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American Behavioral Scientist
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Identity, Electronic Ethos, and Blogs

A Technologic Analysis of Symbolic Exchange on the New News Medium

Robert MacDougall

Emerson College

News blogs (Web logs dedicated to the dissemination of news) are becoming the default political news source for a growing number of well-educated and apparently well-informed segments of the population. Bloggers and blog advocates suggest that blogs, online lists, and their various analogs offer something different and potentially unique to the 21st-century citizen. At their best, blogs represent a new form of open-sourced/open-access partisan press that promises to bring McLuhan’s tribal context one step closer to fulfillment. At their worst, blogs represent the latest form of mass-mediated triviality and celebrity spectacle, with the potential to create and sustain insulated enclaves of intolerance predicated on little more than personal illusion, rumor, and politically motivated innuendo. Employing first a medium theoretic and then a symbolic interactionist lens, the present study considers some of the key structural features of news blogs and discusses some of the personal, social, and political significances of blogs and blogging.

Key Words: blogs • news • ethos • identity • politics

American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 49, No. 4, 575-599 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0002764205280922
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[Abstract] [PDF]