the need to develop a ‘thick skin’ (e.g. 938Live 2009; see also Pedersen and Macafee 2007). On the other hand, adulatory remarks could also be received with ambiguity, and Haliza expressed discomfort with ‘comments like “[Haliza] you are so great”, “You are so”, you know, all these good things about me … If you like someone don’t be too much lah’. Over time, the nuances of comment socialities come to reflect the style of the host blogger, and readers expect a certain conversational ambience. Thus, on a post by Chee Keong, a commenter said: It’s not only the posts are interesting.. but the comments. Haha! Dude, you are creating more dramas than what your non regular readers can take :P [Chee Keong responds] I don’t think they are my readers, I’ve never seen their nicks [i.e. pseudonyms] before. :)7

Although comment socialities have much in common with online forums and email lists (e.g. Kollock and Smith 1999; Postill 2011), a significant difference is that it is the blogger’s ‘forum’. For example, going ‘off-topic’ (to use a norm from forums and Usenet lists) is decided by the blogger, the indisputable and ultimate arbiter of her blog and the comments. In a blog post related to the Gaza-Israel conflict, a commenter asked Tommy to remove his post, as it was attracting racist comments, to which he responded in a statement clearly affirming the authority of the blogger, resonating with the principle of independence: I’ll remove the racist comments, but I am not going to censor myself by removing this blog post. This is my blog. My blog is my house. My readers are guests to my house. If there are unruly guests, I will kick them out. But I shouldn’t have to censor myself in my own house. (Tommy-BP1)

Over time, the regularity of interactions develops a sense of association and familiarity between the blogger and some readers, who may also identify with an in-group centred on the blog. The comment space thus develops its own dynamics, and the ritualistic ‘Firster’ reflects the construction of the comments area as a space where mere presence has a significance.8 In the following extract, a perceived Free Rider is criticised:

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Commenter A: Shame on you for trying to pimp your blog here!! Commenter B: I’m really sorry if I come across as ‘pimping’ my blog. I’m just trying to provide a bit of commentary on the issue and since I’ve written a piece (which was actually published before this piece) I thought a link wouldn’t do much harm. (Tommy-BP1)

‘Commenter B’ is careful to emphasise that she/he had already written the blog post, thus was not being opportunistic. Commenters are often bloggers themselves (e.g. Braaten 2005) who may seek to extend the reach of their blog through commenting, but some subtleties apply. Often, the opportunity to leave a visible link as part of the ‘profile’ of the commenter is seen as both sufficient and appropriate, as Nicky referenced when explaining that she would leave comments ‘and hope that they will come onto my blog, but I wouldn’t like paste my link there, obviously, I would link it under my name’. The different ways in which comments can be used is also demonstrated by Alvin: I comment for two reasons … one is, um, if I know it can bring hits to my site … Sometimes I just go in … and go like ‘Oh nice hat’ and stuff … people see my name and they click back. So I have already changed the way I comment as well, I put my full name there, because people recognise [Alvin] more than [a previously used pseudonym]. So that is strategic. But … I won’t do that on [another columnist’s SoPo] site even though I know it will bring a lot of hits in … I will only comment [there] when I know I really have something to contribute to the discussion that’s going on.

As a newspaper columnist, Alvin found that his name was more effective in attracting readers, and his explanation showed how he would strategically choose to interact meaningfully with the host blogger, or opportunistically try to attract other commenters to his own blog. When he avoids doing this on a SoPo blog he reflects the operations of genre as well as his own personal relationship with the other blogger. The interactivity affordance prompted by the comment section can be deterritorialising by enabling readers to further their own interests and other bloggers to advertise their competing content. Stephanie described commenters ‘taking over’ her comments: ‘forming this little forum on my commentary section and like you know “Let’s go

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out together and hate [Stephanie] together” haha.’ Her response was to delete the comments and block these Haters, but other bloggers developed a conceptual separation between themselves and the comments – for example, Tommy explained that he is happy to leave non-anonymous abusive comments ‘because … I can dissociate that’. Similarly, Rachel said: And the two-way thing about it is so interesting; because I see my job as simply to put up an entry and then stand back, and let everyone else have their say. If you leave things open-ended then they do. (original emphasis)

She also recounted how she was once unwilling to critique a short story by a friend she had blogged about, and hoped that commenters would do it for her, saying ‘It doesn’t have to be you who always provides the honesty.’ Thus, while bloggers welcome commenters as integral to the blog, they also become practised in dissociating themselves from the comments. These strategies recall the dividual self discussed in Chapter 3 – in that bloggers become more practised in maintaining a distance from the comments, as well as negotiating the different relations that are afforded by the blogs.

The Dialogical Medium and Polycasting:  Affording Extended Parasocial Relations Detailed analysis of the comments thus reveals how the blog interactivity affords socialities that sustain interpersonal relations between the bloggers and commenters, and Lövheim notes that bloggers and their readers use dialogic communication whose ‘forms and meaning [are] formed in cooperation between the blogger and her readers’ (2013: 624), as well as between commenters. These mediated relationships resemble the ‘para-social interaction’ experienced by radio and television audiences (Horton and Wohl 1956: 215–16). They explain that audiovisual media and live performances afford the transmission of affect by ‘personae’, and some viewers develop emotional and psychological ties with the performer. The paradigmatic example is of the person who feels true grief at the death of an admired celebrity (Meyrowitz 1985: 47), or attachment to a fictional character (Schmid and Klimmt 2011). However, this ‘seeming face-to-face relationship’ lacks ‘effective reciprocity’, and the ‘interaction … is one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development’ (Horton and Wohl 1956: 215). Horton and Wohl’s

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influential insight (see also Giles 2012; Meyrowitz 1985: 45–46) is very relevant here, but the interaction between personal bloggers and their readers differs in two significant ways from the mass media contexts they were referring to. First, bloggers’ potentially mass audience is usually a smaller one in practice, and bloggers are both producers and recipients depending on their actions. Thus, they may be understood as engaging in polycasting, a term that adds to the extant concepts of broadcasting and narrowcasting, neither of which captures the particular position of bloggers as nomadic media producers and consumers who cluster around a multiplicity of productive sites, both within and spanning on- and offline assemblages. Secondly, although the mode of distribution is one-to-many, they engage with their audience ‘in a oneto-one manner’ (Lenhart 2005: 102). The latter happens in a performative sense, as outlined by Horton and Wohl, but also directly via the comments and other channels such as instant messaging, email and other SNSs. Abidin has highlighted the role of shared intimacies and the ‘perceived interconnectedness’ that bloggers develop with their audience (2013). This additional interactional dimension means that blogs afford extended parasocial relations – these are still characterised by asymmetrical reciprocity, but direct interpersonal exchanges between the blogger and the audience are habitual, may extend over time, and even extend to offline interaction. These factors also highlight the dialogical dynamics that underpin the bloggers’ stance towards the actual and anticipated response of their readers and commenters (Doostdar 2004: 655), as well the constitutive ‘construction of meaning through relational communications’ (Yang and Lim 2009: 345). When we add to the interaction of bloggers, commenters and readers the role of the coded blog itself as an actant, as discussed in Chapter 4, the blog can then be understood as a dialogical medium that develops with and through genres and their attendant socialities.

Blog Socialities The above sections discuss socialities mostly centred on dyadic relations that assemble the dialogical medium of the blog. We now turn to examples of ‘blogtals’ and blogmeets in order to illustrate emergent socialities that relate to collective blogger interactions, and to discuss how the blog affordances influence the socialities that emerge through mutually constitutive on- and offline contexts.

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Blogtals At the time of the fieldwork, ‘blogtals’ (derived from web ‘portals’) were widely used by bloggers to find out about other blogs and publicise their own. A blogtal is a website that collates links and snippets of recent registered blogs, displaying them in reverse chronological order. They often enable voting and may display a ‘top ten’ at the top of the page. There may also be SNS features such as individual profiles, avatars and inter-user communication functions. The significance of blogtals meant that by 2010 there were at least ten Malaysian blogtals, and BlogAdNet had created their own one, called Wassup? Created in 2003, Project Petaling Street (PPS) was the earliest and most important Malaysian blogtal, and most interviewees mentioned it as a formative influence for the Malaysian blogosphere. One blogger explained how she used to use Google to find other Malaysian bloggers, but then she found ‘the god sent www.petalingstreet.org that opened up windows to a world of experiences. Nothing has been the same since I joined the community portal!’9 Although it was started by a group of about ten leading personal bloggers in order to keep each other updated on their blogs, and to experiment with generating advertising income, others quickly wanted to participate and were soon included. Debates about its proper ownership and control reflected the egalitarian strand associated with earlier internet cultures (Castells 2001: 54), and the privileged static links to the founders’ blogs on the sidebar blogroll were challenged. This ethos was also evident on a wiki created alongside PPS, which stated: ‘Project Petaling Street belongs to the Malaysian blogging community. The core group members are simply facilitators and custodians.’10 Another blogger also expressed a similar communal ethos: Who does Project Petaling Street belong to? I believe I can answer that question. It belongs to every blogger who uses it. … An idea made into reality. Built up. Refined and evolving with the help of many ideas as times go along. It made a community. And the community makes it up.11

The last two sentences mark PPS as an example of a ‘recursive public’, whereby people knowledgeable in software code develop ‘in common

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the means of their own association’ (Kelty 2005: 186). Later, as the blogtals served a larger network, users were nonetheless also often aware of the coded underpinnings of their means of association, and we can see how the blogtals generated a territorialising line of flight, drawing in the machinic connections of the hyperlinks, distributing blogs and enabling affordances leading to the emergence of blogging socialities. However, in spite of the aspirations of collective control, the need to pay domain-hosting costs and manage the administration of the site meant that one person remained the ultimate arbiter of PPS.12 Thus, in March 2009, the owner contentiously sold the domain to a blogger unpopular with many for his abrasive style and intransigent religious stance.13 Although by this time its significance as the central node of a ‘networked public’ (boyd 2011) was displaced to a large degree by RSS feeds and newer SNSs, its accessibility and visibility meant it likely still played a significant role for newer bloggers. The blogtal operates as a centralised collection of links, and a ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour 1987: 215–17) for blogs, each one being subject to automated calculations based on time and provenance, but also allows for interactive evaluation based on the self-categorisation and voting mechanisms. Not all BlogAdNet registrants used Wassup? but it was nonetheless the site of negotiations of socialities and audience generation, thus giving it a significant territorialising influence. Users had a reflexive awareness of the quasi-automated qualification of posts – whereby a click on the displayed link counted as a vote – which led to competition for the top ten voted blog posts. On at least one occasion, a group of bloggers announced their intention to collectively drive each other’s blog posts into the top ten. With their success they claimed to have demonstrated the underlying disconnect of the voting with meaningful quality. In a similar move, one blogger tried to establish a group of bloggers based on using the rarely used down-voting option – in a blog created to explain himself, he argued that the positive voting was done in a self-serving manner. Some used sensational titles (intimating sex or scandal) to attract hits, and others tried to recruit their personal networks via messaging services. The latter was seen as a nuisance by some,14 and Adeline mentioned a further transgression of boundaries when one blogger used SMS to request for votes.

Blogmeets When questioned about ‘community’, interviewees most commonly related it to blogmeets. To trace blog socialities, as distinct from the usual

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pattern of organised events in Malaysia – such as a door gift given at the registration desk, a master of ceremonies (‘emcee’) introducing speakers and bestowing tokens of appreciation, and refreshments laid out on a buffet table – this section looks at blogmeet practices that relate directly to blog-related affordances, demonstrating the meshing of onand offline contexts in ways that belie their frequent dichotomisation. The first PPS party in 2005 was a seminal blogmeet and, like other similar ‘meet-up[s]’ (Boellstorff 2016: 397), was blog-centred – recalling Bourdieu’s autonomous fields (1998: 61). As blogmeets became more common they tended to centre on genre, particularly SoPo blogs – where civil society and political themes dominated – and personal blogs. As BlogAdNet and AppAds developed, blogmeets for personal bloggers became financed by marketing interests and focused on socialising between younger bloggers whose presence was also motivated by free refreshments and opportunities to win prizes. However, even when blogmeets are not wholly centred around blogs, owning a blog still remains a condition for participation, and blog-oriented interpersonal practices are evident.15

Camwhoring The most obvious shared practice at blogmeets was ‘camwhoring’, or taking photos, as this blog extract exemplifies: [Tommy] was here too.. I managed to grab and talked to him while there were not many people around … BlogQueen with her boyfriend … were there too!! Haha.. Managed to grab a shot before everyone was rushing there~~~ Hehe.16

The online centripetal attraction of the bloggers with a larger audience is replicated offline, and the high-status blogger has more ‘incoming’ photographs (when they get asked to pose for photos), just like his blog has more incoming hyperlinks, and in both cases he is less likely to reciprocate. Camwhoring at blogmeets is a territorialising practice in that higher status bloggers’ positions get confirmed and reinforced, resulting in more incoming traffic online. The digital camera reveals itself as a key actant – as implied in the term ‘camwhore’, being enslaved to the camera – and it is an almost obligatory point of passage in connecting the on- and offline. Digital cameras allow multiple frames and post-editing – thus engaging smoothly with the need for personal bloggers to develop narratives and exemplifying the a priori affordances of perfect reduplication and multimedia. Blogmeets were usually planned

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Figure 5.1 Publicising the myBlogS survey at a film premiere (photo by the author).

with opportunities for photo opportunities – such as a red carpet with backdrop, or various props that respond to the bloggers’ need for narrative material. I leveraged this once in order to gain publicity for the myBlogS survey – sporting a headpiece that attracted attention (Figure 5.1) – and on another occasion, dressed in an eye-catching and (as it transpired) prize-winning costume I found myself in demand for photos with other bloggers, some of whom told me afterwards that they thought I was a part of the event. The reciprocal camwhoring also territorialises by occupying time spent together, as the following example shows: Camwhoring/Taking Picture sessions lasted for a while and around 11.03pm we decided to make a move. We went out of the cafe and we took group pictures again and it lasted us 30 whole minutes. HAHA. Of course, many stuffs happened then. lmao.17

Amongst bloggers of a more equal status, taking a photo together is also a good way of breaking the ice, and with an exchange of blog addresses, the tie can be recreated online. The example in Figures 5.2– 5.4 show how this can also be a somatic process, because the classic pose with the camera held at arm’s length requires the participants to draw close to each other. The example shows the three young women

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Figure 5.2

Figure 5.3

Figures 5.2–5.4 Camwhoring – negotiating suitable photographs (photos by the author).

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posing and negotiating – after examining the first photo taken, they decided that they would not want it to be publicly available online for an indefinite period – so they took another. There is a clear awareness of the consequences of the storage and reduplication affordance, and their selectivity is a practice that emerges with it. This awareness also meant that a small minority of bloggers preferred not to have their pictures taken (Figure 5.5), preferring instead to extend online anonymity offline.

On- and Offline Meshing Another way in which the on- and offline mesh is when online interactions prepare offline encounters, as evidenced in the following account from Tommy’s first blogmeet:

Figure 5.5 Blogger at blogmeet extends online anonymity (photo by the author).

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A typical conversation at the bloggers meet-up went something like this. Blogger: ‘HEYYYYYYY.... Hello [Tommy]!’ [Tommy]: ‘Ummm... hi!’ *scans for name tag* Blogger: ‘Its me, my name is HunnyWunnyBunnyKins [or some other obscure online nicknames]. Remember?’ [Tommy]: ‘Oh! Hi! Yea yea, I remember you! You commented before. How you doing?’ *Repeat process with 20 other bloggers*18

Conversations can be initiated online and continued offline (Reed 2005: 236) with the extended parasocial relations enabling socialities that establish acquaintanceships as well as more lasting relations. Adeline and her partner – who had first met online – were part of a notable group of bloggers, many of whom had also met via online chatting groups in pre-blogging times, and she reflected on how younger bloggers were perhaps experiencing blogging in the same manner. However, emphasising how on- and offline overlap does not mean that they are the same, and Jaymee noted that it is easier to interact with more people online: obviously in real life you will hang out with people that you can click with … online as well [... but] online the clique gets wider lah, because, I mean there are only so many people you can hang out with in real life.

Online, therefore, it is easier to maintain a wider network of weak ties, which also enable extended parasocial relations. However, there can be tensions when this online interaction is not replicated offline – Magdalene mentioned how she had briefly met a blogger/reader in one blogmeet, then they had a chance meeting in a shopping mall four months later and she initially failed to recognise her: but she was quite offended that I didn’t remember her … I think it’s because, like, to her … she knows so much about me from reading my blog so she gets insulted that I don’t know anything about her. Which is kinda unfair because … I’m not reading her blog or anything.

Most bloggers would blog about a blogmeet within a day or two, linking to people they met, along with pictures and a description of the event. Many bloggers could track incoming links, and these

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hyperlinked references usually led to a reciprocating of links and phatic comments, reinforcing the connections initiated or renewed offline. Reflecting on the experience of meeting someone in the flesh for the first time was a common trope – for example, one blogger said ‘Anyway it was nice meeting [Tommy].. and I didn’t know he was that … hmmm … ‘tiny’ lol.’19 Expectations were formed by online interaction and impression management, and challenges to these expectations reflect the limitations of the anonymity and disembodiment affordances in replicating embodied encounters – reminding us that affordances are important in their operation as much as their non-operation.

In Search of Community When questioned about the existence of a ‘blogger community’, the most common reference points expressed by interviewees were PPS, BlogAdNet and blogmeets – the former often enabling the latter. Face-to-face meetings were particularly emphasised, and most

Figure 5.6 BlogAdNet blogmeets often include free food and drinks. This coupon was part of the free offerings at one blogmeet (photo by the author).

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interviewees associated community with offline encounters. Stephanie described the blogger community as: ‘the active bloggers that are mingling around the blogging scene, like you know there’s always a blogger event.’ Saying that ‘[t]here used to be a very strong blogging community based on petalingstreet.org,’ Chee Keong voiced a common sentiment amongst the longer-term bloggers that assigned to PPS the nostalgic status of a primordial community. Similarly, Alvin contrasted those ‘early days’ with a present community made of ‘the young ones’ who go to events and press conferences together. Some identified more closely with a blogger community, thus Rachel said, ‘I personally feel there’s a great kinship with anyone who blogs,’ and Andrew said that ‘[the] blogging community is something more of a virtual type of home … That is what a community means, a family.’ However, the most common response was to locate the blogger community somewhere else, either in the past or else in another group of people. Magdalene said that it was mostly BlogAdNet bloggers who were active ‘in being part of a community’, but had reservations about whether ‘it’s that part of the community [where] I belong’, and this sentiment was expressed more clearly by Nicky, who laughingly said: ‘Yeah of course there’s a blogging community! … I’m just not a very big part of it!’ Adeline explained that she used to perhaps feel a special bond when meeting a stranger who blogs, but no longer did. This was probably due to the increased number of bloggers and the subsequent diluting of consociation amongst bloggers that was not compensated by increased ‘categorical oppositions and primordialized notions of moral obligation’ (Amit and Rapport 2002: 60). While PPS constituted a weak source of primordial identity, the rapid growth and often transient engagement with blogging by many meant that there had not been an effective consolidation of a communal blogger identity. Adeline expressed the tension effectively, referring to journalists seeking to develop a narrative of bloggers as a homogenous group, arguing that ‘you can never understand this blogger is doing this, and why that blogger is doing that … or they may be all doing the same thing, but they all have different reasons why they do it, you know?’ In effect, ascribing a homogenous ‘community’ label to bloggers does not elucidate the questions of agency, for most bloggers do not recognise it as a reason for action – with a few exceptions, the respondents’ own actions were typically framed in terms of personal decisions, or relating to close associates such as colleagues, family or friends. Instead, it was often used to homogenise or differentiate those who were not part of one’s closer circle. An important exception to the

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latter was James, an early senior person at BlogAdNet, who said that they ‘started [BlogAdNet] with a very strong passion to do something for the blogger community, right, because I’m a blogger myself, and I really enjoy people I met up with’, however his other unstated aim, to generate income, recalls the contingent power latent in claiming community (Watson 1997). Instead, most respondents seemed to use community as a ‘background concept representing an assumption about the existence of a wider set of social potentials’ (Pink 2008: 171), and the focus on socialities – ‘forms of social interrelatedness’ (2008: 172) – and the affordances underpinning blog socialities enables a more precise identification of a source for the emanation of agency (Pink 2008: 179) than ‘community’. A further understanding of blog socialities can be discussed through the term ‘blogger friends’ – a term that is bounded in a way that a simple ‘friend’ is not. This usually referred to people whom the blogger had first encountered online, or with whom interactions were restricted to the online space. The context of the initial friendship is thus seen as somehow constitutive of the nature of the relationship, bringing with it particular obligations and practices. One way in which they can enhance sociability is through the ability to observe without interacting and to peruse the blog archives, which can give a new reader a commitment-free opportunity to form an opinion of the blogger – thus, when meeting the person for the first time, it is easier to share interests. Contrasting online acquaintanceships to people whom he considered as ‘real’ friends, Alvin noted how ‘[they] will just come on and comment anyway’ – implying that other readers may comment to attract readers, or other blog-related reasons. Thus, ‘real’ friends may also have blogs – but the blog is incidental to the relationship. A key difference with blogging friendships is that much of is sustained by disembodied and asynchronous interaction, and practices such as reciprocal hyperlinks or regular commenting on each other’s blogs are indicators of these relationships. Different qualities of friendships and blogging are interwoven, and the myBlogS survey showed about 40 per cent reporting that either their three favourite blogs, or the blogs they regularly read, were by someone known to them personally. Of these offline friends or acquaintances, half or more were considered to be personal friends by a majority (57 per cent) of the respondents. However, they were mostly pre-existing friends, with almost 60 per cent saying very few or none of them were encountered online first. Overall, therefore, offline and pre-existing interpersonal relationships played a significant role in guiding choices of blogs, but nonetheless

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most reading choices and online interactions originated from and stayed within the online context. The most negative description I heard was from Mary while chatting at a blogmeet in April 2008. She described ‘online friends’ as ‘“Hi and Bye” friends’, saying that they are only interested in getting hits, by having you mention their blog and/or visit it. Using the expression ‘in real life’, she contrasted online friends with those with whom you have something in common – the same home town, the same school. I asked her was not ‘online’ also ‘real life’ – she agreed, but it was ‘different’. However, Thomas, one of the younger bloggers, mirrored comments by Adeline and Alvin regarding generational differences when he said that he had ‘definitely [made] a lot of friends … actually my bigger circle of friends are actually all in the blogosphere’ (original emphasis). Overall, the importance of blogging as a social activity for most of the participants that I met in the blogmeets – especially the younger ones – was clear, and the blog affordances discussed above influence these interpersonal relationships.

Conclusions This chapter has discussed how blog affordances channel the flows, observable in emergent socialities, that animate and stabilise two general forms of blog assemblages. Around each blog there is a unique hyperlocal assemblage of actors and components, who cluster around the necessary presence of the single blog. Extended parasocial relations are actualised through varying degrees of reciprocal exchange, and bloggers and their readers both express loyalty and criticisms towards each other. While they accept and recognise the relevance and interests of other participants in the blogosphere – especially the principle of independence and the right to ownership of original content (i.e. not to be plagiarised) – the molecular composition of the blogosphere promotes clustering around individuals and their blogs, rather than groups or a collective idea, as happens with open source, forums or SoPo blogs. The A-list bloggers have the greatest reach in this regard, sustaining a larger assemblage and being important nodes of wider blogging social assemblages, such as that which coalesce around BlogAdNet. They do this by acting as prototypical examples and by being a node where other bloggers interact, most notably within the comments or the less common blog-hosted chat box. The discussion of blogtals and blogmeets traced symbolic, prosaic and ritual practices in order to reveal different socialities, placing

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these in the context of relevant assemblages and affordances. An important aspect of PPS and other Malaysian blogtals is that they enhance the possibility of consociational experiences by collating locally produced blogs, increasing the chances for personal blogs to be exposed to readers who share offline experiences. Arguing that ‘community’ is an ineffective frame that tends to overemphasise centripetal as opposed to centrifugal influences, and emphasising the importance of individuals in blogging socialities, does not mean rejecting the relevance of collective influences. Looking at the folding and unfolding of movements of territorialisation and deterritorialisation in social assemblages, wherein different components can have opposing or even dual roles (DeLanda 2006: 12), highlights the relevance of collective influences. The second part of this chapter looked at blogtals and blogmeets as sources of agential socialities. For example, the PPS blogtal and earlier blogmeets engendered several lines of flight, actualising the accessibility affordance and multiplying genres, as well as attracting attention from the mainstream media and government. These lines of flight were enabled by the same affordances that initially stabilised the earlier, smaller, blogging assemblage which had a more actualised communal identity. The next chapter will discuss how BlogAdNet has been important in providing ways for bloggers to meet up offline, and thus territorialising the Malaysian blogosphere in particular ways.

