NetDynam 2.0

Cooper, S. D. 2006: Watching the watchdog: Bloggers as the fifth estate. Spokane: Marquette Books.

Levinson, P. 2009: New new media. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

O’Neil, M. 2009: Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and authority in online tribes. London & New York: Pluto Press.

Rettburg, J. W. 2008: Blogging. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press.

I’ve recently read these four books dealing with different aspects of the web 2.0 world, the common thread through all of them being that they each either touch on or concentrate on the place of blogging in the current netspace. It’s difficult to compare them in terms of content and reliability, because they each have something to offer in terms of content, however my own point of view and personal areas of interest render at least two of them worthy of steering the gentle reader well clear of.

It is these two which I will deal with first.



Levinson’s New New Media published last year is certainly up-to-date, and offers descriptions of several commonly recognized ‘districts’ in the Web 2.0 world: Blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Podcasting, as well as discussing social implications of these new new media, and illustrating his line of thought by taking us through his view of the 2008 US election qua new new media. He justifies his choice of the doubled term of the title in the first chapter, arguing that new media (such as email) has been around for some time, but the Web 2.0 stuff is newer new media (such as wikipedia), stuff which has hardly been mentioned in studies of online media published as recently as 2008.

Levinson describes his various areas of new new media in a chatty lucid way, taking readers through these media districts by describing how and when they were formed, what they do, and the questions that we have all asked ourselves about them – as if we are somewhat ignorant of what it all means. He manages to lay it out simply and concisely much as a good teacher might do. He gives examples of types of blogs, ways of using YouTube, potted histories of twitterati, and so on, and most chapters will cite lavishly his own internet web-based experiences via his own blog as a tv program reviewer and aficionado – as well as citing any publication of his own that has any relevance whatsoever to what he is writing about. This is reflected in the References section at the end of the book, of which five whole pages (out of 24) are taken up with publications under the name of Levinson, Paul.

While Levinson’s book provides a worthwhile overview of the scope and conundrums of the web 2.0 world, giving the occasional gems of wisdom and useful advice, peppered with anecdotes and examples relating to Levinson’s own work and experiences which can begin to pall after just three chapters of this relentless self-promotion, Stephen D. Cooper’s Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers as the Fifth Estate, became positively nauseating after even the second chapter.

Cooper’s book concentrates on news, reporting, and blogging sites related to jounalism. He addresses the vexed question over the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream or traditional news outlets, and discusses the benefits of professional journalism and the future of commercial news reporting. He proposes a typology of news ‘genres’ in the blogosphere, together with a short description  of the ways that these genres operate to critique news gathering. It is worth summarising the typology here:

-Accuracy: bloggers operate as fact-checking facilities

-Framing: bloggers act to contextualise or dispute the way a piece is presented

-Agenda-Setting/Gatekeeping: bloggers act to question the news agenda and set alternatives

-Journalistic Practices: bloggers actually gather, write, edit and correct news

The next several chapters address these four areas of blogger activity by providing us with blow-by-blow accounts, complete with quotations, of examples of blogs and bloggers who concerned themselves with these aspects of the news media. Unfortunately, it did not take me long into reading the book for me to gather that Cooper has a slightly right-leaning agenda which coloured his report of news blogging history for me, and rendered what already seemed interminable recounting into somewhat sour reading. I admit that I was not motivated to complete reading the book, and skipped several pages as I went through, hoping to get past the screeds of historical ‘evidence’ and reach the point of his argument. For this reason I cannot recommend the book, unless one is gathering details about events on news blogs or researching the ways that the right hope to seem even-handed in their discussion of internet media behaviour.

In the final chapter there were some interesting discussions, one of which concerned what was termed the ‘spiral of silence’, a version of what sounded to me like Lyotard’s idea of the differend. In essence, the spiral of silence refers to the idea that when people compare their opinions with those of the mass media, and theirs differ considerably, they are likely to refrain from saying anything lest they be ostracised. The idea of media bias was another bugbear discussed in this final chapter, with Cooper coming out in favour of the idea that news should be fair and balanced.

Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging was almost a warm bath in comparison to the previous two. In fact, I completed Rettberg’s book before starting the other two, and was able to read it cover to cover in almost one sitting. This speaks to its lucid writing style, clear direction and interesting perspectives on the world of blogging. It does not claim to be the last word, but performs a useful summary of how blogs operate in the Web 2.0 arena. She first defines three basic loosely-bounded categories of blogging: personal blogs, filter blogs and topic-driven blogs. Each of these categories seem to overlap and some blogs might conceivably cover all three categories. Yet they provide a useful first sieve through which to describe the content, appearance, and interpersonal motivations of blogs in general. Each chapter deals with a different sphere of the blogging world – such as “Blogs, Communities and Networks”, “Citizen Journalists?”, “Blogs as Narratives”, and “Blogging Brands” – outlining and summarising the main areas of research interest in each. It’s a good first primer on the geography of the blogosphere, offering several links to further information for the researcher and interested reader.

The final book of the four, CyberChiefs: Autonomy and Authority in online tribes by Mathieu O’Neil, was the most interesting and engaging of the group. Its main idea was that despite claims that groups online could act and interact co-operatively and democratically, in practice this was difficult to maintain, and in fact might even be so contradictory as to be counter-productive. After carefully outlining and presenting his thesis regarding the different types of authority wielded both on and offline – sovereign authority, charismatic authority and index authority – he goes on to describe four online ‘tribes’ using these terms. Each tribe is selected for their differences in terms of their content, history and ideology: primitivism.com, Debian, DailyKos, and Wikipedia. He describes their method of governance and recounts an instance of conflict in each one, showing that no matter what their stated objectives are, there will always be events that disturb these objectives of mutual co-operation.

This book has so much to offer for me, it is difficult to decide what aspects to mention in a short review such as this. A couple of quotations from the book will have to suffice for gaining flavour of its main concerns:

“…online, there can be no autonomy without authority. Far from being anti-authoritarian entities, in a decentralised network, autonomous tribes require authority to perform basic functions: defining what they embrace, and what they reject; what information is relevant and irrelevant; which pronouncement is trusted or distrusted; who is included or excluded.” (p.33)

“Norms develop best in a small and static community because they derive whatever legitimacy they have from group endorsement, and because internalisation of rules takes time.” (p.81)

“ The autonomy of workers in post-Fordist teams and the autonomy of consumers of social networking devices and platforms can only develop along avenues devised by senior management.” (p.176)

“…the brute reality of network dynamics is that some nodes get all the attention. Neither illegitimate forms of power such as archaic force nor legitimate ones such as charismatic authority are democratic, as their source lies not in fair deliberation but in the reification of network dynamics or the importation of offline advantage.” (p.188)

The book concludes with a statement regarding O’Neil’s idea of the ideal direction of the collectivist principles of the internet, which would result in a debate ‘to formulate strategies to extend direct popular control over more aspects of existence…’ even though, as O’Neil himself would acknowledge, without the benefit of access to information and expertise crucial to decision-making, direct popular control is likely to result in a less sustainable way of living. And so the contradictions of autonomy with authority remain. A recommended book for those interested in the notions of control, power, dominance, authority, democracy, economics, management, and network dynamics online.