Category: blogging

Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure

By Guest Author Michael Sullivan
After twenty-five years in construction I had worked my last days at a steady job in December of 2008. At a time when tens of thousands of other workers in construction were also laid off, it was time for me to make a change. The days of people wanting to flaunt their wealth by building opulent homes of exaggerated size for the number of people living in them was coming to an end.
At the same time a cable television show called “Blog Cabin” (airing on the DIY channel) was experiencing a very successful show that combined the actual construction of a luxury cabin with advise from viewers submitted via the shows blog on their website. As I had found the demand for large trophy homes was diminishing the producers of Blog cabin were coming to the same conclusion. The show had built a community of bloggers who not only gave their suggestions on what color paint to use or what choice of tile was best, but had become intertwined in each others lives. When one community member got sick others raised concern on the blog while the shows producers disregarded these comment and were focused more on what benefited the show.
The producers of blog cabin were using the web 2.0 platform [which specific platform? that is quite a general term…]  to generate more profit for the show’s website as well as the television show. The website gathered information from viewers as they registered for the website, accumulating this information and shared with advertisers on their website and cable broadcast.
It seems the shows producers were exploiting their viewers by taking their suggestions and comments and incorporating them into the show more than their own writers contributed. One of the main draws for people to get involved in the blogging process for Blog Cabin was that all those who contributed to the house would be eligible for a drawing at a chance to win the house being built. This enticement had given the fans concern of the cost of owning the home if they were to win it. The value of the cabin being built in 2008 was at 750,000 dollars. This home would be taxed as income and with state and federal taxes the viewers had estimated the taxes to be about $250,000; most admitted they could not keep the cabin if they won it. The bloggers by now had become a close community and had gotten to know each other through their posts and had become known as “The Off-Site Build Team”. The Team had started making request for the show to build an more affordable home where the winner would stand a better chance of keeping it if won by one of them. The producers failed to reply with affordable building plan options for the viewers to choose from and limited them to more grandiose home plans. The fans were unable to get other accommodations from the producers such as a plaque for a member of their community suffering from cancer.
This article makes the case that the contributors to the Blog Cabin show were being exploited and their input and ideas were being used on the show and building of the cabin and they got little too no considerations from the producers of the show. As the community of bloggers had shared hardships and triumphs within their own lives, the show had only sought to get the information needed for advertisers and to complete a successful show.
Robert W. Gehl and Timothy A. Gibson (2012). Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure. Television & New Media  2012 13: 48-67.

Some Evidence that Blogging is Beneficial

By Guest Author Eduard Nagornyy, found at @eduardNagornyy and http://eduardnagornyy.tumblr.com/ .

A t-shirt promotes bloggingMillions of people blog. Some blog just to vent and others do it to manage their distress (an emotional release). What many might not know is that blogging, for the majority of users, is therapeutic, socially supportive.

Initial research was done on the psychosocial (the relationship between individual thought and behavior, and certain social factors) benefits of blogging. Many bloggers blogged the initial research and created discussions about it.

Baker and Moore compared the responses in these discussions to the results of the initial research on social connectedness, satisfaction with friendship, and psychological distress; essentially they sought to determine if the blogging community agreed or disagreed with the initial research. They took three weeks to complete where searches were done on specific blog search engines (e.g. Google Blog Search), and they looked for any reference to the initial research. 167 sources found (English-written blogs) generated nearly 500 comments. The comments were then categorized under individual users (289 unique user comments) that commented on the initial research. The majority of the results agreed with the initial research, with 55% whole-heartedly supporting the results, 25% accepting the results, 11% feeling neutral towards the results, 6% opposing the results, and 3% that were unfriendly (comments that were angrily vented with foul language).

This research indicates that blogging can be beneficial. 80% of the users here claim to have a positive experience while blogging. Some of the benefits include increased self-esteem and self-worth, less stress after participating, emotional release, higher trust in others, inter-mixing socially, and friendship fulfillment. The overall well-being of a person who blogs might be higher quality because of recognized social support than that of a person who does not blog.

So, for those people who are under a lot of stress, make a blog and vent. Join the millions of other users who do the very same thing and release yourself emotionally. It might be surprising how therapeutic blogging can be and the social support behind it. On a side-note, this second-wave of research was done using dialogue, meaning that the authors used the responses to the research as evidence. This type of procedure is not widely used but the authors claim it should be used more often, especially since technology is allowing the participation of users with the research and results. The procedure provides the researchers and their methods more transparency.

Baker, J. R., & Moore, S. M. (2011). An Opportunistic Validation of Studies on the Psychosocial Benefits of Blogging. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14(6), 387-390.