Notes   1. However, some studies have suggested that only about half of blogs have blogrolls (Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004a: 8; Schmidt 2007b: 9).   2. GeekMonk, accessed 15 December 2010: b0594.   3. Thomas, accessed 3 February 2009: b0061.   4. Blog post, Maango, 18 February 2009: p00505.   5. Blog post, Alfred, 6 January 2009: p00193.   6. Blog post, Tommy, 24 December 2008: p00080.   7. Blog post, Chee Keong, 12 January 2009: p00234.   8. Although in fact the commenter is trying to be as synchronous as possible, it reflects the affordance in its attempt to bypass it. As Collier and Ong suggest, this movement is relevant too, in that the ‘circumvention [of an assemblage] and its effects are as much part of the assemblage as is the global form itself’ (Collier and Ong 2005: 13).   9. Blog post, Mary, 1 January 2008: p00851. 10. Website, June 2003: p00859. 11. Blog post, Tampopo, 5 July 2005: p00847. 12. Blog post, Adil, 5 July 2005: p00848.

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13. It was sold for the relatively low sum of RM 3,000 (approx. USD 910), according to an informant. 14. Blog post, Tan, 9 July 2008: p00849; Blog post, Thomas, 5 March 2009: p00534. 15. These include: asking questions about interlocutors’ blogs – how many hits they get, what they blog about, what platform they use; taking photos with other bloggers, especially celebrity bloggers (‘blogebrities’), for later display on one’s blog; exchanging blogging tips; and so forth. 16. Blog post, TanFan, 25 October 2009: p00852. 17. Blog post, Thomas, 24 December 2008: p0071; original emphasis. 18. Blog post, Tommy, 30 June 2005: p00803; original emphasis and square brackets. 19. Blog post, TanFan, 25 October 2009: p00852.

CHAPTER 6

April 2007 Voicy Consumers and Negotiating Networked Publics

When BlogAdNet was founded in February 2007 it reported targeting 300 registered blogs in three months, but its expectations were exceeded with 250 in two weeks1 and 1,500 in two months.2 Rooted in the Malaysian market, they offered previously unavailable localised services to both advertisers and bloggers, with significant advantages for both groups in terms of audience targeting and income generation, respectively. This brisk growth of registrations not only demonstrated a pent-up demand for the monetisation of blogs, typically presented as an effortless inclusion of some code into the blog, but also the rapid spread of information spread through the blogging networks. A direct competitor, AppAds, emerged in the same month, and there was a lively discussion and dissection of the relative merits of each company via blog postings and comments. Overall, the discussion followed a consumerist discourse, measuring the relative service offerings and potential to benefit bloggers financially, rather than potential impacts of market dynamics on the personal blog genre. This thick description will draw upon the ANT concepts of the ‘economy of qualities’, ‘voicy consumers’ and ‘overflows’ (Callon 1998a, 2001; Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002; Foster 2007) to analyse the intermingling of sociotechnical and economic dynamics detailed below. It will also analyse the overlapping audiences in terms of ‘networked publics’, understanding how networked technologies construct a shared space and allow for an ‘imagined community’ to develop online (boyd 2014: 8; see also Rheingold 2012: 122–23). The events detailed below centre on a lively discussion sparked by comparative reviews of the two blog advertising networks. The blogger, ‘Reviewer’, was a newcomer, but his detailed reviews attracted comments from the founders of both blog advertising networks,

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responding to his well-meant critique.3 The appearance of the founders in the comments generated wider interest, and as they engaged with Reviewer, commenters and directly with each other, Reviewer found himself at the centre of a brief but intense drama that saw accusations of sockpuppetry – i.e. fabricating voices of the ‘public’ – levelled at AppAds. Reviewer’s blog thus became a salient intersection of three publics – the bloggers, the blog advertising networks and the clients. The response by BlogAdNet and AppAds shows them leveraging comment socialities in an effort to manage at least two related publics – the bloggers, who were their resource in terms of advertising space, and the potential advertisers, who would provide the revenues. This chapter is organised into two overlapping sections. Each draws directly from Reviewer’s blog posts, looking at the ways in which the commenters respond to blog posts and how these spark new blog posts. The first section focuses on the ways in which the blog advertising networks try to engage with and contain Reviewer’s voice – demonstrating the voicy consumer in action and attempts to manage the overflow. The second looks more closely at the relation between digital literacy, imagined community and the (de)legitimation of particular voices through technical and communal means.

Brief Overview This thick description looks at eleven blog posts that were published over twenty days, with the latest comment posted twenty-eight days after the first post.4 There were 174 comments in total, and 41 were responses by Reviewer. The post with the highest number of comments had 31 comments by readers, and the lowest was 3; the average number of comments was 15.8, and the median was 13. All quotes have been paraphrased to keep the same meaning but to prevent them being retrieved via a search engine. To assist in following the narrative, Table 6.1 below shows a list of main characters who commented a few times, or figured in some of the contentious points of discussion.

Managing Overflows and Qualifying Audiences This first section covers a familiar commercial public relations issue – managing public criticism and comment – that has become more

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Table 6.1 List of characters. Name

Description

Reviewer

Blogger and self-nominated reviewer of AppAds and BlogAdNet

Peter

AppAds founder

Zainul

AppAds employee/web designer

James

BlogAdNet senior partner

Chang

BlogAdNet senior partner

Poh

Anonymous commenter – challenged by Peter

Beginner

Anonymous commenter – accused of being an AppAds sockpuppet

JustSaying

Anonymous commenter – accused of being a false front for AppAds

challenging in the context of social media and the viral spread of online content. An early example of this was an angry blog post about Dell’s service in 2005 that led to a cascade of comments and increasing visibility as the blog posts climbed up to Google’s first page of results. Eventually, Dell contacted the blogger directly and instituted some changes to their customer service and engagement policies (Jarvis 2009: 12–20). As Callon explains, these voicy consumers constitute ‘overflows’ that destabilise the qualification of the product (1998a), and thus companies seek to reintegrate these voices. Below, we see how the blog advertising network founders engaged with Reviewer’s posts. It is likely that they were using Google searches and other means (such as PPS) to find references to their companies and, upon finding them, left some comments. In so doing, they raised the profile of the post, and other bloggers mentioned the post and linked to it, perhaps leaving comments too. Dialogical dynamics thus enabled the emergence of a blog post that overflows, or destabilises, the messages already distributed by the two companies, and we see how they leverage the same affordances to manage it, including by seeking to reduce the publicness of the conversation.

Managing Overflows The opening line of the first blog post (‘Review: BlogAdNet v. AppAds’) announces ‘This post is NOT paid for.’ This pre-emptive refutation of accusations of bias was indicative of the new climate emerging with the monetisation of blogs, and AppAds was offering RM50 for a review

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of their services. Announcing that ‘The battle for the blog advertising market in Malaysia has started!’, Reviewer makes a detailed comparison of both companies’ websites, with careful and well-informed suggestions for improving their design and function – commenting on the logo, language used, information provided, branding and suggesting some SEO tips. Concluding, he realises that he has been more critical of AppAds but justifies this by saying that although BlogAdNet’s site is a bit plain its simplicity is more effective. He announces that he will soon be reviewing BlogAdNet ‘from the inside’ – i.e. as a registrant – and finishes with a call to the audience, ‘As of now, I really don’t know who will win this battle. What’s your opinion?’ This question was one that many bloggers were pondering at the time, on their blogs and in the comments areas, but this post stood out because it was technically detailed and competent, and the language used demonstrated professional skills. In all there were fifteen comments, and Reviewer made ten comments in response. Most of the commenters were the three blog advertising network founders, Peter from AppAds, and James and Chang from BlogAdNet – raising the credibility and appeal of the post for the wider blogger audience. They thanked him for the feedback, and Peter said: Answering some of your queries may reveal some of our plans for the future, so unfortunately I cannot discuss this more – but please send me more of your feedback by email, as it is very welcome. … You’re most welcome to visit the AppAds office sometime for a look at our backend if you want – but no photographs.

Three other readers left comments, one noting the attention the post is drawing, saying ‘wow…two important people from the advertising companies are paying attention to you…great huh,’ and another noted that AppAds had changed some details following the review. As in all his posts, Reviewer responded to each comment individually, explaining his motivations and answering questions. In one case, the chronological flow of comments was disrupted. Peter had responded in BM to Reviewer’s discussion of the phrasing and grammar of some of the BM slogans used by AppAds; however, Reviewer apologised for not answering earlier because it had been blocked by the spam filter, surmising that this happened because it was written in BM. Both companies offered to receive more feedback by email, implementing a recognised technique for dealing with consumer comments

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on social media that serves to take it out of the public eye. Reviewer welcomed their participation but rejected the overtures for further behind the scenes email contact, obliging them to respond and engage publicly in the comments area. In so doing, he strengthened the emergence of an interested and vocal public. Finally, addressing both companies in a comment, Reviewer says: I have done sufficient ‘surface’ reviews of your sites. Are you people ready to have an ‘internal’ reviewer? You should be, because I’m heading in. First objective, BlogAdNet – and AppAds, be prepared.

Qualifying the Quantified Audience At the beginning of the next post, ‘An Invitation From AppAds For Reviewer To Come To Their Office’, Reviewer expressed pleasure at the recognition his post had received in spite of his newcomer status, highlighting the heterarchical potential of the accessibility affordance and dialogical dynamics: It did felt [sic] great. Me being a blogger of only one month, having this impact on two (may I say) pioneers of a unique type of Asian blog advertising network.

He also mentioned how Peter had invited him to visit their office, but wondered aloud about ‘How can a blogger “visit places” without a camera? Am I not allowed to cam-whore?’ – and Peter returned to the comments to answer, ‘It’s OK to take pictures with us and some areas in the office, but not any of the hardware or screens for confidentiality. Cheers.’ This highlights the frequent ties between on- and offline contexts that develop through blog socialities – however, in the event it seems that he never went there, for his relations with Peter soon deteriorated. The next post (‘Reviewer Takes An Inside Look At BlogAdNet (Part I)’) returned to the reviewing, going through the registration process with BlogAdNet. A particular issue that emerged was the method used to gather data on the audience of the blog. The second part [of the registration process] is to tell BlogAdNet about your readers. It was already difficult to answer the questions about myself, but now you’re asking about my readers? Obviously, they know a

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good blog when they see one (like this one, right?). But seriously, I think that most bloggers don’t know clearly who their readers are. This is why I think so. Apparently, only 1% of blog readers leave comments [this is linked to a marketing blog]. Even if you get 10% of your readers to comment, and you get to know them really well, you still won’t know who the other 90% of your readers are. Right? So, answering your questions about my (our) readers is purely guesswork. How accurate is it then? So what’s the point?

The ability to quantify and qualify the audience is an essential part of making a media platform into an effective advertising platform, and this question is one that the blog advertising networks were probably receiving from their clients too. We can get an idea of how they would respond through Chang’s careful answer in the comments: We gather information in three layers, which means we can target effectively. They are the form for blogger registration, the survey with twenty questions, and the precise visitor counter (this gives much more data to us than we show to bloggers). From these three methods, we collect and organize the information through our systems in the backend to target blogs and their readers effectively. A significant amount of our bloggers know their readers. Because bloggers with as few as 20 unique visits can sign up, many of them actually know PRECISELY who reads their blog. Most likely family and friends. For the blogs with bigger readership, such as tommy.com, they keep very close contact with lots of their readers, with hundreds of email and comments every week. Those who sell advertisements directly, they use this information to inform the client. Bloggers who want to maintain influence need to keep up close relationships with their blog readers and interact. Just like we’re doing now! Hi I’m chang! Pleased to meet you! We have dealings with global brands, and are currently in negotiations with them. They express support for our approach.

Peter took this opportunity to extol the superiority of the AppAds reader self-completion poll plug-in:

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Here are some of our results so far for the poll submission, for your information – nicky … has 977 so far, and Maango has 309. Is that a large enough sample do you think? Over all the AppAds blogs, more than 20,500 questions were answered. If the average time to answer one question is 5 seconds, this means about 28 hours of opinions have been gathered so far.

AppAds required registrants to have 100 responses to these polls before the blogger could host advertisements, a move that would ostensibly increase their credibility in the eyes of advertising clients – however, Reviewer questions this system as well in a later post (‘Reviewer Takes An Inside Look At AppAds (Part II)’): I don’t think making the users get 100 polls filled out before advertisements can be allowed is a good idea because some (I saw two already) users have to ask for answered polls by unconnected individuals (i.e. someone who doesn’t normally go to their blog but answers just to ‘help out’).

He refers to a chat box on Tommy’s site where he saw bloggers asking for others to fill out their ‘reader’ form and uses a screenshot to prove it. This is compounded by his observation that there is no cookie stored to stop the blogger filling out the form herself multiple times. I notice also that a blogger can ‘self-answer’ repeatedly their own polls. I tested it by doing it 5 times. All that is needed is to refresh the page after each time the poll is answered.

Determining the quantity of the audience is reasonably simple for online media, but – reflecting Callon’s argument – qualifying it in terms of demographics and other criteria is essential for the blog advertising networks and their clients. Although – as with conventional media – assumptions about the audience can be made based on the content of the blog, and the demographics of the blogger herself, we can see that there was a sustained effort to obtain more detail. The ability to gather data from thousands of bloggers, and to insert polls into blogs that reach through to the individual audience members, is a powerful affordance of the web for advertisers. However, we also see how audiences overlap and seek to exploit affordances in ways that address their own interests – thus bloggers may seek to manipulate data by fabricating audiences, undermining the validity of the data that is essential for the commercial interests.

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Sockpuppets and Qualifying Publics Despite attempts to engage with the public(s) in the comments and to mitigate criticisms, AppAds was receiving the most criticism from Reviewer, who accused them of lacking professionalism and having an ‘inept and careless’ approach to security. Mostly, the comments from third parties tended to echo Reviewer, and in public relations terms AppAds was not able to manage the overflow effectively. In what follows, we will see how AppAds was accused of creating a fake online identity as a ‘sockpuppet’ in order to attack BlogAdNet and defend AppAds. Thus, this was apparently a deceptive approach to containing the overflows that leveraged the anonymity affordance. However, the unravelling of this stratagem demonstrated the limits of online anonymity when faced with digitally literate operators who can understand and monitor digital traces of online activity. It also demonstrated the perceived importance of comments, and their authenticity, by all the actors in this unfolding public.

Detecting Sockpuppets In the first ‘Inside Look’ at BlogAdNet, the second comment by ‘JustSaying’ was partially deleted by Reviewer: JustSaying [edited: {Reviewer} removed this part due to false criticism] This sentence is hilarious: ‘I felt like throwing one of the Nuffnang guys down the Penang bridge already’. So if you get frustrated with Advertlets, then how? Throw down the Klang river? KL Tower? (original square brackets)

The full original comment had been deleted by the time the data was recorded, but an explanation for the action was given by Reviewer: I deleted the attack on BlogAdNet in the first part of your [i.e. ‘JustSaying’] comment. … I can’t help believing that you HAVE to be from AppAds, or somehow connected with them. You provided a non-existent email … More importantly, the IP address is almost exactly the same as Peter’s last IP (124.81.X.197) & (125.81.X+1.85). I can’t stand back-stabbers who don’t have the balls to own up. I especially can’t stand those who mess with me.

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But, it you are not from AppAds, send me your email. Everyone can have the freedom to speak out. But you didn’t use your real email. Anyway, I’d still be happy to hear your explanation.

To this, JustSaying responded: OK I put my email in this comment, but please don’t reveal it to others. Just like you, I like to have some anonymity – for example, you don’t use your actual name on your blog also  So about what you mentioned about the IPs, it doesn’t say anything … it only means that Peter and I use the same ISP (like almost everyone!), or that we are both in PJ [Petaling Jaya]. [He provides some links and concludes] Based on this, all 125.81.X.X IP addresses are from TMNet [the most common Malaysian ISP]. If they were for example (125.81.197.X) & (125.81.197.X 1) it would probably just mean that we are just close to each other – within walking distance, or in the same cafe or something. No, I’m not from AppAds, all I am is a poor IT student with something to say. … Hope this ‘explanation’ is enough, just contact me if you need more.

Reviewer responds by agreeing with the right to be anonymous and recognising that the email eventually provided was genuine, but insists that not leaving a valid email (albeit pseudonymous) with the comment is equivalent to leaving a surat layang (a poison pen letter). He concludes by linking to a ‘present’ for JustSaying. This was the next blog post (‘Reviewer Blogs Video On BlogAdNet And AppAds For The First Time’), which was a video of Reviewer’s computer screen showing him navigating through the backend of his blog. Referring to accusations made elsewhere regarding possible sockpuppetry by AppAds, he explains that he is using the video to preclude any accusations of manipulating screenshots or images – that there is ‘no fake edited version or whatsoever’. The video shows him accessing the ‘Recent came from’ section of the blog server analytics, which shows the last URL a visitor was on before arriving on the blog. This helps website owners to understand more about sources of readers, referrals from other blogs, search engine references and so on. Based on the time stamp, and the specific address of the referring URL – terminating in ‘/wp-admin’ – it is clear that someone who was logged into the password protected ‘admin’

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portion of the AppAds website visited his blog 43 minutes before the second comment by JustSaying. This in itself did not prove anything, but Reviewer also showed that the visitor from AppAds had the exact same IP address as JustSaying. The most obvious reason for this is that the same computer was used for both comments and had not been logged off the internet in between the time the visitor arrived and the comment was made. Reviewer’s evidence was compelling, and the consensus amongst commenters was that AppAds, or Peter, had been ‘owned’ (i.e. bested). However, Peter defended himself by presenting further technical arguments: I’ve emailed you regarding referrer spoofing, as well as the DDOS attack on [AppAds’] server (that had access to the settings for the [AppAds] Google Analytics settings), and how they may be connected. You made a lot of effort in this, and its very easy to understand how people could leap to the wrong conclusions. When we know that referrers can be faked easily, its very possible that the attacker’s actual purpose was to get caught, and implicate [AppAds].

In a follow-up comment, he also implied that Reviewer might be colluding with BlogAdNet to implicate AppAds. Chang swiftly commented with a categorical denial, defending the ‘BlogAdNet community’ and threatening legal action for slander. Peter responded by denying having specifically accused BlogAdNet but suggested that sympathisers may be acting on their behalf and complained about ‘registered BlogAdNet members’ making offensive comments about him in various blogs. In the final comment, Reviewer responds to Peter’s email. However, reflecting his scepticism about image manipulation, Reviewer is unconvinced, and says: Your picture sent with the email is not proof of anything. It is only a part of a screenshot. It doesn’t show on what domain the graph is on. If I had just posted screenshots instead of the video, it would have been more difficult to believe what I’m trying to show, right? Also, I wasn’t able to find a google analytics graph like your one. Can you show me where it would be?

In a later blog post (‘How AppAds Explains Why They Were ‘Inept’ and ‘Careless’’), there was another contentious commenter – ‘Beginner’ – whom Reviewer also challenged, asking for an email and a blog address. When these were provided, he noted that the blog was not registered

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with AppAds, in spite of the commenter making specific claims about AppAds’ service to bloggers that would require being registered. Again, Reviewer connected this commenter to AppAds and addressed Peter: ‘Beginner’ made three comments and had two different IP addresses. Know what? Both of the addresses are linked to you. Sure, ‘ip spoofing’ blablabla. Know what else I discovered? You both have the same feedreader for accessing my blog, even the same version.

These exchanges and examples show Reviewer using two ways of determining the authenticity of the commenters accused of being sockpuppets. Asking for an email and a blog is a way of connecting the comments to a specific person that depends on an interpersonal exchange through stable channels of communication. The other method he used was tracking and understanding the automated digital traces, to which Peter responded with more technical arguments, relating to the possibility of overcoming or faking these traces – here their arguments revolved around assumptions of digital skills on the part of unidentified human actors. Reviewer’s use of the video also reflects this context, whereby he uses the video to pre-empt any accusation of self-interested manipulation of still images that a skilled operator could carry out.

Imagined Community and Legitimising Public Voices Following on from the video post, where Peter had said he would send Reviewer an email to prove his case, the next post (‘An Open Message to Peter’) was Reviewer’s heartfelt rejection of any bias on his part with detailed reasons for rejecting Peter’s evidence. He agrees that he is motivated to some extent by the possibility of having a larger audience but asserts his ethical stance: I can also say that I DO want increased traffic on my blog. Who doesn’t? I did some things that were successful. But some that were not. I assure all my readers and you that I used a legal and ETHICAL technique. I intend to do a tutorial about it some day when my blog readers grow bigger and more stable. I can’t do a tutorial [on] something that I don’t know well, can I? If you’re still thinking about whose side I’m on, the answer has always been — neither. I said this on the video, I don’t care about your battles. But it seems like I came a little too close, and got a few blows also.

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Last thing. You don’t have to knock me so hard. This blog somehow did attract a bigger crowd suddenly, but it would probably go away the same way. And anyway, it’s not as if my opinions have any ‘weight’. Now please excuse me, I have to write the Part Two review.

There are some short supportive comments, but one commenter, ‘Poh’, pens a long criticism of Peter that, amongst other points, states that AppAds is mean-spirited, overly defensive, that it has an ‘inferiority complex’, agrees with Reviewer that they are ‘manipulative’, and calls Peter a ‘pretentious snob’. Peter then comments and asks why Aw’s comment was not deleted: Wouldn’t it be best for you to censor users who are anonymous, who are making baseless personal attacks and spurious claims? For example, the only commenter in this thread who did not leave a URL? Are you going to take the same action as you did before? Or only when it fits your purposes?

Poh responds, objecting strongly and making references to common standards and conventions amongst bloggers: @ Peter: Censor? Anonymous? Are you joking? … Nearly all users are ‘anonymous’ online. And you can’t ‘censor’ any body for anything apart from vulgarity or for breaches of TOS [Terms of Service]. … I made some opinions about your character, substantiated … by what you have done so far. … blogs never make any claims to be 100% unbiased. The point of a blog is that it *is* biased from the blogger’s opinions, which is why it’s not a ‘news site’ and is a more interesting read.

Reviewer answers by posting a link to the next blog post in the series. This redirection to a follow-on post is possibly one of the techniques Reviewer mentioned regarding how to increase traffic to his blog. It also shows the dialogical process whereby comments can generate movement and suggest directions for the blog/blogger to take. In the followup post (‘Peter, Here Are My Reasons For Allowing Poh’s Comment’), Reviewer explains that he was at first worried that Poh may be another sockpuppet. He then gives seven reasons for allowing the comment, including verifying the email given and checking the IP address – as he had done with the previous contentious comments. His sixth point refers to a broader principle espoused amongst most bloggers, the principle of independence:

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Biased or not, as this blog’s owner, I can do whatever I want here. I paid for the hosting and the domain for christ’s sake! I don’t have to answer to anyone unless I feel like it. If you like reading my blog, then you are very welcome to come again. If you don’t, then you can let yourself out.

Peter does not respond to this post, but another well-known blogger interjects in the comments, saying that she felt Poh was genuine: ‘Poh’s left enough comments, and for long enough, on many blogs for me to consider that it’s warranted. Unless by coincidence someone else using the same “nick”.’ Reviewer responded ‘Yeah, I also bumped into some Poh’s comments in some other blogs.’ In this we see the meaning and value of a stable pseudonym – Poh’s voice as a member of the relevant public is not only legitimised through the technical traces but also through the recognition of his/her consistent presence and participation in the imagined community of bloggers. In that sense, the voice is legitimised entirely within the context of a networked public. The dynamic seen in the early ‘blogwar’ is again seen here, whereby the desire for anonymity is respected by most bloggers, but not the use of multiple pseudonyms. In the context of an interested public this authenticity becomes more important, and the legitimacy of a public may be undermined if individual voices are not deemed to be credible.

Conclusions This above thick description shows how – despite his newcomer status and initial low readership – a blogger was able to become a temporary locus of a public centred on the new blog advertising networks’ services, by engaging prominent figures and expanding his audience. Through blogging and/or commenting, interactive affordances allow members of the audience to become voicy consumers – vocal members of a ‘public’ – in an opportunistic or temporary manner, or to become a more persistent presence. In the event, Reviewer’s place in the limelight was to fade, as he suggested may happen, but nonetheless some comments in later months demonstrated how the blog posts’ permanency mean their dynamic agency is subject to contingent reactivation. Over a few months, four different pseudonyms were used in his blog, and other blogs, to promote AppAds and/or attack BlogAdNet. These all had the same or similar IP addresses to those used by Peter when he left comments – and the pseudonymous commenters were noted to be active at the same time as Peter. This, and other events such as delayed payments

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to bloggers, led to a loss of credibility for AppAds and Peter’s personal integrity being questioned. Eventually, BlogAdNet became the more successful company. The blogging and comment socialities are the underlying formative mechanisms of the publics, and the relevance of the comments space was seen through the way in which it is used by the companies, readers and bloggers to interact and debate. However, not all voices are equal: the blogger retains primacy following the principle of independence; the social capital of other salient figures such as Peter, James and Chang adds weight to their voices; and a consistent presence embodied in a recognised pseudonym supplants new voices of dubious provenance. The digital literacy of the participants, in particular Reviewer’s technical knowledge of internet communication protocols and affordances, was important in framing the debate and determining the legitimacy of particular voices. While the internet enables members of the silent audience to easily transition to being a member of a vocal public, it also enables the fabrication of counterfeit voices. Interpreting the use of the affordances also involves assumptions about the digital literacy of the actor. When Reviewer uses digital traces to expose JustSaying as AppAds’ sockpuppet, Peter responds by imputing another level of technical knowhow to the actor that would change him/her from being a person supporting AppAds, to a person opposing AppAds who is maliciously spoofing the AppAds IP address in order to manipulate public interpretations. Depending on the level of agency in terms of digital skills the actor is assumed to have, which determines how she/ he can use the affordances, the interpretations change. In ‘the space constructed through networked technologies’ (boyd 2014: 8), the affordances of the digital infrastructure partially frame the interpretation and (de)legitimation of voices in the contingent public(s), alongside projected assumptions of actors’ digital skills and diachronic interpretations of textual performance based on interpersonal and sociocultural factors that span on- and offline contexts and are framed by an understanding of the conventions of the genre. These influence how the persona is framed in terms of provenance and motivations, becoming a combination of the digital and human traces.

