Networked selves : trajectories of blogging in the United States and France / Ignacio Siles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Siles, Ignacio, author.

Series:

Digital formations ; v. 111.

Digital Formations, 1526-3169 ; Vol. 111

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blogs--United States.

Blogs.

Blogs--France.

Self--United States.

Self.

Self--France.

France.

United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 221 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Peter Lang, [2017]

Summary:

Networked Selves is an original analysis of one of the most defining cultural features of our time: how people turn to the Web to construct a public self. It examines the trajectory of a practice that embodies this sociocultural shift in fundamental ways: blogging. The book traces the evolution of the Web as a means to publicly perform a self through an analysis of the emergence, development, and transformation of blogging from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. It discusses processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web over two decades in two countries: the United States and France. Through this comparative analysis, the book shows that the cultural identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. Instead, it demonstrates that the development of the Web required the forging of various articulations between specific conceptions of self, publicness, and technology. These articulations were responses to both transformations in the daily life of actors and larger economic, political, and cultural processes--notably neoliberalization. The book also explains how the cultural imaginary around blogs came into being in the United States and how it has also functioned as a model for actors in other countries, such as France. Networked Selves discusses how and why actors in the technology field in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country's national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead. -- Publisher description.

Contents:

1: Voicing the Web :

Why Blogging?

A French-American Comparison

Conceptual Grounds: The Web as Technology of Subjectivity

Analyzing the Voices of the Web

How the Research Was Done

Three Registers of Voice: An Overview of the Book

2: The Emergence of the Blog :

Blogs and the Early Web Ecology in the United States

Early Voices on the French Web

Concluding remarks

3. The Proliferation of Blogging :

The American "T-shirt-clad army of bloggers"

The French Republic of blogs

4. From Blogging to Microblogging :

Inventing "microblogging": toward a new web

Ecology in the United States

Between blogging, "microblogging," and "curation": a new French web ecology

5. Rethinking self-performance in the digital age :

Self-performance in the digital age

From Paris to San Francisco: a story of Americanization

The reconfiguration of pubic and private lives

Appendix : Research design.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781433147098

1433147092

9781433147081

1433147084

OCLC:

995777638

Publisher Number:

99993260124