Presentation of the paper presented at the ESA Conference "Culture and the making of worlds", Università Bocconi, 7th-9th October 2010.

1. STRONG AND WEAK TIES: THE
CHANGE OF ONLINE RELATIONSHIP
FROM BLOGS TO SOCIAL NETWORKS
Elisabetta Locatelli
PhD Graduate
Università Cattolica di Milano
OssCom | Osservatorio sulla Comunicazione
ESA Conference “Culture and the making of worlds”
Università Bocconi – Milan
8th September 2010

2. Timeline
• What are blogs?
Personal
Web logs Websites
Online stream of
(diaries of organized in a
personal news feed in
web chronological
diaries chronological
navigation) reverse order
reverse order
• Timeline
1997 1999 2003 2004 2006 2008 2010
First blogs First blogs in Splinder Facebook Google buys Facebook August:
in USA Italy MySpace Blogger success in Facebook is
Hi5 Italy the most
LinkedIn Twitter visited
Netlog website
Badoo

3. Places for online relationship
• Blogs as places for
– Self publishing
– Social relationship SOCIAL MEDIA :
«a group of Internet-
• Social network sites as «web- based applications
based services that allow that build on the
individuals to (1) construct a ideological and
public or semi-public profile technological
within a bounded system, (2) foundations of Web 2.0,
articulate a list of other users and that allow the
with whom they share a creation and
connection, and (3) view and exchange of user-
traverse their list of generated content»
(Kaplan, Haenlein 2010)
connections and those made by
others within the system» (boyd,
Ellison 2007).

4. Features
Blogs Social Network Sites
Visibility of contacts Blogroll; Traffic feed (MyBlogLog). List of friends.
Content (text, video, photo, podcast,
Content (text, video, photo, podcast,
links) publishing;
mp3, links) publishing with
Commenting;
Levels of actions limitation depending on platforms;
Graphic customization of layout;
Commenting; Limited graphic
Addition of application and widgets;
customization.
Connection with SNS.
Extent of intimacy Different levels with no fixed features. Different levels with privacy options.
Content publishing and sharing;
Means of Content publishing;
Chat; Private Messages; applications
communication Comments; Private Messages; Tagboard.
(gifts); Social actions (poke, like).

5. Theoretical framework
• Three stages of internet studies (Silver 2000, Wellman 2004)
– Popular cyberculture
– Cyberculture studies
– Critical cyberculture
• Gurak (2004): cyberculture  “internet studies”
– Popular internet studies
– Embedded internet studies
– Contextual internet studies

6. Theoretical framework
• Three stages of blog
studies
– End of ’90s:
descriptive - Overlaps
- Everchanging
– Beginning of 2000:
nature of
quantitative
blogosphere
– After 2004:
“qualitative turn” 
social implication of
blogging (i.e.: gender)

7. Theoretical framework
• A wider framework: blog
and social networks as
(Hine 2000)
– Cultural context
«it means looking at the forms of - CMC and other forms
communication, sociality and identity of communication
that are produced within this social
space» (Slater, 2006, 534) - Cultural practices of
users
– Cultural artefact
«a product of culture: a technology - Users practices
that was produced by particular - Internet, blogs and SNS
people with contextually situated and cultural products
goals and priorities» (ibi)

8. Methodology
• The data are taken from two qualitative and multisited
researches:
• (1) About personal blogs and Italian blogosphere
– Done between 2006 and 2008
– 4 steps:
• Explorative research
• Observant participation at three blogger events
• 26 semi-structured interviews to explore the micro-social context of blog appropriation
• Semiotic analysis of 50 blogs
• Blogger divided in three groups (early blogger, beginning in 2003 and 2006; three
cities: Milan, Turin, and Rome)
• (2) Young adults and social relationship in new media (see
www.testimonidigitali.it and Giaccardi 2010 forthcoming)
– 50 telephonic semi-structured interviews to Italian young adults
– SNS profiles observation

9. Results
• Social relationships in the
blogosphere
“After I met her and other bloggers a small group of
– Early bloggers people formed” (m,2001,text-photo)
• Few people
• Virtual community: Clear boundaries;
Common memory; Common language
– 2003 Content is a key
• Comments point for building
• Public space  Circle of readers
• Blogstars social relations
• Link = trust
– 2006
«Frequent readers then came, especially ones
• More confidence who leave a comment and after it you go to read
• Social tools their blog. You knew a lot of people […] and you
set up a network of relations» (m,2003,text).
• Two splitting phenomena
– Desire to protect privacy «At a certain time I realized that if a blog has no
– Desire to have more and more readers comment it doesn’t work, so I tried to put into
• Offline aggregation in bigger events (e.g. posts questions, feedbacks»
(M,2006,text+photo, 42).
BarCamps, BlogFest)

10. Results
• Social relationship in SNS
– Focus on Facebook «I use Facebook mainly for
organizing» (m, 23, w)
• Claim: “Facebook helps you
connect and share with the
people in your life”
- “Social capital
• Incorporation of different
instruments of CMC (status bridging”
update, comments, likes, pokes, (Cachia 2008)
private messages, chat) - Mix of strong
• Functions and weak ties
– Organize
– Monitor
– Maintain
«Facebook is a good way to start
– Improve «I like <Facebook> because I something, but then you must know
– Add can see a lot of things, what people offline, otherwise true
others are doing» (m, 21, w) communication has no sense,
Facebook is a virtual relationship»
(m, 20, s)

11. Conclusion
• Embedding and mainstreaming of blogs and SNS in
everyday life
• Intertwining of online and offline
• Blogs  contents “Community of discourses”
(Jankowsky 1991)
• FB
– Stability of network
– Concentric circles
– Social capital bridging
• Configurational technologies (Fleck 1988)
– Interpretive flexibility (Bijker – Pinch – Huges 1989)
– Innofusion (Fleck 1988)

12. Going further
• SNS aggregation
• SNS as new forms of blog  emerging of a
standard
• Geotagging
• Mobile communication
• Different Countries

13. Thanks for your attention
elisabetta.locatelli@unicatt.it
http://theblogup.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/donnabetta

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