Notes  1. Blog post, Tan, 12 March 2007: p00822.  2. Blog post, BlogAdNet, 22 April 2007: p00826.  3. Blog post, Reviewer, 31 March 2007: p00823.

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 4. There were eight comments (not included in the above analysis) that were posted a few months after these events, demonstrating how the permanency of blog posts can reactivate their relevance, or be attributed different relevance, over time.

CHAPTER 7

Assembling a Blog Market

Markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work. … Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets. … So, if markets are conversations (they are) and there’s no market for messages (there isn’t), what’s marketing-as-usual to do? Own the conversations? Keep the conversations on message? Turn up the volume until it drowns out the market? Compete with the new conversations? –– Searles and Weinberger, ‘Markets Are Conversations’. Responding to the explosion of online content and interaction that was transforming the media landscape, and consequently marketing and advertising, Searles and Weinberger announced a new paradigm in their influential work The Cluetrain Manifesto. Their position that ‘markets are conversations’ and a ‘profound act of humanity’ echo anthropological and cultural theorists’ debates regarding the imbrication of culture and economy. However, they also understate the power relations that were always built into marketplaces and market interactions, as well as the constructed nature of markets. In the optimistic voice of the turning century, they proclaimed that the ‘Word of Web offers people the pure sound of the human voice, not the elevated, empty speech of the corporate hierarchy’, and they entreated marketers to interact directly in dialogue with their customers, voicing ‘the public expression of [the corporation’s] authentic identity’. For those who are skilled in ‘the art of impersonating sincerity and warmth’ they argued, ‘[t]he market will

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find out who and what you are’ – because the ‘Web is the best medium ever created for sales’ (Searles and Weinberger 1999). The latter argument seems to rest on an assumption that the web will enable the perfect rational market knowledge of classical economic theory, recast in this instance as the netopian collective agency of the ‘group mind’. These arguments resemble those of Ghosh (1998), Raymond (1998) and Barbrook (1998), who also cast the internet as a space for a radically new form of economic exchange and drew upon anthropological conceptions of the gift economy (Malinowski 1920; Mauss 1990) to explain the non-monetised forms of exchange – such as the collective production of open source software – occurring online. Altogether, these arguments stem from a technodeterminist view of the internet and a gift/commodity dichotomisation. The idea of markets as conversations was influential and is omnipresent in online marketing discourse. The above epigraph also speaks directly to the subject of this book, the monetisation of blogs and in particular ‘advertorials’ (paid blog posts). In Malaysia, BlogAdNet’s answer to Searles and Weinberger’s question ten years later was to make a market out of the messages, and to ‘Own the conversations’. As we shall see, advertorials are paid for and vetted by clients, rolled out online in carefully calibrated marketing campaigns that extend across different digital and analogue media, accompanied by different ways to initiate participation with bloggers and their readers both on- and offline. Although Searles and Weinberger may have missed the mark, their emphasis on authenticity helps to understand the centrality of the affective labour that builds the extended parasocial relations, creating value for advertisers (Rettberg 2014: 136–39). Early online activity was notable for the lack of market-based activity, but gift economies cannot be defined by the absence of money alone. Appadurai’s discussion of the social constitution of commodities (1986) and studies of gift economies (e.g. Mauss 1990; Parry 1986) focus on the changing status of objects as they circulate, where their exchange involves reciprocal obligations while recreating or generating lasting social ties. It is best to see the internet as a hybrid terrain ‘always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy’ (Terranova 2000: 51), and therefore we need to examine how blogs and the social relations they enable shift and mutate contingently in dynamic interactions within and between assemblages. Similarly, Wenninger (2007) points to an important tension wherein the free content and software that is the basis of so much of the rhizomatic potential of the internet – the open, smooth space – is underwritten by

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the sale of advertisements, which are a potent part of the recoding and territorialising dynamics of the exchange market. Searles and Weinberger’s overreaching emphasis on the novelty and separation of the virtual sphere from offline socio-economic systems also parallels the predictions of a rootless economy of signs that have been challenged by Du Gay and Pryke (2002b) and others, and Terranova has convincingly argued that the internet is not a break with capital but is rather ‘a mutation, of a widespread cultural and economic logic’ (2000: 54). Slater makes a similar argument, challenging theories of ‘dematerialisation’ that do not take into account the ‘social processes and conditions through which things are stabilised as social materialities, or destabilised, reconfigured, problematised’ (2002c: 96). This chapter will follow their lead in asserting that the fundamental economic forces at play online are no different from those offline, and there is no need to posit new economic theories to explain the reconfiguring of the blogging assemblage by market-oriented actors. Instead, it will draw upon actor-network theory that centres around the ‘economy of qualities’ (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002; Du Gay and Pryke 2002b; Slater and Tonkiss 2001). This argument has three main components: markets are understood as ‘social artefacts’ (Slater and Tonkiss 2001: 94) constituted through economic discourse, calculative agencies are central to markets, and they create overflows, or externalities. These approaches adopt an empirical focus by tracing practices through networks that form on flat planes and span the presumed oppositional spheres of the economic and non-economic, avoiding the semiotic overreach of some cultural analyses of the economy (Du Gay and Pryke 2002a: 7). Advertising via blogs emerges as a particularly good site to critically engage with the convergence of culture, economics and new media affordances – especially with regard to the importance of quantifiable qualification and of the affective labour of personal bloggers.

Alienable Relations An anthropological analysis of blog monetisation takes a critical approach to the economic theories that tend to naturalise the ‘market’ and divorce it from its cultural context – regarding the latter as aberrations of an idealised true market that is used to formulate theories and advise policy (e.g. Hewitt de Alcántara 1993). The causal relations of a market assemblage are entangled and mutually supportive and do not exclude cultural and ethical concerns, but these are defined alongside

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the opportunity of minimising reciprocal relations through market exchange per se, which itself has an ethical underpinning based mostly on Adam Smith’s utilitarian model (Dilley 1992; Silver 1990). Homo economicus – the rational, self-interested and calculating agent at the centre of economic theory – is not an inherent universal but made contingently possible by various sociotechnologies. Slater cautions against taking for granted that culture has necessarily taken an increased central role in contemporary economic processes (2002a: 76). However, the moral and ideological basis of the market and the co-constitution of economy and culture need to be acknowledged (D. Miller 2002), enabling social-institutional frames that institute and naturalise the assumptions underpinning consumerism and economically oriented governance. Arguments that emphasise the sociocultural foundations of economic systems were central to the ‘cultural turn’ that disaggregates markets, considering them not only as embedded, or localised but also as instituted by identifiable local or global processes (Slater and Tonkiss 2001: 201–2). When pushed to its limits the cultural turn resulted in epochalist claims of the dematerialisation of economies dominated by signs, but these need to be tempered by an understanding of culture and economy as distinct but mutually dependent realms (Du Gay and Pryke 2002a: 6–12). This means that markets do not necessarily impose a certain type of social order, but they are important parts of the social order. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism decodes and reassembles flows of desire, recoding them as components of the market assemblage. They tend to ascribe to economic forces an objectivity that separates them from and assigns them greater power than other ‘codes’ – i.e. forms of inscription that regularise and stabilise flows (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 271). However, others have tempered this by noting how breakthroughs and unexpected developments can occur (Jensen and Rödje 2009b: 12); the historical development of local and regional markets as specific assemblages (DeLanda 2006: 17–18); and the necessity to balance global forms such as the market by examining processes whereby the complex of local and specific components are brought ‘into new alignments’ (Collier and Ong 2005: 16). Once markets are understood to be particular and contingent assemblages, it is difficult to argue for a universally prevalent, consistent and dominant inexorable market logic, and instead culture and economy are more advantageously considered as components interacting on a ‘flat’ plane, to which we can add blogs, bloggers, advertisers and other actors. Callon addresses the role of economic theory and ‘calculative agencies’ in constructing markets (Callon 1998b), and where Deleuze and Guattari speak of coding and decoding, Callon speaks

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of ‘translation’ between different components that are disentangled and re-entangled through the application of ‘technologies, including economics’ (quoted in Barry and Slater 2002: 286). Thus, Callon et al. provide a careful argument regarding the construction of markets under the influence of experts (such as economists) who influence government policy (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002), and Law (2002) demonstrates this process in a grant-funded laboratory that was required to recalculate its costs and outputs in market-oriented terms, and new forms of ‘calculative agencies’ – embodied in spreadsheets and rationalised quantification – reassembled organisational dynamics. Nonetheless, there is relative autonomy between different cultural fields (including the economic field), and it is important to note that a fundamental component of market discourse is that which provides the opportunity for a relative disengagement from reciprocal and cultural obligations, underpinned by the moral limitation of economic interaction, in the last instance, to the contractual exchange of money – differentiating it from the jajmani system, for example, wherein caste obligations are formally intertwined with economic reciprocation (D. Miller 2002: 222). Thus, Callon describes a disentangling ‘marketization’ process that ‘implies investment and precise actions to cut certain ties and to internalize others’ (1998b: 19); similarly, Slater points to ‘a social technology of framing and individuating’ (2002b: 238), enabling ‘alienable transactions’ that entail ‘limits on the kind of social relationship formed between transactors’ (2002b: 235). Miller and Slater disagree on the extent to which disentanglement is relevant. For example, the sale and purchase of a Christmas present is embedded in a historically contingent cluster of affective and cultural connotations – Miller’s ‘totalizing moment of purchase’ (2002: 227). Slater prefers to focus on the particular context of market-based relations and the potential for alienable market transactions, based on ‘specific forms of property rights’ (Slater 2002b: 240), which does not mean that objects lose their ‘meaning or cultural connection’ but only that the ownership can be transferred with no further obligations (barring contractual guarantees, etc.). These actions contribute to the perpetuation of an assemblage, the ‘market economy’, that requires that relations be mediated through the exchange of money for commodities or services, and that at least the illusion of calculated choice be maintained. These practices are empirically observable, and when they are habitually integrated into interpersonal and social interaction they become socialities that are constitutive of social institutions. Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa’s ‘economy of qualities’ identifies ‘two structuring mechanisms [of market formations]: the singularization

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of goods and the attachment of goods to (and detachment from) those who consume them’ (2002: 202). Singularisation is achieved by the qualification and temporary stabilisation of the object or service as a ‘good’, thus enabling it to become attached – suitable for consumption and/ or exchange – to a particular network. As the goods move through a series of networks, translation is needed to detach, requalify and reattach to the respective networks. Thus, for example, apples are sold based on certain qualifiable criteria to a juice-processing factory, which then produces another good – tested and certified as ‘fresh apple juice’ – which is sold to supermarkets. The qualification may be done by specialised metrological instruments (e.g. to test the level of acid in apple juice), or other mediators – such as company spokespersons, advertisements or consumers, who are all involved in the ‘strategic management of product qualification’ (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002: 201). In the last stage, the sale to the retail consumer, the process of qualification is particularly bound up with advertising and the operations of the personal networks of the consumers such as their family or other consociates that are central to what may be the epitome of the ‘cultural economy’ and the advertising industry – the brand.

Assembling Markets Through their work as key ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Slater 2002a: 60) and purveyors of semiotic value, the advertising industry’s increased economic significance has been seen as evidence of the advent of a sign-based economy (Du Gay and Pryke 2002a: 7–8). Countering this, McFall’s historical account of advertising demonstrates that – rather than degrading from an informational to a semiotic function – advertising was always dependent on symbolism and the manipulation of affect (2002). Nonetheless, understanding advertising as a ‘constituent practice’ of contemporary socio-economic systems that consists ‘inescapably of both cultural and economic elements’ (McFall 2002: 153) is an important balance against the conventional separation of the cultural from the economic that characterises formal economics, where advertising is usually conceptualised as a ‘cultural intervention in the domain of the economic’ (Slater 2002a: 61). Advertising practices attempt ‘to destabilize markets and then to re-institutionalize them around new, strategically calculated product definitions’ (Slater 2002a: 68–69), thus creating markets by defining the meaningfulness of goods in terms of relations of consumption and competition (Slater 2002a: 73). Product definitions underlie the construction of markets and are rooted in a

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combination of semiotic, material and social ‘points of intervention’ (Slater 2002a: 73) but cannot be explained by any single one of these. Indeed, Miller argues that ‘economic considerations’ are mostly avoided in business practices, which focus instead on entangling the commodity with the consumer, capturing their attention at the crucial ‘totalizing moment of purchase’ (2002: 227) where all of the personal and cultural values and attitudes of the consumer coalesce in their purchasing decision. Thus, Foster notes that a primary concern of business strategists is to avoid ‘the “commoditization” of their products and services’ where consumers’ sole concern with price and utility could lead them to regard products ‘as generic and interchangeable’ (2007: 716). The price point and utilitarian considerations are inherent in consumer decisions, but once these are resolved, there is an additional set of motivations that marketers seek to manipulate, primarily through distinguishing their products from others through branding exercises intended to induce ‘loyalty beyond reason’ (Roberts 2004). Brands have emerged as a defining characteristic of cultural economics. They are initiated by advertisers’ semiotic strategies, but their real value is created through the qualification afforded by the ‘consumption work’ of consumers (Foster 2005: 11) – the ‘everyday practices in which consumers use branded goods to create social relations and shared meanings and affect’ (Foster 2007: 717). As Roberts, advertising agency CEO, explained in his call for a new, more emotionally oriented approach to branding, ‘lovemarks [i.e. a new form of brands] are created and owned through the people who love them’ (2004: 71). Therefore, the surplus value of the brand that advertisers bring to markets and products are underwritten by the qualifications that emerge through everyday interpersonal and social relations of consumers.

Affective Labour When particular practices are considered to have economic value, they can become recast as labour. This may happen in a theoretical or ideological sense, such as when unpaid housework is reframed as ‘reproductive labour’ in feminist analysis (e.g. Slater and Tonkiss 2001: 112–16). In other circumstances the transformation of the practice may occur in a very practical sense, such as when bloggers were offered money for something they previously did for free. A noted feature of the internet is the ability for commercial interests to extract and profit from ‘free labour’ in various forms. This reflects the increased importance of ‘immaterial labour’ in cultural economies that produces ‘intangible’ products, ‘a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion

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– even a sense of connectedness or community’ (Hardt 1999: 96). There is a continuity with pre-internet appropriation of subcultural forms, and Terranova draws a parallel with the AOL chat room online subcultures, where the ‘knowledgeable consumption of culture’ can be both a pleasurable and voluntary activity, as well as a source of exploitable value (2000: 49, 37). The concepts of ‘prosumer’ (Toffler 1981), ‘produser’ (Bruns 2008: 9) and ‘pro-am’ (professional-amateur) also highlight the convergence between market and non-market activities and the ‘continuum of possibilities’ that exist between these two poles (Bruns 2010: 9). These hybrid socialities became more apparent with the advent of online user-generated content. For online advertising, the quantifiable clicks and views are one aspect of this, but the unprecedented visibility and textual materiality of the consumption work offer new opportunities to construct them as products amenable to market-based transactions. While the relations themselves remain ephemeral and subjective, we shall see how BlogAdNet was able to restructure bloggers’ creative activities as a product, and hence create a market. Central to this endeavour were the extended parasocial relations that enhance the impact of their consumption work, and it can be more precisely identified as ‘affective labour [that] is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities’ (Hardt 1999: 89) and is also central to branding (Brodmerkel and Carah 2013; Carah 2014).

Overflows and Voicy Consumers Thus, a successful advertising campaign can destabilise and reassemble a network of consumers around product definitions or social meanings embedded in a brand. However, the successful constitution of a market does not result in a static assemblage – an inevitable result of the reassembling of relations is that there are loose ends and new dynamics generated, and that the framing of the market is ‘a fragile, artificial result’ that is subject to destabilisation in the form of externalities, or ‘overflows’ (Callon 1998a: 252). One such overflow, intrinsic to the outsourcing of brand value creation to autonomous agents who engage in consumption and affective labour, are ‘voicy consumers’, who critically involve themselves in discussions regarding goods and services and contribute to the qualifying mechanism of the economy of qualities (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002). While advertisers may be able to influence, and at times pay for, positive ‘voices’, this component remains unstable and subject to whimsical trends, and in order to become economically significant overflows need to be evaluated and measured

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(Callon 1998a: 259) – this can be in monetary, social or psychological terms. When bloggers post about brands, and commenters voice their opinions, the internet architecture affords companies the ability to observe, measure and analyse these overflows – in contrast to unobservable offline conversations and interactions. Thus, as the bloggers were destabilising the advertising market, BlogAdNet was able to qualify and render these overflows monetisable, reframing the overflows as economic opportunities.

Blog Advertising Echoing Searles and Weinberger, and the cultural theorists above, in 2007 a prominent public relations and marketing figure expressed a changing conception of the brand: brand equity is shifting away from brand essence and brand recall. … In the new marketing reality, the brand is based on the dialogue you have with your customers and prospects – the stronger the dialogue, the stronger the brand. (Weber 2007: 32)

As the public relations industry became increasingly interested in blogs, Cook argued that ‘Blogging can be an answer, even perhaps the answer to the crises facing PR’ (2006: 53; original emphasis) by enabling participation in fluid communities of interest (see also Raghavan 2006; Smudde 2005). In 2005 an early response promoted blogs both as repositories of unmediated customer experiences and opinions and also as a means for a company to communicate directly with their market (Wright 2005). For the latter situation, companies were advised to create their own blogs to engage with their target market online – rather than engage in risky engagements with external bloggers – and Microsoft’s blog was touted as a successful example (Kelleher 2009). In all these cases, the importance of personalising the blog and the relationship with the audience was central. During the fieldwork period, there was an evident increase in personal blogs’ commercial activity. Although early research found high numbers of bloggers blogging about companies or products (Viegas 2005), only small minorities engaged in monetisable activities (Brake 2009; Kullin 2006; Pedersen and Macafee 2007). By 2008, Technorati’s ‘State of the Blogosphere’ survey (Sifry 2008) found that a third of bloggers had been ‘approached [by companies] to be brand advocates’; a majority had advertising on their blogs, with 80 per cent

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posting ‘brand or product reviews’, of which 37 per cent did so ‘frequently’. For Asians, it reported a maximum annual estimated blog revenue (in USD) of $250,000 and a mean of $7440. However, a much lower median of $120 shows the disparities in income, with most earning relatively insignificant amounts. The 2009 myBlogS survey showed similar results: 51 per cent of bloggers made some money from their blog, but 66.7 per cent made less than RM100 per month compared to 8.7 per cent making more than RM1,000 per month. Marketers were interested in blogs because of their ability to influence consumers and their access to a young and affluent population with a higher disposable income, often understood to be less accessible via the traditional media (e.g. Vijaindren 2009). Replicating the conventional commercial media pattern of audience commodification (Ang 1991), BlogAdNet was able to position itself as an effective point of passage to this market segment, promoting the ‘blogger community’ as a source of value for those commercial interests as well as to bloggers. BlogAdNet had to persuade potential clients that blogs would help to translate their goods into meaningful repositories of cultural and personal value for their targeted demographic. In effect, the blogs would enable particular relations to be generated with and through their brands and distinguish them from other commodities, while these relations were qualifiable through the use of automated analytics. Moeran describes advertising as a ‘tripartite business’ where clients, agencies and media try ‘to sell the others the value of its products, services, or messages’ (Moeran 1996: 21). However, BlogAdNet were in an unusual position of being neither an advertising agency nor the media. For advertisers they carry out different situational roles, sometimes dealing directly with clients, their agencies and also organising events. With regard to bloggers (the media in Moeran’s triangle), they play a similar role to media agencies, booking and filling advertising space for a commission.1 The Malaysian co-founders, who were also bloggers, had recently graduated with economics training from leading British universities and were thus proficient in relevant cultural, subcultural and economic discourses. They became mediators – agents positioned between ‘intersecting networks’ of bloggers, advertising agencies and clients – able to ‘transfer understandings across social locations’ (Slater 2002b: 244). By doing so, they also created this market to a large extent, setting the basis of its cultural and metrological genesis by combining statistical and discursive qualifications. Contradicting Searles and Weinberger’s claim that there was no ‘market for a message’ (above), as we shall see, BlogAdNet was able to create a market from personal bloggers who were willing to be paid to create messages, and the clients used their

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financial clout to find different ways to extend their influence from old to new media. Nonetheless, the centrality of affective labour does underline Searles and Weinberger’s point, and tension developed between perceptions of blog authenticity and the commercial content. For the respondents who had started blogging before blog monetisation was an option, it was only after a gradual process of increasing audience and public profile (especially through appearances in the mainstream media) that their hobby became a potential source of income. However, to maintain an audience bloggers need to persuade the readers of their sincerity, something that is not alienable but necessarily an expression of an intangible reciprocal trust. This is where the monetising of the personal blog can become controversial, and various techniques such as disclosure, or an explicit identification with the brand or goods being promoted, were deployed to mitigate the impression of inauthenticity. Thus, as the outcomes of personal blogging become requalified as goods in an advertising market, the productive activity mutates, resonating with the dynamic machinic and expressive components of the assemblage.

Web Analytics: Centres of Calculation and Calculative Agencies You’ve got to do more with blogs than just dynamic ads, got to have fully fledged interactive campaigns, contests, advertorials. Then you have to figure out a way to measure this hype to justify the clients’ ROI. There is a minimum requirement for traffic, right? Because [of] … two reasons. One is because, for advertorials to be effective, and to be trackable, right, you need a certain critical mass. And the critical mass the bare minimum starts at 500 uniques a day; because if you go without that … the advertiser has completely no way of measuring how effective the advertorial is. Because chances are the blog may not get many comments, that blog will not have any click-throughs to their site, you know. So, that’s why that critical mass is necessary. … Also, because of how you price an advertorial. … we thought advertisers will pay at least five hundred bucks and they expect, for that five hundred bucks, you know, a certain amount of track. — James; original emphasis A web analytics dashboard is available to BlogAdNet registrants, who are obliged to embed the relevant code on their blog to allow BlogAdNet

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to remotely track visitor activity. Bloggers can see how many ‘unique visitors’ they have had (cookies count each visitor only once every 24 hours); details about how long the reader stayed on their blog and the entry and exit page; the ‘geolocation’ indicates what country they are based in; the keywords used in a search engine that brought up a link to their blog; and if a link on another site was used to reach the blog, what the referring webpage was. The ‘community’ analytic highlighted visitors who were also registered with BlogAdNet. Detailing the development of audience analysis and web analytics on the internet, Bermejo notes that because of its wide reach and ability to target specified demographics, the internet is potentially ‘an ideal vehicle for advertising messages’ (2007: 93). There are two main payment models. First is the payment for banner advertisements calculated through ‘impressions’ (i.e. when the image is displayed to a unique visitor), this replicates old media models such as the number of newspapers printed, but it is more accurate online. The second is native to the internet, the ‘click through rate’ (CTR) is a calculable expression of a relational tie – for example, where a blogger’s reader has connected directly to the company – and is paid more because clicks are ostensibly a sign of genuine interest. Advertisers may also use the ‘Pay per Action’ model that pays based on particular actions by web users, such as a purchase or entering a competition. These statistics are ostensibly objective and transparent, but Bermejo does point to the fact that web analytics are always in fact counting exchanges of information between web browsers and servers rather than persons – thus these measures can be counterfeited. BlogAdNet carefully polices for instances of ‘click fraud’ – i.e. clicks that do not represent a genuine interest (Hopkins 2014a). In the last instance, the demographic characteristics of the readers can only be surmised by other means. This is also a central matter of concern for Google and SNSs, whose market value is mostly based on their ability to link online presence with offline demographics. As discussed in the previous chapter, BlogAdNet asked for bloggers’ help in collecting information about their readers. The blogger’s persona and topics would also serve as indexes of the audience, and the blogger is relied on to keep that audience interested and influenceable. Often, a marketing campaign will stimulate readers to ‘click through’ to a competition or other activity that requires registration, through which the client is able to harvest more detailed personal and demographic information. As James explains above, these analytics are an essential part of their company’s business model. BlogAdNet measures audience reach through the unique visitors count, and the geolocation is essential for advertisers whose marketing budgets are justified and measured

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in terms of nationally bounded sales measures. Thus, audience reach and location are the most important measure alongside the number of clicks on the advertisements themselves. Through their large network, BlogAdNet gets a unique strategic overview that is used to apportion advertisement opportunities to bloggers and to construct reports for clients and agencies. The web analytics are a ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour 1987: 215–17), generating ‘calculative agencies’ (Callon 1998b: 3) able to assemble particular practices and become a constitutive centre of the Malaysian blog advertising market. The different calculations that are used by BlogAdNet can be roughly mapped along a continuum from more objective – visitor count, geolocation, clicks, number of comments – to less objective measures, such as the demographics of readership, content of the comments or the blog genre. By actively interpreting and leveraging these qualifications, BlogAdNet and bloggers were able to generate commercial value. In addition, making the analytics available by default to bloggers naturalises them, and they become a disciplinary sociotechnology that enacts a particular definition of the value of their blog. This provides a means for bloggers to reflect on their online performance as they interpret web analytics in order to increase their quantified audience.

