Why Am I Doing This?

This was written for a presentation as part of a panel, but I think it stands as a starting post. It was only supposed to be a ten minute presentation, so is not as detailed, accurate or well argued as it might be. But it's my current thoughts and a start.

When I began thinking about what I wanted to focus on for my PhD, the Internet was an obvious place to start. I had fallen headlong in love with all things online during my MA studies and had had chance to think about the Web in more depth during the Feminist Perspectives on Web Fiction module, but realistically I wanted more. The chance to spend at least three years thinking about, exploring, reading about and investigating the Web and the Internet was just too exciting to resist.

I knew I wanted to think about the relationship between feminism and the Internet. After all, feminism was really what led me to the ‘Net and what keeps me there. But the Internet is a both a cultural artefact and a cultural phenomenon. Depending on whether you want to be technologically or socially determinist about it, you can see it as either changing the way we live our lives or being changed by the way we use it, or a combination of the two, which is where I tend to see myself. So I knew I wanted to look at the way in which feminist culture utilises and is possibly shaped by the ‘Net.

Finally, I have a longstanding complicated relationship to the way in which Feminism both describes itself and is described, particularly terms such as ‘Third Wave’ and ‘postfeminist’ and with what seems to me to be the misappropriation and redefinition of the word ‘feminist’ itself. I wanted to have the chance to explore how and why women deploy these terms, who uses them, and what are the issues that of concern to women who use these terms as self-definition. Third Wave Feminism is said to be a product of its sociocultural, temporal location and a key part of this is the centrality of technoculture and the Internet (Heywood and Drake, 2007)

So you can see how all of these elements came together. The final choice was what aspect of the Internet I wanted to focus on to keep the scope of my research realistic. For me, this was a very simple choice. Blogs have been an important part of my online life since I finished my MA, mostly thanks to Andrea, a fellow MA student from California, and they have been an important source of feminist information, inspiration and intellectual respite over the last 5 years. Going from blogroll to blogroll, I eventually stumbled upon the carnival of feminists, and thus found the perfect organising element for my research.

The Carnival of Feminists is a fortnightly digest of posts from blogs across the blogosphere. One blog is nominated to host the next Carnival and asks for submissions. People then either submit one of their own posts or nominate a post by someone else that they really liked. The host blogger then selects from these and presents them in a narrative outlining common themes and debates, with hyperlinks within the text leading to each blog post. At the time of writing this we are currently waiting for the 70^th Carnival of Feminists to be posted on 14^th January.

One of the major challenges for online research is knowing where to start and where to stop. The Carnival provides a coherent structure for me to explore the debates and events that concern and inspire feminist bloggers with a definitive starting point (19^th October 2005).Of course, the question of when to stop will be driven by time and funding.

However, some of the key features of web texts are both what makes them really interesting and what makes them potentially complex to work with. Mitra and Cohen (1999)outline 6 key features for web texts which are intertextuality, nonlinearity, a blurring of the reader/writer distinction, ‘multimedianess’, ‘globalness’, and ephemerality, all of which are true for blogs and the Carnival to varying degrees. Ephemerality poses the most significant headache for a researcher, especially with a long term project. While cataloguing the past Carnivals, I have found that a number of blogs have been deleted, moved or made private. Sometimes a small amount of detective work relocates them; sometimes the original posts are lost forever, although their impact remains within the Carnival. The only way around this issue is to catalogue all carnivals, saving a copy of each and every post currently available onto a hard drive as a more permanent record.

However, this poses other questions. Although it will always be possible for me to cite where the location and date of publication for any blog post accessed, following good referencing practice, keeping a copy and referring to it despite the fact that the blogger has since taken it down does not feel ethical. And do bloggers consider their posts to be public or private? The fact that some bloggers subsequently make their blogs private suggests that open access blogs may be considered public material, but this can never be taken for granted.

A further ethical consideration is exactly how to be a researcher within this particular section of cyberspace or rather how not to be. Unlike some areas of cyberspace, for example Second Life or discussion boards which are based around interpersonal interactions within which one chooses ones level of involvement, blogs are intended to be authored by one person or collective only. Interaction is possible but only in the comments section. This section can often take on a life of its own, but is normally time limited before readers move on to comment on more recent posts on the blog. This leaves the researcher in the awkward position of delayed lurking by default. Providing communication links with the blogger are still functional, it is possible to declare interest and seek permission from the blogger to use the post as source material after the fact, but seeking permission from commenters will be near impossible.

A final consideration that has to be made when conducting online research is whether one treats the online world as a discrete entity, independent of the offline world, or considers them to be inextricably interlinked. Arguments have been made to support both positions. However, because I explicitly want to consider the relationship between blogging and Third Wave theory and activism, I would argue that the online and the offline worlds are fundamentally interrelated in the cultural expressions that I am researching. The question of how closely the ‘reality’ of one might map onto the ‘reality’ of the other may be considered much later in my research.

Because of these challenges and my suggestion that online and offline are interlinked, there are layers of culture to be explored for which only mixed methods would be suitable. Following Bell (2001), I argue that there are three different types of ‘stories’ to be told about feminist blogging and third wave theory and activism, these being the material, the symbolic and the experiential. I propose using three different methods for my research to allow me to explore these stories adequately.

Firstly, the material ‘story’. This refers to what it is and in the case of blogs includes the text, the layout, any images, sound or video, the links on the page, and the presented persona of the blogger. I will explore the ‘stories’ that these elements tell, through the use of textual and visual analysis.

The symbolic ‘story’ refers to what the blogs mean and I intend to explore this through online interviews with a select number of bloggers, focusing on the meaning of the blog for them; their definitions and understandings of feminism and third wave theory and activism; and their experience of blogging, among other things.

Finally, the experiential ‘story’, in this case, is about experiencing blogging myself, particularly in the context of the Carnival of Feminists and as such represents a move towards an ethnographic approach. I’m cautious about claiming that I will be engaging in ethnography since there are some challenges to carrying out pure ethnography online, such as the problem of intermittent immersion, but I will try work within the spirit of ethnography. This will at least go some way towards mitigating the problems of the lurking researcher as well as being true to the ethos of feminist research methods.

In conclusion, I chose to research blogging as a means of exploring a site of feminist cultural representation, cultural production and cultural artefacts. This research is specifically located within one of the Third Wave’s key media because all three types of ‘story’ about feminist culture can be located here and because of the unique opportunities created by the key features of web texts to allow for non-traditional voices to emerge. Whilst there are numerous challenges to be negotiated, adoption of a mixed methods approach can mitigate against many of them. Hopefully, in the case of my research, this will allow me to develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between feminist blogging and Third Wave theory and activism.