Blogging

Digital Media and Society Series

by Jill Walker Rettberg

Blogging has profoundly influenced not only the nature of the internet today, but also the nature of modern communication, despite being a genre invented less than a decade ago. This book-length study of a now everyday phenomenon provides a close look at blogging while placing it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context.

Scholars, students and bloggers will find a lively survey of blogging that contextualises blogs in terms of critical theory and the history of digital media. Authored by a scholar-blogger, the book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication. It gives definitions and explains how blogs work, shows how blogs relate to the historical development of publishing and communication and looks at the ways blogs structure social networks and at how social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook incorporate blogging in their design. Specific kinds of blogs discussed include political blogs, citizen journalism, confessional blogs and commercial blogs.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business

184 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2008

About the author

Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. She is the author of Seeing Ourselves Through Technology (2014), Blogging (2nd Ed. 2014) and co-editor of a scholarly anthology on World of Warcraft (2008), and has been blogging at jilltxt.net since 2000.

Reviews

[TΞΞL❍CK Mith!lesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blogging is a landmark in social cyberspace studies -- and much more than that. It's about the way today's popular culture is actually part of large-scale change in the way culture is produced. Jill Walker Rettberg has written a deep and broad book about the real meaning of blogging as evidence for and a driver of an epochal cultural shift. She deftly uses her own experience as a renowned blogger, examined through the expert eye of an experienced communication researcher, to reveal the psychological, social, political, historical meaning of the blogging phenomenon. She brings media studies, ethnology, literary studies, marketing, journalism, sociology together into a brilliant explanatory framework.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a provocative book, and written and published in 2008, this history has come to pass...

I blog on lichenfoxie on the wordpress and my themes stimulated by this book are Recording for a gentler Ireland. I started reading this book closely on 19 September 2025. I followed from 2012 the Caribbean Literary Salon and its successor Leaves of Life. Jo Hillhouse is a great writer, explaining things. For a Gentler Ireland, as a Botanist, Writer and Composer my sources include the BSBI Ddb and Cybertruffle.

Martin Speight, an early exponent of creating utopias for the ministry of information, Syrph the Net, made an outline of the philosopy of recording in 1977 and 1978, and The Dictionary of the fungi, the Outline of the Ascomycetes, Mycotaxon and Mycobank are part of the new media that journalists of Nature My Bealkelly monologue would make a good podcast and iNaturalist is helping with communication with its links to GBIF, which given iDIGbio is now on its closing phase, the tecnology of record sharing of observations of nature on the surface of the earth is maturing now. Environmentalism in 2025 is refragmenting its sphere of influence, yet community building using this technology will be the making of citizen botanist a Sunday Gleaner or a botanist interrupted as a song of a human voice.

Artificial Intellegence will challenge. Pope Leo is correct that the ethics of Artificial Intellegence needs to be moderated. Pinterest is an educational meme communicator also thought of a blog. Historians of theology should read this book to understand participatory media and the personalised information construct that we need to think critically about technologically assisted opression. The linking of Narure occurrence data, with DNA databases, and CRISPR techology, together with leases of land could herald new landraces of biota, sprading through the biosphere, and we utilise blogging as an early warning system to changes in the privatisations of the commons that are happening now.

This 2008 book is a masterful introduction to Blogging, and deserves to be considered by people involved in conservation and to keep seeking and deliver utopias to conserve life, during our vigil.

[Shonell Bacon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book -- a lot of the material I've read within other books and in articles during my dissertation research, so it was good in that it confirmed, added to what was learned prior. One of my fave chapters in the book was Blogs as Narratives. As a storyteller, it was good to learn about the various forms of narrative often illustrated in blogging and especially the notion of truth/fiction as developed within the blogging narratives.

[Margrethe Aas Johnsen]

Excellent book for basic introduction to everything blog.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the history of blogging to date as well as what is current - as of a couple of years ago.

[Diana180]

#digitext #research #teaching #kindle

[Cassey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful definitions, but aged out examples and other references.