Bloggers Counting Hits The myBlogS survey showed that more than three-quarters of the Monetisers had statistics counters on their blogs compared to half of the Non-Monetisers, suggesting that seeking to monetise a blog is usually accompanied by a greater awareness of the quantifiable audience of a blog. Bloggers were reliably able to give a fairly accurate summary of their hit count and often noted how, especially in the beginning stages of a blog, it was not uncommon to compulsively check their visitor statistics. Tommy explained that as his audience stabilised, his attitude changed: ‘It used to be very important to me, but I guess now you know it doesn’t really matter that much. I’ve always been the top of the list, since about 2–3 years ago until about 6 months ago [when Dr Mahathir, the then ex-Prime Minister, took over that position].’ As Table 7.1 and Table 7.2 show, Monetisers are also more likely to use strategies to increase readership. For example, Chee Keong explained how he might try out techniques to attract more hits: ‘Sometimes … I have to admit, I feel influenced to blog about certain things … if I know that this will get me hits I will blog about this.’ Giving an example of a recent blogpost about bloggers getting name cards (incidentally, exemplifying their increasing professionalisation), he said ‘I knew that it was going to get me

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Table 7.1 Comparing Monetisers’ and Non-Monetisers’ habits in checking analytics and trying to increase audience. I regularly check my visitor statistics and try to improve the number of visitors  

Strongly Somewhat Somewhat Strongly disagree disagree Neutral agree agree

Monetisers (n=183)

6.6%

8.7%

26.2%

36.6%

21.9%

Non-Monetisers (n=173)

30.6%

24.3%

26.6%

14.5%

4.0%

Table 7.2 Comparing Monetisers’ and Non-Monetisers’ habits in strategising the use of keywords and search engines. I regularly check the keywords readers use to find my blog, and use more of those keywords to get more readers  

Strongly Somewhat Somewhat Strongly disagree disagree Neutral agree agree

Monetisers (n=183)

16.4%

24.6%

31.7%

16.4%

10.9%

Non-Monetisers (n=173)

41.0%

20.8%

30.6%

6.4%

1.2%

a lot of comments and a lot of visits so that’s why I did it.’ His strategy was successful, and he got ‘about 500 more uniques [than usual]’. Alvin explained how a careful daily tracking of the analytics regarding provenance, referral and quantity became an integral part of his blogging practices and influenced his decisions regarding content and posting comments on other blogs. He said: ‘I can say I get at least 10 to 20 hits a day, based on leaving comments. Because you can see where the incoming links are coming from,’ however, ‘I try not to go to [Tommy’s] blog and comment on every post, because I don’t want it to look like I’m doing it.’ He had noted that ‘about 50 to 60 per cent [of his hits] are Google searches’ because blogging about issues in the news would give a boost to his incoming readers, but ‘if I talk about issues three or four days in a row, my hits go down.’ Similarly, Nicky was also able to provide close detail: ‘A day I get about a thousand eight to two thousand two uniques. … my hits are highest on a Monday. … Most of my readers are from Malaysia, and I’ve got some from Singapore and Australia fall in second … I think it’s about 70 to 80 per cent [from Malaysia].’ Monetisers were also much more likely to pay attention to

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the connection between the frequency of the posts and the number of readers – 58.5 per cent agreed that they posted often to motivate readers, compared to 26.6 per cent of the Non-Monetisers. Overall, we can see how the calculative agencies not only allow for the creation of an advertising market for BlogAdNet but also allow bloggers to experiment with acquiring and maintaining an audience by measuring the direct impact of using different content or adopting different communicative strategies. In this way, they normalise the perception of the audience as a quantity, subject to measurable influences. We can recall how, in earlier days, accusations of being a ‘hitslut’ were common; under the new market conditions, this activity could now be reinterpreted through market-based discourse – either positively as entrepreneurial media content production, or negatively as being money-grabbing.

Search Engines As the most important search engine, Google constitutes an important centre of calculation for bloggers. In addition to the similarity of keywords to the search terms, the national, social, cultural and affective relevance of a webpage is quantified based on opaque algorithms (Brin and Page 1998; Google 2016; Vaidhyanathan 2011: 55–67). Also influencing the result is the ‘Page Rank’, a formal measure of the historical relevance of a webpage based on its access history and relative centrality in a network of webpages. This network centred on the blog is a key index of the blogger’s popularity, built through producing attractive content, nurturing extended parasocial relations and stabilising affective and emotional ties with her readers. The opacity of Google’s algorithms has spawned a minor industry in search engine optimisation (SEO), and bloggers have become knowledgeable in how to improve their search ranking. I came across an example of a client’s approach to search engines at a ‘Pole dancing workshop’ organised for bloggers to promote a brand of mint sweets. The Brand Manager explained to me that they wanted to use bloggers to counter their competition’s online presence, and ‘to have a presence in the online community.’ As evidence of the success of their campaign, she noted that if you googled the brand name and the slogan of the campaign, many blogs appeared straight away in the results.2 In effect, by choosing popular blogs, and paying them to include specific key words and brand phrases, the client was manipulating the search engine results by leveraging the bloggers’ previous SEO efforts and affective labour.

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Qualifying Affective Labour hey look, this is a different kind of online advertising, it’s not … you don’t just put a banner … and I don’t just give you a spreadsheet at the end of the day which goes through the clicks, and the clickthrough ratio and all that. You know. You get to see how people react, what people say to them. … now you’re actually seeing people, people who use your brand. The bloggers, right, actually create content of their own, personalise your own brand. — James; emphasis added Juxtaposing his earlier emphasis on the need for statistics, James’ above explanation that he gives to clients demonstrates the centrality of bloggers’ affective labour that produces the brands’ value through developing interpersonal and social relations through and around them. As a subjective experience, qualifying affective labour is more difficult than the quantification of the audience behaviour. While a consistent audience and the degree of visible positive interaction may be indexical of the value of a blogger’s affective labour, the blogger’s degree of influence over their readers’ consumption choices is unknown. A hypothetical measure of this would be metrics that compute extended parasocial relations, recast through monetisation as affective labour – but in the absence of this other means are adopted. The number of comments is an important index of the blogger’s ability to connect with the audience. James explained that although comments were anecdotal and without statistical significance, selected comments would be passed on to clients when they were: really good or really bad, you know, and if it’s objective. If it’s something senseless like ‘Oh I don’t like this brand because, I just don’t like it’ then we just leave it. But if it’s something worthy, for example … ‘my broadband doesn’t work for me in this area’.

He would tell clients worried about negative comments that: it’s … never a matter of restricting, blocking comments. It’s always a matter of how you manage them. A blogger or commenter can say what he wants. And you just reply to him, and say, ‘Hey you know, this is what happened’ and all that. And, very often, you see the blogger turns around and says ‘Hey, thanks for replying, you know, I didn’t see it that way, bla bla bla’ and it kind of works, you see.

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In effect, the way bloggers respond to comments is central to their affective labour. Chee Keong would always respond to all comments in his blog, which on occasion exceeded one hundred, explaining: When I comment on people’s site … I want to see a reply to the comments on other people’s blogs; it just shows that you care about your readers – you’re not just a faceless person. It shows that you care and you actually read the comments.

Similarly, Xi Ving, when asked about adapting his blog to readers’ feedback, said that: … sometimes reader would say they prefer more pictures than words or more on specific topic. It is good to make your readers feel that they are part of this blog and something [can be] contributed by them.

Perhaps due to his professional experience, Andy would often engage with the comments in a customer service style. After an advertorial about a credit card with a customisable image, he seemed to mediate on behalf of the client in the comments: Porkie’s Weblog said … the credit limit is too low! after one month i cancelled the card LOL … Anonymous said … Awesome Andy! That credit card is way cool! Will you apply for one? [a link to the credit card application page followed] … Andy said … … porkie: well, probably their different products have different credit limits. possibly the one you applied had some other advantages even if the credit limit was low? just wondering :) anonymous: i will do. :D

The second comment by ‘Anonymous’ appears to be a fairly bald attempt by the client to simulate a reader response, to which Andy gives

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a clipped response. This type of intervention by the client was rare, though on occasion a client would openly respond to comments. James and Haliza both mentioned that, on occasion, bloggers might delete some comments that were unreasonably negative, or apparently from a competitor – but James emphasised that this was a blogger’s decision, not something they could be directed to do. The value of ‘word of mouth’ is recognised and prized, albeit subjectively evaluated, and another way of incorporating bloggers’ affective labour is to recruit them as ‘brand ambassadors’ – a term that reflects their relation-building role – who are paid a retainer and/or given samples of products to use and share their experiences with their readers. Typically, the blogger would also have a logo displayed on their blog, or some other permanent indication of their association to the brand. Stephanie, who specialised in travel blogging, was recruited by a leading camera brand and she explained what they asked of her: … I take photos all the time, so basically I just need to show people that I take photo using this camera; and you know when you upload … the photo, there’s detail underneath … ‘This is taken with [the brand and model]’. People do check up, and people do ask me all the time what kind of [Brand] … do I use. So, it doesn’t really change what I do, but I guess it depends on, you know, who are the ones who sponsor you … you know your content are not really determined by anyone else, and … your blog won’t really look so spammed like you know, flooded with ads.

In some other situations where blogs competed directly with mainstream media, bloggers were employed directly. This was most evident with Ibrahim, whose blog had become an important destination for fans of a reality TV show, and he recounted how the cable company ‘called me to work for them … they said to me “If you can’t beat them join them”, so that is why … they offered me a job to be their official website content provider.’ In other examples, Stephanie was given a regular column in a national daily, and – because of the Tropical Gardening blog – I was contacted by a Sunday newspaper who commissioned articles on gardening from me. The effort that bloggers put into developing extended parasocial relations with their readers requires satisfying their desire for authentic content, as well as direct and indirect interactions. When they blog about a consumer experience, the reader may relate experientially because they already use that same brand or product – investing the brand with a shared meaning – or they become more interested in the brand because of their affective ties to the blogger. In each case,

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the shared experience is mediated through the brand, which becomes part of the blog as a dialogical assemblage, assembling and redirecting flows of meaning and experience, thus contributing to the production of the ‘social networks [and], forms of community’ that Hardt sees as a product of affective labour (1999: 96).

BlogAdNet’s Affective Labour Making money is just an added bonus for [bloggers]. If you want to earn well from blogging, you have to make sure your contents are good and people really want to read it. More often than not, this is only possible if your heart is in the right place. Blogging is all about passion and not monetary satisfaction.3 — James, quoted in newspaper article, June 2008 The above quote references the tensions between the discourse of community and authenticity that implies reciprocity and motivation beyond monetary gain and market socialities that materialise relations ‘as transactable entities’ (Slater 2002c: 111). In all my interactions with him, and based on other bloggers’ remarks, James seemed genuine in both his passion for blogging and desire to deliver fair returns to bloggers for their work. However, addressing the tensions inherent in the mediating role of BlogAdNet, he said: ‘when you are always a broker between advertiser and blogger right, sometimes, you tend to blur the lines a little bit.’ In a demonstrable effort to counterbalance the advertisers’ influence, selected bloggers were offered shares in BlogAdNet, and the ‘Our Community’ page on BlogAdNet’s inaugural announced that ‘bloggers with associated skills and influence’ had a stake in the company, promising that ‘Their identities will be revealed here over time!’4 In practice, the effect of this is unclear. One of these shareholders told me that he had no more involvement other than signing routine documents; and another – a lawyer – told me that he had occasionally given legally related advice, apparently on an informal basis. Three years later, the names were still not announced on the website, and James told me that it was not for him to reveal the names, although they were available from the Registry of Companies. In fact, at least one blogger knew who these shareholders were and implied to me that this was more of an example of cronyism rather than inclusiveness. While acknowledging inevitable compromises regarding authenticity and disinterested reciprocity that accompanied advertorials and commercial activity, both James and Andy tended to rationalise this by arguing that it was a blogger’s choice in the first place, and that the

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financial and material rewards bloggers received from BlogAdNet were significant. James noted that BlogAdNet paid out monthly six-figure total sums to all bloggers, and Andy said: ‘every single blogger has the chance to actually earn from ads now that [BlogAdNet] is here,’ and that ‘never before [were there] any blog events attended by bloggers which are totally free of charge […with] food and beverages [… and] prizes.’ Personally, the latter resonated with me, for I had had more rewards in terms of free gifts, cinema tickets and prizes than ever before in my life since signing up with them, and Faizal also commented how he had got so used to seeing movies for free that it ‘become[s] an obsession for me trying to get that free tickets. … it’s a bit like … monetisation in kind’. Recalling the arguments of Callon and others regarding the constitutive role of the economics discourse, James used economic theory in his reasoning, explaining that although bloggers frequently complained about their meagre earnings and/or a lack of other services from BlogAdNet, they were often operating under the misconception that they were consumers, rather than suppliers. Thus, the assumption that more competition for BlogAdNet would improve their lot was erroneous, as it would benefit the advertisers, who were the actual ‘consumers’ in this model. Citing some examples of price gouging from competitors, he noted that this just drove down the prices for blog advertising. He concluded by arguing that there was a ‘natural monopoly’ situation, whereby the best option for bloggers was to support BlogAdNet as the sole supplier of blog advertising, thus improving their bargaining position.5 Overall, therefore, it is important to note that while the different strands of ‘community’ and financial gain may be in tension, they are not exclusive. Mirroring the relation of bloggers with their readers, BlogAdNet had to manage the tension between market relations and expectations of reciprocity embedded in community socialities. In these situations, affective labour skills come into play, and both bloggers and BlogAdNet need to navigate these relations in a way that stabilises connections between the market and blogging assemblages.

Clients and Affective Labour Sebastian, both a blogger and a noted public relations social media specialist, gave some insight into the different ways in which Slater’s ‘alienable transactions’ played out in practice. Unusually, he disagreed with advertorials, because:

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if your goal is long-term relationships then advertorials are not the way to go, because it’s transactional, alright? They [the blogger] will say, ‘Yeah I don’t owe you anything beyond what I wrote for you and that’s it’.

Adeline also had a similar argument, explaining why she did not use a ‘disclaimer’ (i.e. an explicit disclosure statement in an advertorial): because if you put disclaimer, why would you be bothered to read it anyway? You’re like ‘Oh it’s advertorial’, and you go to the next post. So that is what we’re trying to avoid – people judging our post as just all being paid to write in that way but no, we put a lot of effort into writing the advertorials, we really use the products, and we find that it’s good and we want to write about it and share with our readers! And getting paid for it, it’s just one of the perks of doing it. I think that people who put disclaimer is just one way for them to take up a lot of advertorials without being responsible for it. That’s my theory.

Alvin seemed to confirm Adeline’s suspicion, saying although disclosure should be the norm, ‘everybody should take advertorials with a pinch of salt.’ He explained that it was always possible to be economical with the truth and not make a wholehearted endorsement: ‘I don’t have to say I choose iPhone or BlackBerry, … but I can talk about how good the BlackBerry is and what kind of features it has, you know’ (original emphasis). Sebastian strongly advised his clients to develop long-term relations with the bloggers, with a view to gaining insight into consumers and building trust with the blogger that might, presumably, translate into the bloggers’ representations of the brand. He also noted that, as opposed to ‘journalists [who] come to you to interview you … when you sit down in a room [with bloggers] and you talk with them they want to tell you stuff!’ (original emphasis), and that it is not all just about creating marketing hype, or creating value in terms of that. It’s about relationships, it’s being there, being able to have a conversation with the bloggers …. Ultimately that’s what it is, it’s about a conversation.

Thus he was advising clients to focus on affective labour by developing relations between themselves and the bloggers rather than enabling bloggers to disentangle themselves from further non-specified relations through discrete transactional arrangements. However, he found

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himself confronted by conventional PR practices based on appearances in the media, where ROI is calculated by column inches, the number of mentions on television and so on. Thus, Sebastian had found that clients and other PR practitioners would often prefer to pay for content and have more control: PR agencies are so confused if they go out and say, you know, to clients ‘If you have this event, fifty people will write’. And then they come back and they say ‘Let’s pay, X number of bloggers’ – that’s the safest way to do that.

I had an experience of the latter when I was contacted regarding an advertorial for a deodorant: the terms were that I would attend an event, write two blog posts and payment would be according to a sliding scale based on the readership of my blog.6 These examples show how, at the intersection of the blogging and market assemblages, different historical practices and discourses jostle for space. The outcomes are never certain, but the heterogeneity and the heterarchical nature of the blogging assemblage means that there are always opportunities for new emergent practices and patterns.

Blog Genres Blogs can also be qualified through a genre typology – in effect a commercialising of patterns of forms of interaction that enable transactional dynamics between bloggers, BlogAdNet and the clients. The requirement to self-categorise one’s blog as part of the registration process with BlogAdNet was experienced by some personal bloggers as an uncomfortable imposition. Magdalene also showed an awareness of how it might affect her blog’s business potential: I never know how to categorise mine also … I put mine under humour so it’s like, I don’t know if that’s very relevant, because like, you know, when you give it to clients for proposal and they’re not going to choose this blog because it suits ‘Funny’.

In a similar vein, Alvin reported selecting ‘Lifestyle’ when signing up for an online environmental campaign because ‘it’s the most vague of all the categories’; and Faizal, while signing up for a blogtal, looked for a category ‘specifically about relationship’ – the ‘family’ category did not suit him as he had no children, and he also wondered how nonmarried couples would fit in. As Magdalene suggests, these are qualifications that would affect how blogs are presented as choices to potential

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clients; for the A-list blogs the genre may not matter so much, because their larger audience makes them relevant in their own right, but it would probably make a difference for the bulk allocations of banner advertising that affect most bloggers. Thus, the process of signing up to BlogAdNet – and blogtals in general – becomes partly a reflexive process where bloggers are introduced to a disciplinary categorical logic dictated by BlogAdNet’s understanding of how clients segment the consumer market. Similar to the web analytics above, this qualification method also suggests to the blogger ways of understanding how their particular relations with the readers, mediated through their textual presentations and emergent socialities, can be reimagined as commercial and commodifiable categories.

Conclusions The rapid and transformative growth of the internet introduced cultural and economic changes, and for some it represented a break with the past and a new culturally based market. However, the existing market assemblage has adapted and mutated, and the internet is now dominated by commercial concerns. Nonetheless, there has been appreciable change, and if we were to plot a continuum, starting at a subsistence economy, with minimal luxury goods and very little tradeable ‘culture’, to current advanced economies that boast a surfeit of food and large amounts of value deriving from the production of intangible cultural (mostly media) assets, we can see the relevance of the principles of cultural economy. The latter point is underlined by the rapid growth of powerful corporations such as Facebook and Google, underwritten by the advertising that is a powerful exemplification of the convergence of culture and economy. However, the strength of market discourse that rationalises and constitutes the market as a naturalised field is undeniable. This chapter has outlined some anthropological literature on market formation, focusing on Callon’s ‘market of qualities’ and discussions of the ‘cultural economy’. These analyses start from understanding the market as a culturally constructed mechanism, depending on cultural categorisations and differentiation. However, this does not mean that markets are subject to complete semiotic and ‘cultural’ manipulation, and there are objective contexts that regulate conditions of economic transactions that develop their own constitutive agency. The motivation and social context of the blog advertising networks is mostly economic, and the concepts of the ‘economy of qualities’ and ‘voicy consumers’ (Callon 2001; Foster 2007) help to explain the

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intermingling of sociotechnical and economic dynamics. The economy of qualities explains how goods and services need to be defined, or qualified, in ways that enable them to be attached and detached from networks of consumers – in each configuration they become singularised in such a way as to become suitable for consumption within that network. Voicy consumers critically involve themselves in discussions regarding goods and services, forming part of the qualifying mechanism that determines the qualities of goods and services in the economy of qualities (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002). As voicy consumers, when bloggers share their consumer experiences, they effectively engage in marketing – making an object ‘meaningful and desirable within specific social relations’, culturally entangling, defining and representing it ‘in terms of consumer lifeworlds’ (Slater 2002b: 247). These blogs and bloggers are overflows, entangled with their readers in extended parasocial relationships based on non-market economy principles, destabilising but also intriguing the advertising market. To effectively commodify their audience, they need to articulate the economic relationship with the advertisers in a manner that does not alienate their readers. This involves engaging in heterogeneous practices that enable bloggers to simultaneously maintain dialogical parasocial socialities based on the promise of authenticity, whilst also clearly engaging in paid promotional work. The stabilisation of this line of flight was the goal of BlogAdNet, the advertisers/clients and the bloggers, motivated by economic gain. BlogAdNet was able to deploy sociotechnological strategies that mobilised bloggers as representatives of, as well as authentic purveyors of, a particular audience, destabilising the non-monetised blogging assemblage and drawing blogs, bloggers and advertisers into an emergent assemblage that articulates effectively with the market economy. Thus the interactive affordances of blogs – both passive (via the web analytics) and active (the blog and the comments) – are important elements in the successful monetisation of blogs. The blog is a means to stabilise an audience, which is then commodified for advertising purposes, and successful monetisation depends primarily on retaining this stabilised audience, as well as qualifying it in some measure in terms of its demographics. The latter is done by the deployment of statistics, as discussed above, but their underlying uncertainty and the opacity of the demographics of the audience means that other means are used to predict the audience. One of these is by classifying blogs into genres, and – as will be argued below – the emergence of the lifestyle blog genre is an outcome of this process.

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Notes  1. According to respondents, their commission was 50%, well above the usual international standard of 15%. This may, however, be a norm for internet advertising, as the company through which I sold links also took 50%, or it reflected particular conditions at the time.  2. Fieldnotes dated 14 August 2008. However, it may be that this apparent visibility is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the brand name is unique, and the slogan is a specific phrase, thus ensuring its appearance when googled. This suggests that marketing should focus on getting brands associated with generic terms such as ‘happiness’, or indexical terms or phrases such as ‘How to make my breath fresh’.  3. Quoted in newspaper article, June 2008. Details retained to maintain confidentiality.  4. BlogAdNet webpage, 2007–2010: p00755.  5. Arguably, his interpretation of ‘natural monopoly’ was mistaken. However, this matters less than the fact that the economic discourse was part of his sensemaking process.  6. Email dated 31 December 2009.

CHAPTER 8

January 2009 Negotiating the Authentic Advertorial

The previous chapter outlined the dynamics underlying the emergence of blog advertising, and this chapter will focus on the various negotiations that are implicated in the production of an advertorial, the subgenre that epitomises the attempt to entangle the emotional and hyperlocal extended parasocial relations between the readers and the brand. Writing a blog is an inherently reflexive process and the advertorial forces a greater reflexivity, bound by the need to represent the client in a particular way while maintaining their usual style – entangling the authentic blog and the commercial message. The advertorial is expected to be woven into the usual prosaic narrative of the Personal blog, its casualness belying the careful planning and negotiation that goes into its creation. There are formal negotiations between the blogger, agency and the clients, and discursive negotiations that operate through blog socialities when collective norms are debated and affiliations negotiated. ‘Saying it with Music Telegrams’ (hereafter, ‘Saying it’), the advertorial examined in this chapter, was for ‘Music Telegrams’, a mobile phone service whereby subscribers could send songs with personalised dedications. There was also a concurrent radio commercials campaign, and some filmed dedications delivered in person by a performing team were put online. This advertorial by Shi Han attracted a fairly high number of comments1 and some controversy related to the visibility of disclosure, the management of comments and the status of certain commenters. It also exposes some of the advertorial producing process. The analysis shows overlapping heterogeneous causal relations and interpersonal exchanges intersecting in a single blog post, through the multimodal and hyperlinked body of the post and, importantly, through the voices of readers in the comments section. Using the blog post and comments, interjecting various extracts from interviews, survey data and reflections

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from participant-observation, the thick description shows how the themes raised here are relevant to blog affordances, the wider Malaysian blogging assemblage and the dynamics of monetisation.

Monetised Hyperlinks The opening declaration announcing his crush on another blogger and the discovery of her reciprocal feelings gives no warning or indication that the post is any more than a usual one (Figure 8.1). The first hyperlinks lead to Mei Chan’s blog – one to her main blog address and one to a post where she had invited ‘applications’ to be her boyfriend. He goes on to describe how he had wooed Mei Chan by sending her a ‘Music Telegram’ – and the relevant services are hyperlinked within the same narrative (Figure 8.2). Although there is no explicit ‘call to action’ as one might see in a conventional advertisement, readers are given the opportunity to enter into relations with the client in a manner that replicates conventional blog practices. Shi Han’s style as a no-holds-barred ‘bad boy’ makes this narrative believable, and by modelling the use of the Music Telegram service he entangles it with his readers by making it into an example of consociation with another blogger and, in a wider sense, a means to engage with a potential love interest.

Figure 8.1 ‘Saying it’, selected portion (published with permission from the blogger).

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Signing off with a photo of Mei Chan and the announcement of success, ‘I’ve got a date scheduled with her on Saturday night. Wish me luck, everyone. ;)’ the story seems to have a happy ending. For the sharper eyed, underneath the post the category ‘Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!’ is a category label ironically indexing the advertorial, and the tags – ‘advertorial, digi [a large telco], music, [BlogAdNet]’ – indicate that it is in fact a paid post (Figure 8.3). However, the fictitious nature of the post was not evident to all commenters, as we shall see.

Disclosure I implore those readers of [ShiHan.com] who have trouble understanding [Shi Han’s] posts to check under ‘tags’ before commenting. It might help :/ —Commenter B, ‘Saying it’

Figure 8.2 ‘Saying it’, selected portion – the hyperlinks are inserted in the text (published with permission from the blogger).

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It’s not misleading la...look at the categories and the tags. :) (Shi Han, ‘Saying it’) Disclosure – making visible the paid status of the blog post – is a central issue that addresses tensions between the blogging and market assemblages. In general, it is seen as desirable: interviewees all agreed that disclosure was preferable, and the official policy of BlogAdNet is to encourage it. The myBlogS survey showed that more than 60 per cent of bloggers and readers believed that ‘Bloggers should be required to always clearly mark advertorials as such’, and just over 5 per cent disagreed with this.2 This concern, and the potential for readers to directly monitor and articulate shared values of blogging, can be seen in an exchange on an advertorial by Amanda. Commenter A remarked that she had seen an advertorial for the same beauty product elsewhere, and concludes: ‘This entry is an ad.’ In effect, advertisement campaigns roll out coordinated cross- media content, and I had noted that Stephanie had done an advertorial about the same product the previous week3 – although an edit had revealed the scheduled nature of the post, when she had written: ‘Short note: Omg, I thought today was Tuesday already. Damn it, posted on the wrong date.’ On Amanda’s blog, Commenter B responded to Commenter A by pointing out that the post was filed under the ‘Commercial Break’ tag and that ‘As long as it is labelled as an ad there is no deception’, but Commenter C pointed out that the post had initially been miscategorised as ‘Cheesecapade’. Amanda confirmed the latter and apologised, having rectified the error. Disclosure can occur in the blog post itself by writing ‘Advertorial’, or ‘Sponsored post’, at the top of the blog post. The more common and less visible method, as in ‘Saying it’, is to use tags or categories (see Figure 8.3). A third method, not commonly used by the bloggers

Figure 8.3 ‘Saying it’, selected portion – categories and tags (published with permission from the blogger).

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I interviewed, is a standalone generalised statement that addresses the whole blog. This statement is often a derivation of a disclosure statement 4 initially developed by PayPerPost in response to criticisms of paid blog posts and a ruling by the United States government addressing the opacity of paid endorsements online (Federal Trade Commission 2009).

Asynchronicity and Holoptism Bruns’ concept of produsage has echoes in personal blogging, but his model is mostly predicated on more or less stabilised ‘communities’ within which there are common goals and holoptism – the ability of each user to be aware of the whole and of each other’s action – is afforded. The individualistic Principle of Independence mitigates against the ‘holoptic model of communal evaluation’ (Bruns 2008: 25), but nonetheless we can see in the above exchanges that disclosure is one area where readers feel empowered to judge a blogger’s actions. The comments in Amanda’s blog show how this is afforded by asynchronous communication, whereby the permanence of blog posts and comments mean that readers can rapidly assess bloggers’ actions and relations between bloggers and bring this information to bear on ongoing asynchronous conversations. On ‘Saying it’, Commenter C also demonstrates this dynamic by linking to Mei Chan’s boyfriend’s blog and remarking ‘Don’t want to disappoint you, [Shi Han]. But ain’t she already have a BF [boyfriend], DEAR?’ In the meantime, Mei Chan noticed the post – which was published at 1.36pm – and at 12.23am she intervenes in the 13th comment: OMG!!! I didn’t know you were gonna write up a story like this when I took the photos for you … despite the popularity you’re giving me, I don’t appreciate that you’re downgrading my character … I hope you’ll make a slight change in your post stating that the whole thing was just a make up story for advertorial purposes.

Having noticed an increase in visitors to her blog (and maybe anticipating more), she also posted on her own blog immediately afterwards (at 12.27). Addressing ‘everyone who dropped by from [Shi Han]’, she politely emphasised her gratitude for the extra visits but reaffirmed: ‘I’m seriously attached to my BF.’5 While making her case in her new post, she is also able to capitalise on the increased incoming traffic by referring to a shared experience and giving readers an opportunity to comment on

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it. Each post offers an opportunity for consociation, the strengthening of parasocial interaction, and accumulation of readers. For more popular bloggers with regular readers, the consistency of posts and narrative enables shared socialities to develop, but less popular bloggers may need to capitalise opportunistically on temporarily increased inflows in order to retain the new audience. Although asynchronous communication is afforded by stable blog posts and comments, in practice interactions are quasi-synchronous and interest quickly shifts from one event to the next because readers usually focus and comment upon the most recent post. Thus the blogger who wants to benefit from time-sensitive interests needs to act quickly. This time decay effect is encoded in the reverse chronology of blog posts and explains why clients usually require bloggers to leave the advertorial as the first post for two or three days to increase opportunities for readership.

The Advertorial Subgenre I soon smelled a rat and realized it was an advertorial when [Shi Han] started to get obsessive over the Digi [i.e. the telco] thingie. — Commenter B, ‘Saying it’ You can buy a blogger’s attention with an advertorial, [but] you cannot buy the blogger’s opinion. —James; original emphasis James insisted that bloggers value their independence above all, saying there had been many occasions when a blogger had reviewed a product, not liked it and said to the client: Look, this what I’m gonna write about it. Are you sure you want me to publish it? If not then, take it back, and don’t pay me’ …. It’s just like a newspaper … you can invite them to the press conference, you can get their attention, but you can’t dictate what they are going to say. The same for bloggers lah. (Original emphasis)

Regarding the elaboration of the advertorial content, James said that the process is ‘very open’, that clients don’t even impose a word count and ‘it’s a very natural flow’. Interviewees such as Nicky reported relatively minor interventions in the content: ‘Most of the time they’re not major changes, it’s just small details, or “Change this picture”, or “Insert this line”, so it’s quite simple.’ However, Chee Keong anecdotally reported

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one blogger who had refused to carry an advertorial as requested by the client, and Jaymee said that she had turned down some advertorials because although the product being advertised was alright, ‘the way they want it to be done can be a bit, ah, weird … then I don’t do it lah’. Haliza said that about 40 per cent of clients will ask for changes but also implied that as she wrote more advertorials she got better at writing in a style that satisfies the client. In effect, a fairly formulaic subgenre of advertorials developed over time and became easier to spot as time went on – as the commenter above who ‘smelled a rat’ demonstrated. It usually starts with a breezy personal recollection or anecdote, segueing more or less smoothly into a discussion of the product or service. More evidence of the subgenre is seen when bloggers feel the need to explicitly point out that they are not writing an advertorial, such as when Andy blogged about a pizza parlour, finishing with a line about how he wished it was an advertorial, because then he could have had free pizza.6 The tensions between the need for authentic content as balanced against advertisers’ interests are generally recognised by interviewees but presented as minor when it involved themselves. Sixty-six per cent of the myBlogS survey respondents agreed that ‘When bloggers start to make money from their blog, their blog becomes less personal.’ The gap between Monetisers (60 per cent) and Non-Monetisers (78 per cent) was quite large (18 per cent). A similar statement – ‘When a blog starts to have advertorials, it loses its originality’ was agreed with by 48 per cent overall but had an even larger difference – 21 per cent – between Monetisers (37 per cent) and Non-Monetisers (57 per cent). Monetisers are thus less likely to believe that by generating an income from their blog they are being less authentic or personal. However, there remained a generalised scepticism – when asked whether most bloggers would change their content or style ‘if they were paid to’, more than 50 per cent of the Monetisers agreed and less than 20 per cent disagreed. However, when asked the same question about themselves, these trends were almost directly reversed – suggesting a social desirability bias in the self-directed question. James’s insistence that you cannot buy a blogger’s opinion was therefore not reflected in a straightforward manner by the data. From one perspective, Magdalene and Jaymee reported having difficulties rejecting advertorials because of personal loyalty to James; from another, as James’ quote that opened this section implies, bloggers prefer to say nothing rather than say something negative. Advertorials are paid content, and the clients retain full gate-keeping rights over the final content, channelling the form and content of the advertorials in definite ways.

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Arguing that an advertorial is an inauthentic example of self-alienation caused by market forces, and a negation of the blog as an extension of the self, is assuming a unitary self that can only be expressed in forms that are not connected to financial motivations. However, personal bloggers usually argue that as long as they write what they believe, it does not matter if they are paid or not. As a respondent to the myBlogS survey stated in an open-ended comment: as a student, a few hundred ringgit is hard to pass when you’re merely asked to sing praises about something on a blog that is read by a few hundred people. It’s not about selling out, it’s about being true to myself …. You can STILL make the content as original as you want it to be. If you suck at it, then that’s when people think you’re being superficial. (Emphasis added)

A comment on an advertorial by Tommy exemplifies this. It stated: ‘That blog post was 100 per cent pure awesome. I love how you listed it as an ADV at first too so I was expecting it to be an advertorial, but then had a great surprise ending. Bravo!’7 – the reader is satisfied that the ending was in the trademark style of Tommy, involving slapstick humour and photo editing, but also appreciates the upfront disclosure of the post as an advertorial.

Commenting The comments can be understood as the second stage of the dialogical production of the advertorial, and the parasocial interactions that entangle the brand, blog and audience are revealed in a debate about the meaning of ‘Saying it’. The comments area is a key location for entanglement, and there is evidence of emergent stabilised relations as well as an awareness of the role of the advertorial in the changing blog. A few months before I interviewed her, Nicky had – unusually – disabled the comments function because of negative comments. She explained that ‘all this writing is for myself, it’s not for other people, so that’s why I shut it down for a while, because, I didn’t want my writing style to change.’ However, she then took the decision to quit her job and rely on her blogging income, and advertorial revenue was more important: I’m a stronger blogger now … more thick skinned … if someone wrote something bad … I’m OK with it. … Secondly, I was thinking, this is important for my blog, because clients would ask, uh, ‘She doesn’t open her comments?’, ‘What about advertorials?’ Things like that. And I thought,

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if I only open the comments during advertorials, seems a bit, like, strange isn’t it?

The comments are the most visible representation of the ‘conversation’ that clients want to be part of, and we can see how the clients’ preference and the goal of a consistent authentic performance combined in her decision to reopen the comments. The advertorial can be framed and determined to a large extent by the client, but the comments cannot be influenced to the same extent.8 James explained that sometimes there could be competitors leaving comments, and that bloggers often delete these ‘because like, you know it’s just stupid, just saying for the sake of saying just because they can.’ Haliza also noted that clients want to see comments, explaining that she edits comments ‘related to the advertorials, if they are compare[d] to other products, of course I have to’, for example, by blanking out the brand name with ‘XXXX’. Although she said she ‘had to’, and interviewees did mention needing to pay attention to comments of this nature, I noticed other advertorials where brand names and critical comments were not edited out.

Polyvocality and Dialogics An exchange in the ‘Saying it’ comments demonstrates dialogic dynamics as well how the advertorial influences the blogger’s style. First, Commenter D taunts Shi Han by saying: ‘Her bf is much much more better than you … more handsome than you, and … a doctor … And who do you think you are? hahaha… How pity…’ Shi Han responds placidly, but later a ‘Defender’ (Commenter E) asks why does he ‘bother to be nice towards spastic pieces of shit like [Commenter D]’, and proceeds to crudely lambast him/her. Then, further down, Commenter F intervenes saying: ‘[Commenter E] shut the fuck up will ya? If you like to condemn people, then start a new blog yourself. Unless if you are [Shi Han] trying to two-face and be a moderator.’ Commenter F is expressing the Principle of Independence – ‘if you don’t like it, make your own blog’ – but also raising the possibility of deception by implying that Shi Han could be making comments under a fake pseudonym. Again, there is the tension of the anonymity affordance, and in fact we do not know who Commenter F is – she/he could in fact be the same person as Commenter D, or even Commenter E, for that matter. However, Shi Han reveals that he communicates via other means with Commenter E, saying to him/her:

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I would have ripped him another one if this post isn’t what it is. :) [i.e. an advertorial] Like you [Commenter E] mentioned in an email, I know this self-censorship isn’t me, but hey, it pays the bills. Thanks for your support as always my friend. Cheers!

To Commenter F he retorts: ‘[Commenter E] is ALWAYS welcome on my blog. At least he stands up for me when I’m not around to reply comment.’ The asynchronous polyvocality of the comments area results in a relatively disjointed conversation that may either be mediated by the blogger, responding to comments at irregular intervals, or sometimes individual commenters will become polar attractions themselves. This example and the previous section also show how clients influence, indirectly at least, the moderation of the comments and that hyperlocal blogging socialities may also be affected. When extended parasocial relations are established the reader may also take into account the blogger’s situation – in one example, I had started to write a comment challenging the taste of a food blogger’s advertorial for processed cheese but realised that I may be ‘Breaking his rice bowl’ – i.e. negatively impacting on his business – and refrained from commenting. If commenters value their parasocial relationship with the blogger, this may influence them with regards to how they comment, and the advertorials become the participatory outcome of the blogger and the commenters. However, the blogger cannot be certain of receiving this support, particularly regarding non-regular commenters who are less likely to be understanding.

Negotiating the Authentic Advertorial [Commenter G says] seriously, if a girl is not into a marriage, every guy is entitled to have a go (of course, fairly & gentlemanly) but clearly i think [Shi Han] did it for advertising purpose. [Shi Han’s response] I’ve been avoiding the A-word in my replies. It’s … harder than it looks. Heh! It’s not a good advert when it sounds like an advertorial. — ‘Saying it’

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From the client’s point of view the strength of the advertorial is the relative invisibility of the commercial message woven by the bloggers into the prosaic narrative that is the defining feature of personal and lifestyle blogs. Some of the commenters’ reactions showed that Shi Han had been successful in this regard, and he expressed pride, saying ‘Success! No one can ever accuse me of hard sell anymore...,’ and continued, saying ‘or, er, it just speaks more about my non-regular readers than my writing skillz. ;)’ Thus he injected a note of humility towards his regular readers, recognising how some of them had clearly spotted the advertorial. Again, the regular readers and commenters feel a sense of shared experience and understanding, focused around the dialogic experience of the blog. People like me, who had been reading his blog for several years and seen him go through drug addiction, a suicide attempt and more, were more able to read through the lines. However, some others challenged him, with Commenter H saying ‘when we first read you, you were not ‘slave’ to any advertising.’ Such a comment reveals a hankering for the imagined authentic Shi Han, one that does not consider his subjectively changing life and sense of self – as suggested above when he says he has to ‘pay the bills’. A similar exchange occurred on MyEats.9 Although it is a ‘food blog’, there was an advertorial (indicated by the tag ‘lunch money’) about a prepaid mobile phone package. Commenter A reacted by writing: Oh, crap. Pandering to commercial interests. Yup, its your blog and you can do anything you want. It was better when you just talked about food. I’m outta here. Thanks for the memories. [to which the blogger responds] It’s a commercial break, after all it’s nice to have some side income to pay for hosting and domain name etc. Thanks :) 10

Although Commenter A is not happy, another commenter compliments the blogger – saying ‘This is a great advertorial. :)’, and another sees the advertorial as a positive status symbol, saying: ‘Awesome laaaa, you get advertorials’. It’s worth noting that the latter commenter is part of the social circle of the BlogAdNetters – whereas Commenter A leaves no link, which is typical of critical comments. Readers can always ‘vote with their clicks’ – i.e. if they do not like a blog, they do not read it. It is possible that Commenter A above did no longer read MyEats, but in any event, twelve months later it was still a popular blog. The advertorial

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itself can become a sign of taste and authority, and the proper crafting of it can satisfy the audience’s requirements for authenticity – but it also requires bloggers to develop new skills. Shi Han showed that he was reflecting on genre writing in a few responses to comments. He said to Commenter I – ‘Yup, shows that I can do straight hard sell writing, humorous writing [references another advertorial] and tabloid style writing (this). ;)’ He revealed aspects of the advertorial production process by telling Commenter J that the post was written in the previous month and explaining to Mei Chan that he ‘can’t show [his] draft to anyone except the client’. To Commenter K, he refers to a previous advertorial and says, ‘I actually write much better when I’m given a free hand to write.’ Thus, although he was previously trying to avoid exposing the cloaked process of the advertorial, he draws back the curtain somewhat, and by doing so maintains his distance from the commercial intent of the advertorial. The final comment (Commenter L) in ‘Saying it’ points to the financial relevance of controversial blog posts, saying ‘your uniques must have hit rocket high because of all the misunderstandings,’ and Shi Han responds by downplaying the financial implications and foregrounding personal motivation: ‘Eh, didn’t make the stock market move much. But still fun to do this ADV [advertorial].’ Although there is a negotiation going on throughout the comments, there is rarely any conclusion. The lack of physical co-presence, the option of anonymity and the frequent updating means that discontinuation of conversation threads is more likely, and comments can be made without having to subsequently justify them.

Conclusions This chapter showed how clients, BlogAdNet, bloggers and readers come together to negotiate the subgenre of the advertorial within the parameters of contingent blog socialities. Foster argues that a brand is qualified by users’ consumption work; they detach it from the legal owner (the corporation) and integrate it into their relations with others. As a malleable symbol, the brand thus becomes integrated into the consumer and the corporation as ‘partible [persons] … contingent bundles of qualities or assemblages of properties’ (Foster 2011: 50). A blog is a similar such ‘bundle’, expressing the personhood of the blogger, and the advertorial becomes part of that – but explicitly detached using the disclosure. The latter enables the blogger to maintain an authentic relation with the readers, who can be satisfied with a

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disclosure and the elaboration of an advertorial in the consistent style of the blogger. The advertorial developed out of the consumer post, a spontaneous reflection on a consumer experience, reflecting the rhizomatic generation of content in the personal blog that is contingent upon the blogger’s personal preferences (e.g. for red lipstick) and her available time and inclination to blog about a purchase. The advertorial, however, is part of an ‘arborescent’ movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), having its origins in carefully structured marketing campaigns, planned in advance to coincide with a product launch or a seasonal sales push. BlogAdNet and clients shape the content by prescribing hyperlinks, pictures, key ‘brand phrases’ and selling points, and have asked bloggers to adapt their style on occasion: Chee Keong had been asked to tone down some language, Haliza reported having to learn what the advertisers liked to see, and Magdalene had to explain her idiosyncratic use of a potentially offensive acronym. Nonetheless, the impact of the advertorial depends on the strength of the parasocial interaction with the bloggers’ readers, and the clients mostly need to let the blogger develop the content as they see fit. In addition, as we have seen above, the comments are an important part of the advertorial and are even less controllable by the clients. Once the advertorial is posted, it was normal for the clients to ask for it to remain as the first post for 48 hours. This can interfere with the spontaneity of the blog, although it coincides well with the asynchronous aspect – enabling readers a wider space of time to read the post and interact with the blogger. Another distinctive feature of blogs is that the advertorial stays online and is accessible indefinitely – this is very different from the fleeting nature of mainstream media advertisements. The above thick description exemplifies the process of genre development – a negotiation of form, content, practice and social relations. The subgenre of the advertorial developed out of the consumer post, as subgenre of the personal blog. However, as we shall see, the advertorial presages the development of a new blog genre – the lifestyle blog.

Notes  1. 71 in total: Shi Han made 11 comments in answering others, 3 were duplicated. Leaving 57 comments by 43 different commenters.  2. The remainder answered ‘Neutral’ or felt the question did not apply to them.  3. Blog post, Stephanie, 8 February 2009: p00510.  4. See http://disclosurepolicy.org/.

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 5.  6.  7.  8.

Blog post, Mei Chan, 13 January 2009: p00752. Blog post, Andy, 3 June 2009: b00664. Blog post, Tommy, 16 March 2009: p00565. There is a practice of ‘seeding’ forums and blogs with comments about products, but this is not a preferred tactic, seen as being inauthentic and ineffective. There is also the possibility of paying for spam comments (‘Only Humans Allowed’ 2009), but this is mostly done in order to place links.  9. A pseudonym. 10. Blog post, MyEats, 13 January 2009: p00267.

CHAPTER 9

Assembling Lifestyles

Playfully acknowledging the contentiousness of blog advertising, an early banner advertisement for BlogAdNet said: ‘Okay okay I confess! I am a Blog Ad. Please don’t call the cops!!!’ With the additional subheading ‘Asia’s First Blog Advertisement Community’,1 it simultaneously frames advertisements as a (sub)cultural transgression and as a generative opportunity for the ‘Blog Advertising Community’. The potential monetary rewards are made clear, but the tagline reference to the ‘community’ takes us beyond paid promotional activity motivated by cold cash, to the informal comfort, support and security that ‘community’ usually represents, recalling arguments regarding the discursive role of community in binding socialities and situated practices to enable resource mobilisation (Amit and Rapport 2002; Watson 1997). The two poles of economy and culture have usually been separated by classical economics in the attempt to develop a scientific understanding of economic activity, but advertising is one way in which market activity challenges the utilitarian rationality of economic theory. As De Waal Malefyt and Moeran have argued, ‘If anthropologists “write” culture … advertising produces it’ (De Waal Malefyt and Moeran 2003: 15; original emphasis). With the caveat that this applies to successful advertising, this insight suggests how anthropology can help to explore the entangling of economic activity with everyday socialities and identities informed by material culture. Noting the limitations of assuming ‘blogger community’ (Chapter 5), this chapter discusses how interviewees often associated the concept with offline blogmeets, especially those organised by BlogAdNet or AppAds – something prefigured in the above advertisement. Mirroring the conventional economic division of culture and economics, this research started with an assumption that as the

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monetisation of blogs proceeded there would be a split amongst bloggers based on principles of authenticity that reject commercialisation. By demonstrating the binding power of common values, this would also have been a way of finding a subcultural collective that would correspond with a ‘community’ and/or ‘public’. In Callon’s terms, this would be framed as overflows generating groups with common interests in opposition to – for example – a polluting factory. Foster calls these ‘publics’: sociotechnical networks that form around the movement of commodities [and] variously enable consumers to address matters of concern and perforce to constitute themselves as publics – as affiliations performed by attempts to hear themselves and make themselves heard on a particular subject. (2007: 710)

The ‘“fair trade” publics’ discussed by Foster are also framed in an oppositional sense, paralleling what I had expected to happen in response to the monetisation of blogs. In the USA, bloggers and social media consultants had debated the ethics and efficacy of paid blogging. In 2006 a blog written by a journalist touring the USA and parking and sleeping each evening in a Walmart car park was exposed as a ‘flog’ (fake blog) funded by Walmart (WalMartWatch 2006), and confusion over Microsoft’s intentions regarding review laptops provided to some bloggers had generated controversy (Solis 2006). The negative publicity from these cases highlighted the advantages of transparency and the need to differentiate the blogger from the sponsor. A consultancy in 2009 argued that the ‘sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation … [w]ith appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity’ could join public relations and advertising as a legitimate practice in the blogosphere (Corcoran 2009), but others argued strongly against this (Ray 2009). These practices also attracted governmental attention, and the USA Federal Trade Commission issued a directive requiring bloggers to disclose payments both in kind and in cash (Federal Trade Commission 2009; Solis 2009). However – although there were individual voices of concern and generalised opinions on the matter – after three years of fieldwork I was not able to identify any tangible informal or formal group that was expressing a common interest in the manner of a public. This chapter will discuss the evidence of tangible changes in personal blogging, highlighting the role of BlogAdNet in drawing upon existing affordances of personal expression and collective practice, and interests based on the market economy. In particular, the payments and activities organised

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by BlogAdNet enabled a more ostentatious consumerism on the part of the personal bloggers, whose life then came to be entwined with the consumerist ‘lifestyle’ that they have to represent for marketing purposes.

The Personal Blog and the Market Advertising, rather than acting as the instrument of capital to ‘devalue’ authentic culture, emerges as a practice which is neither cultural nor economic in essence. Rather, advertising is a constituent practice, consisting inescapably of both cultural and economic elements. — Liz McFall, ‘Advertising, Persuasion and the Culture/ Economy Dualism’ A critical approach to market society suggests that the principle that any thing can become a commodity through monetarisation, a process that translates subjective value into money, is ‘corroding other value systems’ (Slater and Tonkiss 2001: 25). This process of ‘marketisation’ is also defined by ‘depersonalization, and the increase of calculation and quantification’ (Slater and Tonkiss 2001: 26). In this approach, the ‘virus of commodification’ undermines reciprocity and depersonalises social relations as money becomes the lowest common denominator for social interaction (Slater 2002a: 59). Actors in the cultural setting would thus become disentangled and disempowered, developing instrumentalised interpersonal relations, while relying on market exchange to sell their labour, obtain material comfort and to express their identities. However, these neo-Marxist approaches tend to be undermined by economic determinism, and Nixon’s emphasis on the ‘interdependence of economic and cultural practices and their relations of reciprocal effect within the sphere of cultural production’ (2002: 132) is echoed by Slater and Tonkiss, who state that ‘people can creatively appropriate the products of capitalism’ (2001: 25). It is also useful to consider how a ‘plurality of economic practices’ and modes of exchange can exist alongside each other (Williams 2004: 455), and blogging can fit into both market and non-market categories (Quiggin 2006). For the latter, a blog post is a ‘public good’ – openly accessible to all, without detracting from another person’s access. This character of blogs means that ‘non-monetary motives’ such as selfexpression or an ‘economy of esteem’ based around hyperlinks may dominate, but ‘non-monetary motives’ are often sidelined by market

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rationality (Quiggin 2006: 76), leading to bloggers simulating interest and/or self-censoring in order to accommodate advertisers. He concludes that market rationality ‘can be managed only by demarcating spheres in which the rules of market rationality do or do not apply’ (Quiggin 2006: 76). The practice of disclosure is a clear example of this, although, as we have seen, the lines can easily become blurred. Deleuze and Guattari sit plainly within the neo-Marxist tradition, stating that ‘capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies’ (1983: 267) and ascribing to economic forces an objectivity that separates them from other ‘codes’ – i.e. forms of inscription that regularise and stabilise flows (1983: 271). However, they sometimes suggest that other agents of deterritorialisation can counter the determinism of capitalist coding (Escobar and Osterweil 2009: 202), and Collier and Ong also emphasise the need to examine markets as part of an assemblage that interacts with ‘specific substantive or value orders’ in local and specific contexts (2005: 14; see also DeLanda 2006: 17–18). Thus we do not have to project a totalising capitalist system onto the multiplicity of cultural, social and economic relations that occur in the blogosphere, but we can also recognise the power of market relations in terms of the potential to decode and recode desires ‘into abstract quantities in the form of money and commodities’ (Jensen and Rödje 2009b: 17), a process that is also exemplified by the transformation of countercultural fashion and music into cultural commodities (Terranova 2000: 38). The concept of the assemblage enables the integration of material, cultural and economic components into an explanatory dynamic framework and helps us to understand how – as parasocial relations develop through the selective sharing of life events, mundane practices and consumer experiences – these can become lines of flight that engender new forms of economic value actualised in new genres. An early successful professional blogger in the USA wrote in 2005 about the increased monetisation of blogs and described a progression from advertisements on blogs to paid blogging, to companies sponsoring entire blogs, which became accepted ‘as long as bloggers and companies disclosed that this is what they were doing’ (Wright 2005: 272; original emphasis). He predicted that there would inevitably be some inauthentic behaviour and that newer bloggers would be less concerned with the blogosphere as a whole but that nonetheless blogger authenticity would remain essential. Thus, he argued that advertisements ‘become as authentic as the blog content’ (Wright 2005: 286) when the blogger retains the right to choose the ads. However, this is undermined by the automatic placement of advertisements and the professional or financial pressure on bloggers to accept advertisements notwithstanding any

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personal objection. Nonetheless, his challenge to the fundamental assumption that any paid activity is inauthentic is important and suggests that a convergence of commercial and personal interests is possible, reflecting my observations as well as informants’ accounts. There are incidents of the instrumentalisation of relations and evidence of changing blogging practices. However, to embrace the ‘virus of commodification’ thesis and assume that clients and commercial interests effectively appropriate blogs and subordinate bloggers would oversimplify the situation, ignoring the multiplicity of articulations that are afforded by blogs – afforded especially by modularity and personalisation, through which bloggers’ dividual selves are articulated, maintaining a distance from the clients and avoiding becoming their simple intermediaries. The blogger offers the ‘persona’ that underlies parasocial relations (Horton and Wohl 1956) as a means for integrating commercial and personal motivations. For a blogger, being paid is not ‘selling your soul’, because the blog is only part of him, and the advertorial is only part of the blog (see also Rettberg 2014: 142). This persona becomes a ‘detachable’ part of the person, a facet of his dividual self. Thus, representational arguments that also rest on the logic of an authentic self, impeded or enabled by blogs, and translate the fetishisation of a blog into selfalienation, are not appropriate. Operating within a market assemblage does not require them to submit to an alienating calculative approach to all blog-mediated relations, but there is the additional option of interacting with other actants on the basis of alienable transactions, something that was not present in the same sense before.2 Disclosure – using tags or otherwise – is the formal means by which a potential divergence from authenticity is announced and through which one facet of the dividual self is distinguished to the audience. We need to focus on the specific content, socialities and practices that change with the monetisation of blogging. A term that reflects the axiomatic of capitalism, the ‘brand’, is a useful entry point into considering how the blog develops within a consumerist logic. As the blogger begins to reconceptualise their online persona as a ‘brand’ – symbolic representations that are held to have a ‘personality’ within marketing discourse – this persona develops affective resonance experienced as parasocial intimacy, and particular socialities emerge around the concept of the ‘lifestyle blog’.

Assembling the Relational Self In Chapter 4 the assumption of an authentic unitary self was questioned, and this discussion will develop the relevance of Deleuze’s concept of

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the dividual self in more detail, drawing upon the experience of blogging as well as anthropological literature to explore the process of the elaboration of self-identity in the context of monetised personal blogging. As discussed in Chapter 4, the concept of the relational self draws upon the ‘dividual’, ‘partible’ or ‘fractal’ person (Strathern 1990; Marriott 1979; Wagner 1991), alternatives to the unitary self that predate blogging. We can also draw upon both Goffman and Deleuze to consider how impression management and the subjectification of the ‘dividual’ help to understand the transformation of the personal blog to the lifestyle blog genre. In Strathern’s argument for a relational conceptualisation of the self, society is not the sum of relations of isolated individuals, but each person develops from the existing relations that form their social context and themselves. Within those given parameters, they adjust, create or reproduce relations according to their intentions (Strathern 1990: 587). Her concept of ‘mediated exchange’ proposes that Melanesian practices demonstrate how ‘persons are able to detach parts of themselves in their dealings with others’ (Strathern 1990: 192) when circulating artefacts or substances. This resonates with Reed’s observation that, ‘while individuals are happy to assert that “my blog is me”, they also insist that “I am not my weblog”’ (Reed 2005: 230) – they are able to detach a part of themselves into their blog. Another approach is Wagner’s ‘fractal person’ (Wagner 1991: 162). Many are familiar with fractal images – where new complexity reveals itself at each level, with the fractal algorithm recursively generating new yet numerically related patterns – and Wagner’s use of the ‘fractal’ metaphor suggests the spiralling movements of relatively stabilised social assemblages, where a fractal person ‘cannot be expressed in whole numbers’ (Wagner 1991: 162) – that is, he is always unfinished, always already becoming and moving, territorialising and subject to deterritorialisation. Similarly, a blog is constantly reassembled, and the incorporation of monetised components such as advertorials and advertisements is one way in which the blogger experiences the relational construction of the self, actualised in this instance through the causal dialogic relations afforded by the blog assemblage. Using this approach, the blog(s) and blogger(s) can be understood both as relatively autonomous actors but also as one assemblage, each moving through spaces of becoming together. The ways in which this can occur relate to the affordances, and this approach allows for agency on both parts, without assigning to either part a primal status in terms of ontological genesis. However, the fractal metaphor invokes a limited mathematical logic that implies a central code that unites, integrates, assembles and

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organises the iterations of self-expression. Saying that the ‘fractal person is … always an entity with relationship integrally implied’ (Wagner 1991: 163; see also Viveiros de Castro 2009), Wagner also invokes a relationality that means that we have to take into account the shifting dynamic centre of relations that also includes non-human components such as the blog and other coded agents. In Deleuze’s ‘control society [where]… the distributed network, … supplants the Panopticon as a diagram of control’ (Bogard 2009: 18–19), the Deleuzian ‘dividual’ self is generated as databases and networks gather and reproduce aspects of the self, modulating flows and opening and closing certain pathways for self-subjectification. As opposed to the individual, the dividual flows and shifts, expressing itself according to context and contingency (Savat 2009a) with shifting parameters but nonetheless a centripetal dynamic. The expression of this dividual can be explored with Goffman’s social interactionist concept of ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1956), which explains how people shift between modes of self-presentation based on a contextual and relational assessment of the relative positioning and status of their perceived audience. This concept has proved popular in discussions of social media self-presentation. However, Goffman describes synchronic face-to-face situations where synchronous cues are ‘given off’ and reciprocal adjustments are made on the fly, and Hogan has argued effectively that online performances are better understood as static ‘exhibitions’ in the asynchronous online environment where audiences are invisible and third party software effectively curates the exhibitions when it filters and distributes them. Goffman’s mapping out of ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions and description of the ‘giving off’ of cues with varying degrees of intentionality can imply a certain duplicity and therefore an essential authentic self that is (mis)represented based on circumstances. However, Ytreberg argues that Goffman ‘explicitly reject[s] any notions of the self as a unitary and transcendent source of expression’ (cited in Ytreberg 2002: 492). Nevertheless, Ytreberg notes how ‘“speaking from the heart” and “being oneself” have been thoroughly appropriated for strategic purposes by the broadcasting industry’ (2002: 492), and we have seen above how important the perception of authenticity is to blogging, as well as the value of this when it comes to the sharing of consumption experiences central to lifestyle blogging. In effect, Strathern has described consumer culture as springing from ‘the perpetual emanations of desire held to radiate from each individual person … In meeting need and desire, the individual person expresses the essential self’ (Strathern 1991: 594). This putative essential (i.e. authentic) self is realised through consumption, and – as Foster argues – advertising and marketing focuses on a

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process of branding that ‘enables consumers to incorporate branded products into their own self-definition’ (Foster 2011: 48). The lifestyle blog is an intensified and textualised version of this consumerist narrative of the self, a particular genre of strategic impression management distributed as asynchronous exhibitions and calculated to leverage the automated curation of search engines and other social media algorithms. These strands of self-presentation online and consumerism are well encapsulated in the concept of ‘microcelebrity … [defined as] the commitment to deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded good, with the expectation that others do the same’ (Senft 2013: 346, see also 2008). The ‘blogger’ identity, as it emerged through participatory media, became part of its market value. ‘Bloggers’ were seen as intrinsically more trustworthy because they only have themselves to offer to an audience, as opposed to being shaped through the institutional support and vested interest that underlies conventional celebrities, stars or politicians. However, as personal bloggers became increasingly entangled with market dynamics, the self-conception as a brand raised a paradox. Marketing discourse likes to develop brand narratives that describe brands in terms of personality and character, in effect attempting to entangle them with cultural and interpersonal relations in a manner that demonstrates the anthropological understanding of social materiality. However, brands are developed as unitary – they are given colour schemes, specific fonts, usage guidelines and strict parameters that are understood to result in the symbolic projection of a distinct and unchanging ‘personality’. A successful self-branded lifestyle blogger needs to do something similar, and the simple awareness of the need to self-brand is likely to project a unitary conception of the relational self. These arguments help us to understand how self-identity, consumerism and impression management are combined in a blog. There is a tripartite relation between the blogger, the blog and the readers: the blogger reacts to this context and adapts the content, form and style based on analytics, or based on reader comments, and develops meaningful parasocial relations with readers. As we have seen in the previous chapter this process is integrated with automated vectors of consumerism and marketing via the agency of server databases that quantify audience behaviour and curate distribution. This returns us to Deleuze’s dividual self, and the lifestyle blog is best understood as another expression of the multifaceted relational self, as flows of code and contingent expression, rather than centring the analysis on a dichotomy of the commercial interests undermining, or transforming, the otherwise unsullied personal blog.

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Consumer Overflowings Bloggers’ informative expressions of taste in consumer posts meant that one facet of the extended parasocial relations with readers developed along a vector of consumerist desire, with the blogger becoming an influential voice in emerging consumption socialities. These voicy consumers were destabilising the advertising industry, who also saw an opportunity to enter the new online spaces, and the emergence of the lifestyle blog evidenced a reterritorialisation that entangled market interests, bloggers and consumers. In marketing and advertising discourse bloggers were often constructed both as a channel for authentic communication to consumers framed as the ‘blogging community’ and as consumers in their own right. At the launch of a radio and online television project featuring bloggers, the representative of the primary sponsor (a global sportswear brand) explained to me that sometimes before they launch a product they put some material online and monitor the response of ‘the real consumers’. When probed a little further she said they monitored comments too but implied that the bloggers are indexical of the real consumers. When I suggested that paying bloggers may detract from their honesty, she said that would not happen, because it would mean losing readers who read them for their authenticity. Brand owners are concerned with managing ‘consumer overflowings’, which are welcome as long as they do not ‘exceed the frames of permissible or manageable use’ (Foster 2007: 719). Often, the initial response by companies was to create their own blogs – either as a permanent fixture or as a temporary component of a marketing plan. For example, leading up to Valentine’s Day, a juice company created two blogs for the characters of ‘Berry’ and ‘Lemon’ to promote a new flavour and employed bloggers to ghost write regular posts to document their ‘love affair’. It culminated in an event in a mall to which bloggers were also invited by BlogAdNet – a typical example of a commercialised blogmeet. In another example an electronics manufacturer invited bloggers as ‘guest writers’ on their specially created blog. Leveraging the name recognition of these bloggers was probably more effective than the standalone ‘Love affair’ blog, but overall asking bloggers to speak directly via their own blog to their readership would have maximised their blog marketing reach the most. Another common method of entangling relations was through competitions that require the production of original content (e.g. a video), which is posted on the advertiser’s site, and votes by readers are required to select the winners. Thus, in 2010 a competition for a beer company required 50 bloggers to post about the competition and provide an entry, then recruit

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ten other ‘teammates’ to comment on their blog and/or SNS such as a Facebook page about the beer and/or the competition. This was a way of stimulating, and simulating, a rhizomatic and exponential audience reach – the prized ‘viral’ effect that leverages social media socialities and networked connections. Therefore, the most important means of entangling the affective and hyperlocal parasocial relations between the readers and the brand became the advertorial. In these, the blogger is expected to weave the brand message, along with hyperlinks and ‘brand phrases’ (both components of an SEO strategy), into the stories she tells – those that are central to her online performance that develops the relations with the readers. By ‘inserting products into stories that shape people’s relationships’ (Foster 2005: 11), the branding goal of stimulating consumers to develop an emotional relationship with the brands is achieved.

Emerging Lifestyles Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle. — Mike Featherstone, ‘Lifestyle and Consumer Culture’ I won’t be able to live my lifestyle without a supplementary income. — Chee Keong Personal blogs detail the bloggers’ everyday life, values and consumption patterns – and when the focus turns to their consumption they become prototypes for the ‘lifestyle’ marketing category that was established in marketing in the late 1970s with the development of the Value and Lifestyle System (VALS). This shift in consumer market qualification moved from a focus on demographics towards psychological profiling based on questions about attitudes and regular practices (Mitchell 1983). In 1982, Marketing News explained that these calculations were enabled by the ‘computer revolution’ and – recalling the discussion on calculative agencies above – explained how ‘a constant stream of data … [has] helped us to redefine the woman’s market’ (‘Social Research Redefines Marketer’s Target Audience’, 1982). Tracing the ‘soft’ news category lifestyle journalism back to the emergence of consumer culture in the 1950s and 60s, Hanusch defines lifestyle journalism ‘as a

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distinct journalistic field that primarily addresses its audiences as consumers, providing them with factual information and advice, often in entertaining ways, about goods and services they can use in their daily lives’ (Hanusch 2012: 5). There is a clear parallel with lifestyle blogging here, pointing to a historical development in institutionalised consumerism whereby increased processing power enabling the tracking and segmenting of consumers interacts with journalistic genres. This use of data mining techniques has become the driving force of social network sites’ delivery of tailored advertising. In the 80s, Featherstone discussed consumer culture and ‘lifestyle’ in a cultural economy, and his ‘new heroes of consumer culture’ (above), fascinated with ‘identity, presentation and appearance’ (1987: 65), seem to prefigure lifestyle bloggers. His account echoes the rejection of dichotomies discussed above, arguing that the ‘instrumental and expressive dimensions should not be regarded as exclusive either/or polarities, rather they can be conceived as a balance which consumer culture brings together’ (1987: 59). Giddens also notes the association of the term ‘lifestyle’ with consumerism, but he widens the argument to discuss the modern focus on the authentic individual self that anchors self-identity within the emergence of a ‘plurality of possible [lifestyle] options’ (Giddens 1991: 81) that characterise modern society, as opposed to more restricted traditional cultures. The primary modern segmentation of public and private domains (currently challenged by the blurring of boundaries between public and private occasioned by social media), and their subdivision, results in ‘specific milieux of action’ (Giddens 1991: 83) associated with particular lifestyles that ‘fulfil utilitarian needs … [and] give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’ (Giddens 1991: 81). This diversity of lifestyle choices thus contributes to the ‘mobile nature of self-identity’ (Giddens 1991: 81), recalling the discussion of the relational or dividual self above. Considering the development of the personal blog into the lifestyle blog, we can see how the lifestyle blog comes to exemplify a particular ‘lifestyle sector’, with the space offered by the personal blog for self-actualisation becoming wholly or in parts (i.e. advertorials, etc.) a conduit for consumerist messages. The segmentation of the on- and offline, and of the blog into blog posts, allows for this differentiation and integration into a self-aware pluralisation of expressions of lifestyle choices that do not necessarily sacrifice the authenticity that animates bloggers’ selfidentity. The personal/lifestyle blogger bridges the primary segmentation of public and private in a symbolic reintegration of these separated areas, arguably embodying a return to an imagined premodern authentic self that integrates with the unitary concept of the brand.

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Consumption requires income, or at least rewards in kind, and there was a relation between the ability of bloggers to move towards a more consumption-based blog and the income that came from advertising. When asked about the significance of their blogging income, interviewees’ most common answer was that it was a welcome addition that supported a more expensive lifestyle. Thus, Chee Keong said: ‘It is very important, I won’t be able to live my lifestyle without a supplementary income’; and Tommy said, ‘I can live a more luxurious life [and] make more savings.’ Alvin and Magdalene mentioned paying off debts, and Adeline said it enabled her to save a lot of her day job salary. The bloggers with smaller audiences, such as Andrew and Thomas, mentioned paying webhosting fees and small expenses. Of all the bloggers I interviewed, only Nicky was living completely off her blog, having recently quit her day job because she could make more by blogging – she was happy because it then allowed her more time to blog about all the things that interest her. Like others whom I had noticed apologising for doing too many advertorials, mentioning a backlog of advertorials, or promising a ‘return to usual blogging’, she had experienced advertorials and commercial activities taking up time for ‘normal’ blogging. Therefore, money from blogging directly supported the consumer lifestyle reflected in the blog, and in addition bloggers needed to invest more time and effort both to attend events that can be written about as well as to network with other relevant bloggers and clients. In this way, the offline life comes to reflect more the online presentation, if only in terms of the scheduling of activities devoted to consumerist lifestyle issues.

The Independence Principle A look at the myBlogS survey data reveals an interesting divide between the Bloggers and Readers regarding opinions on the impact of monetisation. Overall, 51 per cent of the respondents agreed that ‘Blogs are too commercialised nowadays’, with 28 per cent sitting on the fence in the ‘Neutral’ category’. A breakdown of the responses showed little difference between Non-Monetisers compared to Monetisers, but 16 per cent more Bloggers than Readers agreed with the statement. When asked about whether making money from a blog was likely to make it ‘less personal’, Bloggers were again more likely to agree than Readers, with Non-Monetisers more likely than Monetisers to agree by a margin of 18 per cent. When asked a similar question of whether respondents agreed that ‘if a blogger has a blog only in order to make

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money, it’s not a real blog’, Bloggers were more likely to agree than Readers, but the difference between Monetisers and Non-Monetisers was less at 5 per cent. When it comes to acting upon negative impressions of monetisation, a slight minority (46 per cent) agreed that they had ‘stopped reading a blog (or some blogs) which became too commercialised’, with NonMonetisers being 6 per cent more likely to agree. One open-ended comment stated: As for bloggers who started blogging and continue to blog just for the sake of getting freebies or money, I feel that the reading quality tend[s] to be very low and after reading a post or two, there’s no point in reading on.

Thus, although there were significant reservations about the effects of increased monetisation, there was not a majority that actively disapproved and nor did most report actually ceasing to read a blog because it became ‘too commercialised’. Bloggers were more likely than Readers to emphasise the values that can be associated with personal blogging – the emphasis on authenticity, as expressed in the phrase ‘If a blogger has a blog only in order to make money, it’s not a real blog’, with about 10 per cent more of the Bloggers agreeing with this compared to Readers. Overall, therefore, Bloggers were more likely than Readers to express discontent with commercialisation and to question the impact on authentic expression. Some insight into this opinion can be drawn from the results to two questions that asked whether most bloggers would change their usual blog content and blogging style if they were paid. To this, more than 50 per cent of the Monetisers agreed, and less than 20 per cent disagreed. However, when asked the same question about themselves, these trends were almost directly reversed – suggesting Monetisers believe that other bloggers change their content or style to suit clients but not that they do it themselves. The obligation to disclose advertorials was broadly endorsed, with 61–65 per cent agreeing across all categories. A content analysis of the open-ended comments at the end of the survey showed a similar balance of opinions regarding monetisation. The greater proportion (22) made negative comments, 11 were positive and 12 gave balanced opinions. The lesser degree of worry by Readers may explain why there was little public pressure on bloggers to maintain an ‘authentic’ stance in rejecting monetisation opportunities, but instead they need to negotiate the misgivings using both affective labour and by disclosing advertorials. Although I often

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saw disparaging comments, and a few blog posts, about bloggers who wrote advertorials, they stood out as a minority in the many other comments and blog posts. Thus, there is no public in the manner suggested by Foster, but it should be noted that this does not necessarily mean acquiescence but could reflect a lack of organisation. These judgements about the proper use and approach to blogging were, however, tempered by the statement that received the most overall agreement – 74 per cent agreed that ‘Anyone can do what they like with their own blog’. Again, Bloggers registered stronger opinions on this than Readers, 78 per cent compared to 66 per cent, and there was a negligible difference between Monetisers and Non-Monetisers. For example, one comment that was non-committal on the effects of commercialisation said: I personally think that blog is a space for people to share their lives and feelings, and the purpose of blogging is to encourage, inspire and connect with people. However, I have no comments on bloggers who use their blog to earn money or to draw people’s attention, because I think that blog is a personal space – that’s your blog, you can do whatever you want.

This helps to understand the reluctance to organise against or challenge the monetisation of blogs by those who object to it. The principle of independence militates against personal bloggers organising in ways that seek to control blog. Overall, the most tangible group that emerged from the overflows engendered by bloggers were defined by the commercial endeavours of BlogAdNet and AppAds. This was often expressed through the discourse of ‘community’, and the relevance of BlogAdNet and AppAds can be seen in Thomas’ explanation: of course actually nowadays there’s obviously two main communities … because of the blog advertising compan[ies] … actually most of one side’s events you will see the same faces; the other side of events you will see the same faces [i.e. each side has their different regulars].

Thus the ‘communities’ are defined in relation to the blog advertising companies and in opposition to each other. Contributing to this was how BlogAdNet had specifically formed a subcategory for registered bloggers, the ‘Bloggerati’. These were defined in such a way as to discourage bloggers from registering with both BlogAdNet and AppAds, and Bloggerati would get preference for attending events and other advantages. Alvin also referred to the two companies, and while

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welcoming the work they had done for ‘progress’, he also implied that the old PPS community spirit had been ‘killed’. He gave an example of one prominent blogger who had ‘crossed sides’ to AppAds, and when he turned up at a BlogAdNet event he was challenged and questioned on his presence. On another occasion, I attended an AppAds event to which I had been invited by Faizal, and at one point he jokingly introduced me as ‘from the other side’ (i.e. BlogAdNet). Faizal was unusual in that he had opted to have two blogs, one with BlogAdNet advertisements and one with AppAds – something he explained in purely opportunistic terms. Another person I recognised from BlogAdNet events had a ‘I ♥ [BlogAdNet]’ badge on his bag and joked about how it might make him unwelcome. In practice, the degree of commitment to either of these ‘communities’ was weak, and I did not feel any particular pressure, but it was clear that the two groups did not mix much.

Conclusions This chapter has discussed specific instances of changes that can be associated directly with the monetisation of personal blogs. The line of flight engendered by the encounter of the blogging and market assemblage

Figure 9.1 Two BlogAdNet banners at events. The picture on the left (15 March 2008) reads ‘We do blog advertising and build communities’. The picture on the right (7 July 2008) narrates the founding and how BlogAdNet has built ‘a vibrant Community of Bloggers’ (photo by the author).

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was stabilised by a new genre, the ‘lifestyle blog’, within a new social assemblage, which in this case is also often known as the ‘BlogAdNet community’. The latter provides a sociotechnical framework that leverages relevant affordances, provides means to develop interpersonal ties on- and offline, highlights prototypical examples of bloggers through eliciting their presence at blogmeets, provides a ‘Blogger of the month’ spotlight on their website and – last but not least – provides a steady stream of cash and other rewards in kind for those who participate as directed. In their own life experiences, bloggers taking up the monetisation opportunities found their blogs becoming more dominated by lifestyle themes, and their offline activities also became more oriented around the activities organised to generate monetisable content for their blogs. The lifestyle marketing category that dovetails with modern conceptions of an authentic self thus became a vector in assembling both the life experiences and the lifestyle blogs. The claim to authenticity is an important part of the value of blogs, but most participants acknowledged a degree of contrived interest, and the discourse of community was also viewed in the framework of commercial interest. However, blog affordances enable a conscious expression and modulation of aspects of the self, and bloggers can recognise the contingent and limited perceptions of the self that are actualised with particular relations. In this way they are able to calibrate their authentic performance to satisfy both readers and clients (e.g. Abidin 2017). The blog is not a static commodity but a dynamic construction of the ongoing shifting, strategic self-expression of the blogger; it is an assemblage stabilised around sociotechnical affordances that allow dialogical relations between blogger and readers, as well as the expressive practices of the blogger. The accessibility of blogs, whereby any reader can also create a blog, reinforces the underlying principle of independence and mitigates against the development of a public based around a shared interest in non-commercial blogging.

Notes   1. This advertisement appeared on numerous pages in April 2007. No specific URL is available.  2. Although the emergent anonymity affordance offers the basis for a different type of alienable relationship.

CHAPTER 10

October 2009 Regional Blogmeet

Blogmeets: Market Territorialisation Through participant observation and interviews it was clear that offline meetups were an important territorialising force of blogging assemblages and a venue for the development of important socialities and the conventions and norms of related blog genres. The initial blogmeets were organised spontaneously, initially around the medium of the blog and then around blog genres. In 2007 I was aware of five blogmeets and two other blog-related seminars; however, throughout 2008 and 2009 there was normally the opportunity to attend a BlogAdNet meet at least once a month, and I attended sixteen of them. Like all the other participants, these blogmeets enabled me to get to know other regular bloggers and develop relations on- and offline. There were also blogmeets organised by AppAds as well as others relating to different fields of social life, such as politics and commercial ventures. October 2009 saw BlogAdNet’s biggest blogmeet ever – three days and two nights in Singapore, with 400 bloggers and guests from four countries. Modelled on mainstream media industry awards, the ‘Regional Blog Awards’ were sponsored by the ‘Singaporean Travel Association’ (STA) and ‘Potatoes’.1 Ten thousand blogs were nominated and more than 250,000 online votes cast, and the online votes and the decision of a panel of judges were combined to select the winning blogs in eleven categories.2 There were probably many self-nominations, as well as small scale clusters of readers nominating their own favourites in a dispersed and decentred blogger network. Although the judges shortlisted candidates based on qualitative criteria, the most popular bloggers with the most loyal readers were the best placed to win. One of the winners explained how she had ‘bribed’ her readers to vote for her by

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promising to tell them the story of how she met her fiancé if she won3 – highlighting the role of sharing intimacy (Abidin 2015a). Advertorials are mostly commissioned from the higher traffic – ‘A-list’ – bloggers, but this chapter will focus on a large regional blogmeet to show how lower traffic, ‘small’ bloggers such as myself, are also enrolled via competitions that normally require the production of blog posts, and thus require skills similar to those deployed in producing advertorials.

Preparing for the Blogmeet As in most such events, nominees and other notable bloggers were invited, but for the others there were seventy-five pairs of tickets to be won through a – by now familiar – competition format. For the Potatoes sponsor, bloggers had to choose from three themes – work, school or home – to produce a blog post titled ‘Its [sic] Krrunch Time, Get Playful’, and ‘share how Krrunch-ing [Potatoes] crispy chips can ignite your playful spirits, such that you can turn a BORING situation into PLAYFUL one’.4 By requiring competitors to produce blog posts on a theme closely integrated into their branding, the sponsors were effectively stimulating the production of many advertorials. In a press release, the Potatoes Brand Manager explained (with an early use of the now widespread term ‘Influencer’): ‘We expect bloggers to be key influencers in bringing alive our fun image and help consumers realise the unexpected fun in every can of [Potatoes].’5 These branding exercises aim to create an affective resonance through symbolic representations, and in this case the bloggers’ affective labour create personalised narratives that resonate with the desired market segment, of which the bloggers are also seen to be indexical. For the STA, the blog post had to use the brand phrase ‘Indulge in the Uniquely Singapore experience’ for the title and as a sign-off. Offering the official STA website as a source, participant bloggers were instructed to talk about why they would want to visit Singapore and plan an itinerary. Also explaining their strategy in a press release, the Director of Brand Management said, ‘As bloggers are able to offer their personal perspectives, their blogs can be both informative and influential in attracting potential travellers from around the world.’ More than an observation, this was a self-fulfilling expectation: presenting the bloggers as autonomous agents in their public statements, the STA managed their ‘personal perspectives’ through the rules of the competition and thus created a body of blog posts – each with unique

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voices – that are possibly ‘informative and influential in attracting potential travellers’, but would not have existed otherwise. While I had become experienced in submitting successful entries for such competitions, I had also come to appreciate the effort needed. Each post took about ten to twelve hours spread over a few days, with both taking the best part of a week. Starting with a close read of the instructions – resembling an advertising brief – I then checked on what other bloggers had done, gathering ideas and inspiration, and thus in effect imbibing and refreshing the genre norms and conventions (Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen 2010). I then developed ideas for a casual narrative centred on pictures, the usual format for lifestyle blog posts. I enlisted some help to take the photos and then selected and edited them. The Potatoes post showed me in a library and falling asleep over a complicated philosophy book, then by chance peering at the book through the Potatoes tube (looking for the last crumbs); a picture editor was used to produce a kaleidoscope effect, spinning the book’s page into a whirl of colour, then back into another book about The Simpsons and philosophy. The final photo showed me in my garden reading the new book in a comfortable chair, with a beer and Potatoes tube by my side. In keeping with the personal blog genre, the style had to be of a casual and authentic narrative, but the emergent lifestyle blog genre simultaneously allows for fictitious content – as long as this is somehow clearly apprehensible through a disclosure statement or other markers. The Potatoes competition entry narrative was entirely fictitious, but authenticity was served by placing myself in my university and my home, and the entry was tagged as a ‘competition’. The entry for the STA post required less artifice in that I had only to imagine and project an ideal trip to Singapore, although I took care to present Singapore in a positive light. Creating a winning post involves all the skills of a lifestyle blogger – writing, photography, using photo editing software, anticipating the preferences of the audience (in this case, the client and BlogAdNet), reflexively articulating the personal blog genre, and creativity. Some of the competing posts were much more elaborate than mine, using video, stop animation, extensive editing with professional software and so on.

Blogger Hierarchies Although the BlogAdNet blogmeets were normally presented as open to all and based on blogging competitions, there was also an ‘A-list’ of

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bloggers, who did not have to meet the same requirements – this status is directly related to their quantified readership and subsequent perceived earning power for BlogAdNet. These bloggers are thus able to make some demands, and Jaymee explained: I’m sorry to say, if it’s not VIP, I’m not going. I’m not asking for fuss, I’m just asking for free food, beer, that’s it … I’ve done my share of waiting in line at clubs, and all that stuff …

In an interview, Magdalene also reflected on the tensions caused by hierarchies that developed amongst bloggers, talking about the lower traffic bloggers – I wouldn’t say like, you know, ‘small bloggers’ … I mean, it’s natural that people will judge a blog by its traffic, but it doesn’t sound nice to say lah. …

She reflected on an ongoing combined television and online series showcasing ‘top bloggers’ and mentioned how someone commented and said ‘These big bloggers don’t read our, the small bloggers’, blogs anyway so why should we go and read their blogs to support them?’ … I guess it again goes to the idea of hierarchy, who’s bigger or what.

In the build-up to the Regional Awards this differentiation was exposed when Thomas blogged angrily about being treated poorly by BlogAdNet. He wrote that he had decided not to enter the competition, because he lacked the time and implied behind the scenes favouritism – ‘knowing how the people work in sending out invites to “bloggers who are qualified.”’ However, BlogAdNet apparently wanted his participation, and a few days later he received a call from them ‘“offering” me passes FOR 2 [… that] would be allocated automatically for me once i’ve done and submitted the 2 blog posts’.6 However, they had a disagreement over conditions for inviting a second person, hence the angry blog post. Similarly, while chatting to a blogger close to BlogAdNet at the Regional Awards, he implied to me that his competition entry had been a formality. Regarding another event, Ibrahim had told me that he had been paid to attend and write about it – but had been asked not to disclose this to avoid upsetting the other attendees, who were not paid. These perceptions received a further airing when a blogger tweeted that BlogAdNet were biased and that ‘they only invite TOP bloggers.

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all non TOP bloggers r ignored.’ I noticed this after BlogAdNet put out a call on Twitter for ‘any non-top bloggers’ who were going to the Regional Awards. I contacted them and was asked to tweet – using the awards hashtag – that I was a non-top blogger who was invited; I also noticed a few other bloggers doing the same. Thus, BlogAdNet was concerned with appearing to be honest brokers and resolving tensions between the ‘big’ and ‘small’ bloggers.

Sponsoring Presence In the lead-up to the day of departure, most of the preparation and socialising happened online – discussions of what to wear, arrangements to meet up and so on. BlogAdNet had chartered buses to take the attendees to Singapore, and the six-hour drive resembled a typical package tour bus trip. Nonetheless, some blogging details filtered through: before the departure, Chee Keong was taking advantage of some downtime to do a blog post, wirelessly connecting his laptop via his mobile phone, and photo-taking was in evidence at each stop. Many of the A-list bloggers had recently been given Blackberries as part of a promotional campaign, and these mobile devices – status symbols and visible evidence of rewards from blogging – were much in evidence. Arriving at the hotel, there was a delay in booking in, mentioned in a rare criticism of the weekend: [BlogAdNet] has bad event planning skills … Great Gatsby, we had to wait for almost an hour and a half for our room key … I suppose cos it’s free and all we shouldn’t complain, but still. Constructive criticism, no?7

The penultimate line is revelatory – BlogAdNet’s events and prizes are always ‘free’ and as such discourage open expressions of dissatisfaction. Another rare critical voice hinted at this dynamic: ‘I really gotta give it to [BlogAdNet]. How amazing they are able to make people with blogs work for their “invites” to the awards.’8 In effect, apart from the bus company, all of the public moments of the weekend were entangled with sponsors – the term ‘sponsor’ evoking benign support, rather than an ‘advertiser’ investing in public recognition – and it was barely possible to blog about any aspect of the weekend without mentioning them, typically in a positive manner. In the context of the competition, although the underlying logic is certainly market-led, the lack of a clear ‘transactional relation’ meant that the linguistic frame in the blog posts usually reflected a gift model, with the sponsors being thanked by name.

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At an early event in April 2008, when some bloggers stayed on to chat over a drink, Andy was discussing upcoming events and was asked whether the bloggers must blog about the BlogAdNet events they attend. He answered: ‘It’s advised’ and suggested that if they did not like it, the bloggers should try to use ‘constructive criticism’. Personally, I felt it important to blog about these events in a timely manner, to continue to be useful to BlogAdNet, and in conversations with other ‘smaller’ bloggers like myself I noticed a similar attitude. My primary concern was to keep the opportunities for fieldwork flowing, but other bloggers’ incentives were the free cinema tickets, parties and other goodies. I also learnt from Andy that there was a ‘blacklist’ for bloggers who failed to turn up at events after confirming attendance. One blogger explained to me that she had only earned RM2 in a year, but that she had signed up with BlogAdNet to get free cinema tickets and blogged just as much as she felt was required. An analysis of the posts after the Awards weekend showed a striking similarity between most posts in that they followed a similar narrative and used similar pictures. Apart from expressions of personal taste, the photos and sequence of the food at the awards ceremony could often be overlaid almost perfectly, and blog posts about other events such as the visits to tourist attractions also reflected this pattern. Although the similarity could have been due to the bloggers’ sharing tables and/or spending time together, it also suggests a ritualistic facet that points to other purposes. In replicating the offline experience online, these spaces are brought together, enabling a strengthening of ties – not mentioning a person online not only risks depreciating the offline interaction but it also denies them an opportunity for an incoming link and online exposure. Thus, the content of the post may not be as important as mentioning other bloggers and linking to them – and in the context of the lifestyle blog the sponsors also need to be included in this ritualistic enactment of social relations. The Awards ceremony provided explicit opportunities for a central means to enact blogging socialities by providing opportunities for ‘camwhoring’, such as a red carpet and a ‘Step and Repeat’ backdrop – and a sponsoring camera manufacturer had also supplied a couple of photographers whose photos were made available online afterwards, stamped with the logo and offering a competition to vote for favourite photos. Apart from taking photos of each other, bloggers were also taking photos of the plates of colourful new flavours of the sponsor’s potato chips that were spread about, the flower arrangements, the crowds, the people and so on. After sitting down to eat, we chatted with the other bloggers, and comments were passed between bloggers’

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partners about having to wait while bloggers took photos of food (e.g. Figure 10.1). These opportunities for camwhoring integrate sponsors’ logos and goods. Not only are sponsors positioned as enabling the event – placing them in the plane of the blogging assemblage as co-participants – but the logo, hyperlink and references to the sponsors become distributed throughout the machinic assemblage of the interconnected blogs. These factors enable the sponsors to become potential rhizomatic nodes and entangle the brands into the relations of the bloggers and their audience.

Transnational Blog Genres The BlogAdNet co-founders gave short speeches to open the event, followed by a video recounting the story of BlogAdNet, and short profiles of the different national offices’ employees. This presented BlogAdNet as emerging from, integrated with, and contributing to, blogging. During the announcement of winners, the nominated blogs’ precis were educative: the more professional-looking Australian bloggers dominated some niche categories – Geek blog, Fashion and Parenting. The Malaysian and Singaporean blogs tended to look more amateurish and

Figure 10.1 Bloggers photographing food, Singapore. (Blog post, 27 October 2009: p00855, published with permission).

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subsequently more ‘personal’. This transnational showcasing enabled a cross-fertilisation of ideas, styles, techniques and variations on genres – widening bloggers’ interactions, interests and influences beyond the local. One Malaysian blogger noted: ‘Most of the awards are bagged by the Australians and Singaporeans. Gosh, Malaysians really need to buck up. :P’;9 and another reflected that the winners had made her think that her blog was not up to scratch.10 Australians and Filipinos were generally quite surprised at the size of the event, seen as evidence of the popularity of blogging in Malaysia and Singapore. Commenting on the biggest winner of the evening, BlogQueen, an Australian blogger said: Unknown to me before the awards night, she has a massive following in Asia and can be considered an Internet celebrity of some sort … One thing to note is that she is a full-time blogger, even though her blog doesn’t focus on any topic in particular.11

This is a fair description of the personal or lifestyle blog, and his remarks revealed that it was not a common genre in Australia. Another national difference was made clear to me the next day when I talked with the President of the Filipino BlogAdNet branch. I realised that the Filipino contingent contained many non-bloggers: there were some media representatives; potential business clients or partners; a media celebrity who did not have a blog but, I was told, ‘blogs on Facebook’12 – and BlogAdNet were planning to help him launch a blog; and two well-known cosplay13 women. For the recently inaugurated Filipino BlogAdNet branch, the Singapore trip was an opportunity to promote blogging to these public figures. The President explained that although the bigger blogs tended to have more readers, there were less blogs in the Philippines, possibly because less people owned their own computers – thus some ‘evangelising’ for blogs was needed. One reason for more blogebrities in Malaysia/Singapore could have been a combination of relatively high internet access for youth (e.g. as opposed to the Philippines) and the relatively fewer outlets for youth expression (e.g. as opposed to Australia). These national differences were important indicators of how blogging is embedded in local sociocultural and economic contexts, and as BlogAdNet was spreading to other countries, it was also attempting to carry the lifestyle blog genre with it as a proven means of entangling bloggers and companies, although I was also told that Australian bloggers tended to resist advertorials.14 The size of the event, the numbers and the sponsors all helped to enrol bloggers and advertisers into the

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lifestyle blogging genre by demonstrating the viability and stability of the assemblage that brings together bloggers with opportunities for self-promotion and advertising.

The Monetised Blogmeet The blog-centric nature of the awards ceremony was a reminder of the earlier blogmeets that also focused on blogs, but as time went by the BlogAdNet meets became mostly structured around marketingled activities and incentives to blog about the brands. Nonetheless, the blogmeets remained a central opportunity for genre-based practices to develop into blogging socialities. The myBlogS survey returned data that showed that Monetisers were more likely to have met their favourite bloggers in person: 45 per cent of the Monetisers had met half or more of the bloggers they read regularly, compared to 35 per cent of the Non-Monetisers; the trend continues with ‘a quarter’ and switches to more Non-Monetisers being likely to say ‘Very Few’ or ‘None’. When asked how many of those they met in person they considered to be a personal friend, the differences were not so pronounced, but the trends are reversed to some extent: 60 per cent of the Non-Monetisers considered ‘Half or more’ of the bloggers they had met in person to be personal friends, compared to 54 per cent of the Monetisers. However, there were also more Non-Monetisers who considered ‘Very few’ to be personal friends. Regarding those that they met online before they met offline, a larger difference between the Monetisers and Non-Monetisers emerges: 45 per cent of the Monetisers answered ‘Half or more’, compared to 22 per cent of the Non-Monetisers; and this difference is reversed for those who answered ‘None’, with 23 per cent of the Monetisers choosing this compared to 44 per cent of the Non-Monetisers. Overall, therefore, there seems to be a higher chance of Monetisers translating their online relations to offline relations but not necessarily into more intimate relations. Considering that 90 per cent of the Non-Monetisers did not attend any blogmeet and that 69 per cent of the Monetisers are registered BlogAdNet bloggers, it is most likely conclusion that the BlogAdNet’s blogmeets enabled these offline encounters and that those bloggers that Non-Monetisers read regularly are personal friends unrelated to blogging in the first instance. These correlations relate to offline meets but not necessarily to monetisation per se. To probe the data from this angle, a ‘Monetisation Quotient’ (MQ) scale was developed. This graded respondents

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according to how many monetisation activities they engaged in, such as hosting advertisements, doing advertorials, selling links, receiving free cinema tickets or restaurant meals. This quotient tended to reflect the positive relationship noted between those who attended blogmeets and stronger relationships, and there was a trend towards a positive relation between higher MQ and bloggers having met their favourite bloggers in person. This data suggests that the BlogAdNet meets are significant in enabling bloggers to meet in person, meaning that those personal bloggers who meet in person are more likely to do so in the context of market-oriented activities.

Conclusions The organisation and expense of the Blog Awards ceremony was impressive, and although BlogAdNet’s annual award ceremonies have continued, none of them matched the scale and transnational impact of this first one. Its discursive recognition of different blog genres and acknowledgement of their economic relevance represented an important stage in the development of blogs. In retrospect, it also represented a peak point of the blog as the central medium for what have now become known as ‘influencers’ or ‘microcelebrities’, whose online presence became distributed across different SNSs, although the blog still remains an important online anchor for many. As new SNSs such as Twitter became popular, the pattern of organising offline meets to gather users together repeated itself, demonstrating the inherent pull between on- and offline socialities. As the fieldwork progressed, it had become clearer that the BlogAdNet meets became less centred on blogging as an activity. In earlier blog meets it was common to have an occasion for bloggers to introduce their blogs or for selected ones to be presented, but this blog-centricity tended to be displaced by a timetable oriented around client-driven activities aimed at showcasing the brand being promoted while also creating photo opportunities – such as prize-giving sessions led by local celebrities or entertaining activities – that suit the requirements of the lifestyle genre. The need to attend these events and to create advertorials also had the effect of territorialising other consociational practices simply by displacing them in terms of time and space. In terms of the nascent blog socialities, these commercially oriented blogmeets represented perhaps the most powerful influence of BlogAdNet; the number of blogmeets increased these far beyond anything previously available and, given the importance of face-to-face contacts in the perception of ‘community’, have successfully stabilised

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an assemblage of bloggers around consumer-oriented blogmeets – effectively monetising blog socialities and the labour of developing and maintaining social relations through blogging. Access to these blogmeets was regulated through BlogAdNet and required labour in the form of blogposts and presence. Bloggers with larger audiences were paid to attend and were offered easier access. As such, they are examples of the striation of the plane of personal blogging through the combined sociotechnical agencies of audience measurement instruments, online search algorithms and various company-specific calculations of ROI. This differentiation, a striation of the plane of personal blogging, is required because of the need to quantify and measure blogger relevance to advertising.

Notes  1. Both pseudonyms, the second is a leading potato chips manufacturer.  2. Fieldnotes dated 23 October 2009. The categories were: Most Influential, Blog Shop, Geek Blog, Entertainment Blog, Celebrity Blog, Travel Blog, Parenting Blog, Fashion Blog, Food Blog, Original Blog Design, Hidden Gem, and Region’s Best Blog.  3. Channel News Asia interview, 26 October 2009.  4. Blog post, September 2009: p00753.  5. Press release. Details withheld to preserve confidentiality.  6. Blog post, Thomas, 25 October 2009: p00713.  7. Blog post, TenQ, 27 October 2009: p00853.  8. Blog post, AyBeeCee, 29 October 2009: p00854.  9. Blog post, kalibr8, 7 November 2009: p00856. 10. Blog post, Karina, 30 October 2009: p00857. 11. Blog post, 30 October 2009: p00858. 12. Where he had 18,000 followers. 13. Cosplay: short for ‘costume play’; where enthusiasts dress up as popular fictional characters. 14. Interview with Magdalene, 22 October 2009; Interview with Sebastian, 25 September 2009 (note that these opinions on Australian bloggers may come from the same original anecdotal source).

Conclusions The Dividual Self and Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog

The ‘blog war’ that introduced this history of the lifestyle blog placed us in a premonetised period of the blogosphere, when personal blogs were mostly driven by intrinsic motivations and a desire for attention. As advertising income became more common, the chapters above show how the key attributes of the personal blog genre – authenticity and parasocial relations – were vectors for the territorialisation of personal blogging by commercial logic and the subsequent emergence of the lifestyle blog. This concluding chapter will look back on this historical development and consider how it can illuminate ongoing developments. This book is the first to look at this process in an Asian context and to focus on lifestyle bloggers who are uniquely concerned with recounting their everyday life, similarly to the ‘camgirls’ studied by Senft (2008) but different to the professionals discussed by Marwick, who are more generally occupied with branding themselves as purveyors of professional services via social media (2013). In retrospect, we can see that blogs have taken the back seat in terms of most online social interactions and the ongoing professionalisation of what are known as ‘microcelebrities’ (Marwick 2013; Senft 2008) or ‘influencers’, a marketing term that has been adopted in scholarly circles (Abidin 2015a). Nonetheless, the material covered in this book shows how these trends were prefigured in the various activities and the polycasting of lifestyle bloggers, who deployed a variety of modalities to share their lives and engage in affective labour to engage audiences and introduce brands into their shared relations. The blog is still relevant to most Malaysian lifestyle bloggers and influencers, and follow-up content analysis and interviews in 2016 showed how most of them still have a blog that functions as a

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quasi-permanent and autonomous base on the internet, but they need to use various other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat to engage with most of their audiences and deliver them to their clients. Considering the subgenres of the blog discussed in chapter four, it seems that various functions of the blog have become specialised, spinning off in lines of flight, in various SNSs. For example, many bloggers learnt to use photographs to anchor successful blog posts, and using photographs to update the blog became a relatively easy way to increase views. This presaged Instagram’s stream of images with minimal text. The networking function of blogs, where friends moving away from home and/or overseas could keep up with friends and family, has now been supplanted by the more convenient Facebook.

Entrepreneurs of the Dividual Self The personalisation affordances of social media allow users to display facets of their identity, enabling extended parasocial relations based on expectations of authenticity. Lifestyle bloggers rely on the interest readers have in their lives and personality and as such need to regularly provide narratives and snapshots of moments in their lives as well as selective intimate and private thoughts (Abidin 2014, 2015a). The ‘blogger’ identity is the core of their market value and their appeal to readers. A ‘blogger’ is understood to be original, authentic, dedicated and opinionated. The fact of being a successful ‘blogger’ inherently implies their authenticity, because bloggers only have themselves to offer, as opposed to celebrities, stars or politicians, who are seen to have overtly constructed personas and who owe their success to institutionally developed narrative persons – fictional or contrived. The original personal (or ‘diary’) blog was a self-realisation and selfexpression project, hence the axiomatic statement: ‘I blog for myself’. However, the inherently public aspect of blogs engendered a tension between this inherent motivation and instrumental motivations such as a desire for an audience and/or money that are ostensibly extrinsic to the self-realisation project. This tension underlies the debate around disclosure and the need for plausible deniability that is effectuated using tags and disclosure statements – impersonal markers that mark out the transactional nature of the post and thus attempt to resolve this tension. Goffman’s theory of impression management frames this issue, and although most social media users are not familiar with the theory, in everyday life they are conscious of the lived reality of presenting different

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‘faces’ in different social contexts. This is heightened in the current online environment, where manipulated images and asynchronous interaction enable experimentation with different self-images and observation of similar practices by others. Hogan has argued for a conceptualisation of online self-presentation as ‘exhibitions’ (Hogan 2010), and it is notable that these visible artefacts of impression management remain online to be perused and repurposed when – for example – a bloggers’ statements can be traced and compared, and inconsistencies can be demonstrated. In the premonetised personal blog, a common criticism that reflected the tension between intrinsic and instrumental motivations (that mirror Goffman’s front and back regions) was the ‘hitslut’ pejorative. I expected a collective reaction to the ostensibly inauthentic monetisation of personal blogging, but although there were sporadic criticisms of blog monetisation in the blogosphere, these remained a minority and without significant influence. Maybe the lack of overall objection to the monetisation and the simultaneous continuance of a critique based on authenticity were because the same dynamic tension continued – whether it is for money or for hits, the dynamic revolves around the distance between the intrinsic and external motivation, not the proximate cause of the division itself. Thus, although the idea of an authentic self is central to the modernist self-realisation project (Giddens 1991) and is based in an essentialist logic of a unitary self, it seems that the idea of a relational self is a better way to understand how (in)dividuals negotiate the tension between their intrinsic and instrumental motivations. This book has argued that the dividual self (Deleuze 1992) helps to overcome the (in)authentic dichotomy and to explain the ways in which blogger selfpresentations can be simultaneously felt as partial yet authentic. The logic of the ‘control society’ (Deleuze 1992; Savat 2009a) can be seen in the way that bloggers’ online self-presentations, and the blog posts, are filtered and re-presented in different contexts according to searches and categorisations in blogtals. The advertising clients seek to attach their brands to the aspects of the bloggers’ selves that are the most conducive to being algorithmically redistributed to potential consumers. Lövheim has noted that increased commercialisation in personal blogs was managed to some degree by emphasising ‘intimacy, trust and spontaneity’ (2011: 13), and the successful lifestyle blogger develops an expressive style that appeals to readers, enables dialogical interactions and enhances extended parasocial relations. The form that the market-driven assemblage takes is dictated by the need to qualify products/brands and create relations with the readers. The skilful lifestyle blogger is an entrepreneur of the dividual self, reducing the

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apparent distance between their own supposed authentic self and the brands’ symbolic narrative – this strategic deployment of the dividual self underlies blog monetisation and social media influencer practices (see also Abidin and Gwynne 2017).

Blog Monetisation and the Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog Genre This book started with the question – how did the introduction of market-oriented practices and components affect personal blogging? The fact that most bloggers in this study were successful personal bloggers before monetisation was commonplace is important in understanding the historically contingent processes. There was a linear chronological development from a period where monetisation was not an option to ubiquitous advertising and advertorials, but both the internet and the bloggers were always already embedded in a sociocultural context characterised by pervasive market-related practices. The bloggers were already subjects in a consumerist developing economy, where wealth creation and socio-economic development is not only a central feature of national discourse but also inscribed into their urban environment, characterised by the mushrooming of entire suburbs and the relocalising of market and entertainment activities into malls. When I first started blogging in 2004, bloggers’ main motivation was reinforcing existing offline ties, sharing common interests and attracting varying degrees of attention, and as new audiences developed, networked publics were forming around blogs as a generic medium for a variety of interests. In 2007 the monetisation of blogs was rapidly gathering steam but was still a novel phenomenon. In 2008, when I started the Topical Gardening blog, I had to add AdSense and Amazon affiliate functions by myself – inserting relevant code into the source code of the blog – but by April 2009 I noticed that these options were integrated into the interface and presented as a naturalised option wherein the choices presented were to sign up or to indicate that you already have done so. Blogging was always reliant on an assumption of authenticity, and this book has shown how an earlier focus on authenticity did not disappear as the territorialisation of personal blogs by marketing and advertising interests progressed, but nonetheless it was reconfigured to allow for monetising activities. The adaptation of sociotechnical innovations often depends on their congruence with pre-existing socioeconomic patterns, and the use of blogs for advertising is an example of this. BlogAdNet was instrumental in locally enabling and amplifying

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this territorialisation, while specific socialities and software recursively interacted to enable the development of a blog advertising market. The analysis of advertorials showed how they represent a mutation of the consumer post and are determined in the last instance by the client. Although not all bloggers agree to do all advertorials, they are the most lucrative form of blog monetisation and are a clear example of the internalisation of ‘voicy consumers’ to stabilise the advertising market. Disclosure debates draw upon the underlying discourse of authenticity and demonstrate the tensions caused by paid blog posts. The comments remained a powerful dialogical dynamic and a constant reminder of the audience’s need to be included and at least symbolically interacted with. The reframing of reciprocal linking and clicking as click fraud was a clear case of the influence of the calculative agencies and the need for BlogAdNet to discipline bloggers in the interests of guaranteeing the authenticity of interest in advertisements, shifting from a focus on the authenticity of bloggers’ interests. Finally, the blogmeets represent perhaps the most powerful influence of BlogAdNet; they increased far beyond anything previously available and, given the importance of faceto-face contacts in the perception of ‘community’, successfully stabilised an assemblage of bloggers around consumer-oriented blogmeets. Thus, the blogging assemblage was becoming reconfigured around causal relations that took monetisation as the default. This was demonstrated when bloggers occasionally felt the need to emphasise when some positive mention of a shop or service was not paid for. A variety of specialised blog genres also developed in areas such as travel and fashion, and some bloggers developed ‘blogshops’ – online retail sites – that occasionally went offline too (Figures 11.1–11.3). Slater argues that the important distinction of the market economy is the potential for specific, contingent, alienable relations (2002b), and within the same blog it is possible to flag different posts as having different meanings, enabling readers to use their familiarity with the blogger to interpret the advertorial. In effect, they use the totality of their interactions with the blog to qualify the blogger and the brands, or good, presented in the advertorial. At each stage there is a different entanglement, and the ability to disentangle and re-entangle is important. Advertorials qualify a good for consumption by readers, but the good provided to the client through lifestyle blogs is affective labour (Carah 2014; Hardt 1999), an intangible qualifying service that entangles the brand name and goods with the bloggers’ readers – creating relational networks animated by desires focused on the brands. The value of this labour is indexed through the proxy of engagement and viewing statistics that are afforded by the ability to track readers’

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interactions with the blog. Lifestyle bloggers also become skilled at interpreting and improving those statistics through using different modalities, narratives and interactions.

Affording Genre Socialities This book emphasises the personal blog as a dialogical medium, noting how the blogging assemblage develops beyond the blog/blogger

Figure 11.1

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Figure 11.2

Figures 11.1–11.3 A shopping mall in 2011 where the ‘Offline blogshop’ offers products sourced from online blogshops (photos by the author).

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assemblage to include extended parasocial relations between bloggers and readers. The most active commenters were often bloggers too, engaging in polycasting and forming heterogeneous assemblages that articulate both on- and offline. The causal relations effectuated via the comments, hyperlinks, blogtals, blogmeets and the discourse of community are proposed as central to this phenomenon. These causal relations are afforded by the blog, and combined with the ability to record views and clicks the personal blog became a vehicle for advertising. The monetisation of blogs was enabled in the first instance by the ability for individuals to create their own websites, blogs and share aspects of their lives with relative ease. However without the ability to track audiences that is afforded by the internet architecture (Bermejo 2009), this would not have been as successful. This book has proposed a two-step development of the concept of affordances that takes into account the malleability and inherent sociability of coded media that nonetheless present themselves as mostly material to the end-users. The a priori affordances are manipulated by the coders and owners of the platforms, and although the emergent affordances could not exist without these a priori affordances, they are not determined by them. Nonetheless, they can be seen as framing the emergent affordances – limiting and suggesting particular forms of interactions that emerge as genre socialities, patterns of textual interaction that become associated with particular platforms. Most of the ethnographic data and analysis presented in this book could have been explained without reference to the a priori affordances, but analytical logic led me to use an actor-network chain of cascading affordances as a more holistic explanation. Most social media users are used to opening up their interface and discovering that an a priori affordance has been added or taken away – these would also be referred to as ‘features’ in other analyses (Evans et al. 2017). This reflects an aspect of web activity where, more so than in many other spheres of life, users have learned to expect change as a default and also that they have less control over interfaces that are provided for free. Recognising this inherent instability and power that flows from being able to adapt the platform at will is important (Van Dijck 2013), hence the use of affordances to emphasise the relations that build the platform in the first place. The second reason for using the a priori category is that there are many similar platforms online, and distinguishing between them requires categorising them in terms of what they offer users – although this will not determine the actual use. There is thus a causal relationship between the underlying technology and the emerging socialities. The concept of the assemblage

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is helpful here, as it emphasises the directed nature of how components relate causally, but it does not rest on an ability to represent a fixed condition and proposes fluid movements. An assemblage recognises causality, materiality and agency, but it is never complete; it is a multiplicity of material and expressive nodes that territorialise and deterritorialise through the intensive causal relations. As Lüders, Prøitz and Rasmussen (2010) suggest, a blog genre reflects an assemblage of technological, social and expressive components. With social media in general, genre socialities develop through the medium that also becomes the form of the socialities. In the deterritorialisation and destabilisation introduced by the monetisation of blogs, and in particular BlogAdNet’s business strategy aimed at establishing a new market, there was a line of flight that formed a new genre – the lifestyle blog – that is a result of the blog affordances being used with a new purpose in mind, commercialisation.

Final Thoughts Currently, the most successful media corporations in the world – Google and Facebook – are based on gathering user data to sell advertising. Alongside other SNSs they have distinguished themselves by dominating the media industry without depending on their own production of content. They have developed models that generate capital from that which makes us human – our social relations – handily delivered by the free labour of users. The quantified and coded aggregation of users’ actions into unparalleled databases that store and render parsable every single online action of users suggests that we should carefully examine Deleuze’s predictions of a control society, where digital technologies enable the substitution ‘for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled’ (Deleuze 1992: 7). Networked publics are stabilised by shared socialities that find industrial expression in genres, and articulating those genres as well as navigating socialities is what constitutes the affective and emotional labour that is monetisable. Unlike the majority of users, lifestyle bloggers do not provide free labour and have been able to leverage social media to become entrepreneurs of the dividual self, skilled in navigating the networked connections and quantified qualifications that make up the commoditised social relations embedded in social media networks. In the monetisation of personal blogging, we saw one facet of this trend towards leveraging the activities of internet users as labour. The original impetus of BlogAdNet was oriented around a need to localise

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advertising, and although the market logic of advertising is global, there is a recognised need to adapt branding to local cultures and contexts. In addition, national markets are still the building blocks of corporations’ global structure, with budgets and sales targets being measured in national frames. Abidin has written extensively about lifestyle bloggers and influencers in Singapore (e.g. Abidin 2013; Abidin and Gwynne 2017), and much of her work complements what is contained in this book. Singapore and Malaysia share many historical and cultural traits, and there is not much evidence of lifestyle blogging emerging in a mature form so early elsewhere. However, without more comparative research it is difficult to state with certainty that this phenomenon has any particularly Malaysian or Singaporean sociocultural particularities. Most people’s online activity complements and mirrors their offline life, but by understanding lifestyle bloggers and influencers we are able to imagine ways in which an online presence becomes integral to and perhaps predominates in daily activities, self-presentation and impression management. Lifestyle bloggers and social media influencers offer us rough prototypes of future ways of being human that incorporate non-human agencies and integrate on- and offline interactions. This book has explored how these interpersonal and social interactions have become an economic resource, and offers itself as a contribution to the ongoing research and public debate in this important area.

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Index

actant, 14, 21, 23, 26, 53, 54, 69, 84, 94, 97, 166 actor-network theory, 21–22, 125 affordances and, 21, 26 assemblage and, 11, 23, 27 Deleuze and Guattari and, 27 economy and, 108 methodology and, 22 power and, 22 advertisement, 19, 48, 149, 160, 162, 165, 176, 180 banner, 134, 138, 145, 162 advertising, 1, 20, 61, 72, 95, 123, 130, 131, 132, 134, 142, 146, 151, 158, 162, 163, 196 algorithms and, 172, 191 audience measurement and, 27, 56, 113, 114, 146, 188 commissions, 147 culture and, 128, 145, 164 destabilised, 170, 193 nation and, 108, 198 advertorial, 9, 133, 139, 148–61, 173, 192, 193 affective labour and, 193 Australia, 185 authenticity and, 141, 148, 157–59 consumerism and, 61, 160 parasocial relations and, 160, 171, 193

production of, 124, 144, 148, 160, 179 self and, 166, 167 subgenre, 153–55 affect, 7, 26, 46, 61, 69, 86, 93, 127, 128, 129, 137, 166, 171, 179 affordances, 13–20 a priori, 17, 18–19, 24, 46, 83, 84, 97, 196 accessibility, 20, 56, 106, 112, 164, 177 agency and, 27, 69 anonymity, 1, 19, 44, 46, 73, 86, 88, 90, 100, 102, 115, 120, 156, 159, 177 assemblage and, 26, 70 cascading, 17, 24, 196 community and, 83–84 computers, 15–16 disembodiment, 19, 35, 46, 83, 102, 104 emergent, 11, 17, 19–20, 22, 82, 94, 105, 196 features, as, 17 genre and, 54, 69 hyperlinking, 13, 15, 17, 19, 35, 40, 44, 48, 56, 84, 101, 104, 148, 149, 171, 184, 196 interactivity, 12, 20, 26, 56, 62, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 120, 146 modularity, 17, 19, 47, 166 multimedia, 13, 18, 43, 97

218 | Index

perfect reduplication, 18, 97, 100 personalisation, 20, 26, 56, 65, 71, 131, 166, 190 relational, 13–15 self and, 67, 69 social, 16 socialities and, 82, 83–84, 85, 94, 196 storage, 18, 64, 100 typology, 18–20 agency, 11, 14, 21, 22, 33, 40, 46, 103, 121, 145, 167 assemblage and, 25, 27, 197 community and, 84, 103–4 non-human, 17, 21, 25, 26, 27, 44, 54, 120, 198 sociotechnical, 188 alienable, 133 relations, 193 transactions, 127, 142, 166 anonymity, 28, 30, 35, 36, 42, 43, 77, 78, 93, 116, 119, See affordances AppAds, 97, 108–21, 162, 175–76, 178 arborescent, 25, 160 assemblage, 22–27, 165 affordances and, 83 blog, 48, 53, 54, 105–6, 177 blogging, 125, 144, 149, 151, 178, 184, 193, 194 consumer, 171 hyperlocal, 82, 105 lifestyle, 177 machinic, 54 market, 125–26, 130, 135, 144, 145–46, 151, 165, 166 on- and offline, 48, 94, 196 person and, 159 self and, 64, 166–67 social, 25, 82, 84, 105–6, 167, 177 asynchronous, 12, 57, 89, 104, 152–53, 157, 160, 168, 169, 191 audience, 31, 35, 36, 41, 47, 56, 93–94, 120, 131, 133, 145, 169, 189 active, 40, 44, 62, 193 commodification, 132, 137, 146 disinterest, 31, 43, 63, 190 invisible, 168 measurement, 52, 112–14, 133–35, 138, 146, 169, 196

authenticity, 11, 26, 31, 33, 43, 53, 120, 124, 133, 141, 156, 163, 164, 174, 177, 180, 189, 190, 192–93 comments, 115, 118 community and, 141 expectations, 65–67 monetisation and, 154, 170 self and, 67–68, 70, 155, 166, 168, 172, 177, 191 axiom, 166 blog advertising network, 108–9, 112, 114, 145 blog war, 28, 189 BlogAdNet, 95, 103, 108, 130, 132, 160, 162, 176, 178, 184, 192 blogmeet, 80, 102 commercialisation, 170, 186–87 community and, 102, 162, 193 competition, 179 history, 71–72 blogosphere, 28, 29, 30, 77, 81, 83, 95, 105, 163, 165, 189 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 31, 97 brand, 128, 129, 131, 172 affect and, 130 ambassador, 140 culture, 198 phrase, 160, 171, 179 relational, 129, 132, 138, 140, 148, 159, 184, 191, 193 self and, 166 SEO and, 137 calculative agencies, 125, 127, 135, 137, 169, 171, 193 Callon, Michel, 21, 108, 110, 114, 125, 126–27, 128, 130, 135, 145, 163 camwhore, 60, 97 celebrity, 93, 185 chat box, 105, 114 room, 101, 130 clicks, 15, 85, 96, 130, 158, 196 click through rate, 133, 134, 138 fraud, 134, 193 comments, 20, 32, 44, 68, 74, 77, 152, 159 advertorial and, 138–40, 155–56

Index | 219

censoring and, 33, 39, 52, 115–16 dialogic, 31, 93, 94, 193 socialities, 31, 86–93, 104, 112, 120, 121, 136 typology, 87–89 commodification, 145, 164, 166, See audience commodity, 164, 177 community, 28, 95, 130, 137, 187, 196 blog, 102–4, 170 BlogAdNet, 117, 132, 134, 141, 162, 175, 177 critique of, 82–84, 106 imagined, 108, 109, 118 of practice, 83 control society, 69, 168, 191, 197 DeLanda, Manuel, 23, 24, 25, 48, 106, 126 Deleuze, Gilles, 47, 69, 168, 197 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 23, 25, 26, 126, 160 capitalism, 165 dialogical, 110, 119, 155, 167 advertorial, 156–57 assemblage, 141 medium, 93–94, 194 diary, 30, 40, 52, 54, 56, 58, 62–63, 64, 190 digital literacy, 16, 38, 44, 109, 121 disclosure, 133, 148, 165, 166, 181, 190, 193 advertorial, 143, 150–52, 155, 159, 174 legal, 163 dividual self. See self domestication, 46, 52 economy of qualities, 108, 125, 127–28, 130, 145–46 email, 34, 36, 47, 83, 91, 94, 111, 113, 116, 117, 115–19 externalities, 125, 130 Facebook, 2, 145, 171, 185, 190, 197 field, 24, 97, 127, 145, 178 fundamental law, 11 of blogging, 43 fieldwork, 4–6, 163, 183

forum, 12, 83, 84, 91, 92, 105, 161 Foster, Robert, 129, 159, 163, 169, 170, 171 Foucault, Michel, 47, 69 fractal person. See person friend, 30, 59, 66, 85, 86, 186 blogger, 104–5 gender, 4, 60 genre, 4, 5, 12–13, 18, 28, 35, 40, 46 advertising, 144–45 blogs, 53–56 lifestyle blog, 169, 177, 187, 192–94 personal blog, 30, 42, 43–44, 56–57, 69, 86 practices, 76, 78, 79, 87, 92, 97, 121, 159, 180, 186 socialities, 194–97 subgenre, 56–61 territorialising, 80, 178 transnational, 184–86 Giddens, Anthony, 67, 172, 191 gift economy, 124 Goffman, Erving, 67, 168, 190 Google, 52, 95, 110, 117, 134, 136, 137, 145, 197 heterarchy, 112, 144 hierarchy, 30, 85, 180–82 holoptism, 152 I blog for me, 62–63, 83 identity, 54, 115, 123 blogger, 73, 78, 103, 106, 169, 190 self, 167, 169, 172 impression management, 46, 67, 102, 167, 168, 169, 190–91 income, 1, 29, 55, 104, 108, 132, 133, 155, 158, 171, 173, 181 influencer, 2, 179, 187, 189, 198 interactivity. See affordances intermediary, 21, 128, 166 journalism, 13, 55, 73, 103, 143, 163 lifestyle, 171–72 labour, 164, 188

220 | Index

affective, 8, 124, 125, 129–30, 133, 137, 138–44, 174, 179, 189, 197 free, 197 immaterial, 129 Latour, Bruno, 21, 22, 46, 52, 83, 96, 135 lifestyle, 164, 170, 171, 173, 171–73, See assemblage, See journalism, See genre authenticity, 168, 172, 177 cultural economy, 172 genre, 78, 144, 146, 158, 167, 180, 183, 185 identity, 172 self and, 169 line of flight, 96, 146, 176, 197 Mahathir, Dr, 73, 81, 135 market economy, 127, 146, 163, 193 marketing, 2, 123–24, 131, 134, 143, 146, 147, 160, 164, 166, 168–69, 170, 171, 177, 189, 192 blogmeets, 97, 186 media, 4, 12, 22, 24, 63 digital, 13, 15 industry, 132, 197 mainstream, 1, 3, 29, 43, 55, 71, 73, 74, 76, 80, 106, 133, 140, 160 mobile, 14 new, 27, 133 participatory, 169 practices, 67 media, 93 mediator, 21, 128, 132 memory, 18, 63, 64 microcelebrity, 2, 9, 169, 187, 189 modulation, 69, 70, 168, 177 monetarisation, 164 monetisation, 2, 61, 142, 173–74, 175, 186–87 authenticity, 163, 191 blogs, 52, 108, 110, 133, 146, 165, 166, 177, 192, 193, 196 morality, 44, 53, 67, 103, 126, 127 myBlogS survey, 5, 59, 63, 65, 86, 98, 104, 132, 135, 151, 154, 155, 173, 186

Najib Razak, 81 nation, 25 obligatory point of passage, 21, 22, 97 open source, 105, 124 overflow, 108–9, 109–12, 115, 125, 130–31, 146, 163, 170, 175 parasocial extended, 93–94 extended relations, 82, 101, 105, 124, 130, 137, 138, 140, 146, 148, 157, 170, 190, 191, 196 interaction, 153, 155 intimacy, 166 relations, 26, 43, 67, 165, 166, 169 participant observation, 2 person fractal, 47, 167–68 partible, 47, 159, 167 persona, 30, 43, 66, 121, 134, 166 phatic, 86, 101 politics, 1, 3, 22, 48, 55, 63, 76, 77, 78, 76–78, 81, 178 polycasting, 94, 189, 196 power, 84, 104, 123, 126, 196 practices, 11, 12, 15, 84, 127 advertising and, 128, 164 blogging, 17, 18–20, 28, 54, 68, 83, 97, 104, 136, 146, 149, 166, 177 emergent, 71, 83, 144 everyday, 15, 46, 129 labour and, 129 market and, 192 public relations and, 144 reflexive, 69 textual, 54, 69 Principle of Independence, 11, 63, 83, 88, 91, 105, 120, 121, 152, 156, 175, 177 produser, 130, 152 prosumer, 130 public good, 20, 164 public relations, 8, 55, 109, 115, 131, 142, 144, 163 public sphere, 76, 78 publics, 115, 121, 175, 177

Index | 221

fair trade, 163 networked, 8, 96, 108, 120, 192, 197 recursive, 95 reality television, 53 reflexivity, 46, 60, 64, 67, 68, 76, 84, 96, 145, 148, 180 rhizome, 11, 24–25, 58, 61, 70, 124, 160, 171, 184 ritual, 91, 105, 183 genre, 53 search, 18 engine, 19, 40, 42, 48, 52, 59, 70, 85, 110, 116, 134, 136 engine optimisation, 136, 137, 169 self actualisation, 46, 67, 172 dialogical, 68 dividual, 47, 69, 70, 166, 168, 191 flexible, 46 relational, 68, 167, 169 unitary, 47, 68, 155 social media, 2, 16, 17, 40, 44, 110, 163, 168, 169, 171, 172, 189, 190, 197 social network site, 2, 14, 29, 95, 96, 172, 187, 190, 197 social ties, 25, 54, 112, 124, 137, 177, 183, 192 weak, 101 socialities affordances and, 17 blog, 52, 61, 85, 94–102, 104, 106, 112, 121, 148, 157, 159, 183, 186, 187

community and, 84, 104, 142, 162, 187 consumption, 170 digital, 84, 166 emergent, 82, 105, 145 hashtag, 84 market, 141 parasocial, 146 sociotechnical, 108, 126, 135, 146, 163, 177, 192 sockpuppet, 109, 115–18, 119, 121 SoPo, 3, 53, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 76–80, 86, 89, 90, 92, 97, 105 subgenre, 57, 61, 69, 148, 160, 190, See advertorial, See genre camwhore post, 60 consumer post, 60 filler post, 61 personal reflection, 58–59 random post, 58 rant, 57 social occasion, 59 subheading, 57 translation, 21, 127, 128 transnational, 187, See genre viral, 80, 110, 171 voicy consumers, 108–9, 110, 120, 130–31, 145–46, 170, 193 web analytics, 52, 133–35, 145, 146 word of mouth, 140

222 | Index