"In the networked public sphere, online clusters form around issues of shared concern, information is collected and collated, dots are connected, attitudes are discussed and revised, local expertise is recognized, and in general a network of 'social knowing' is knit together, comprised of both people and the hyperlinked texts they co-create."
In this 16-page article from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in the United States (US), John Kelly uses network analysis to demonstrate the ways in which internet-based technologies, and the manifold genres of interaction they afford, are recreating public and private communications and thus altering the relationships between all manner of social actors. He starts from the premise that familiar questions about whether blogs and other web-native media are superseding legacy mainstream media (MSM), particularly institutional journalism, tend to oversimplify the matter. Indeed, he argues, it is becoming clear that the blogosphere and MSM are complementary players in an emerging system of public communications.
In order to begin sketching the pivotal role that he feels institutional journalism plays in the blogosphere, Kelly examines the "vibrant new network environment of blogs, online media and other websites", identifying 3 core features:
- Emergent clusters of similarly interested bloggers provide structure to this network, shaping the flow of information by focusing the attention of thematically related authors (and their readers) on particular sources of information.
- The network includes new actors alongside old ones, knit by hyperlinked multimedia into a common fabric of public discourse.
- Legacy media, particularly journalistic institutions, are star players in this environment.
Brief treatments of some of these observations frame the empirical analysis that follows. Centrally, besides challenging the landscape of mass media, internet technologies have enabled shifts in methods and practices of interpersonal communication. Internet technologies, as Kelly explains, enable many-to-many forms of communication that support flows of knowledge and coordination among groups which are larger than face-to-face primary groups and smaller than mass publics. This means that "virtually any communication of any social scope can commingle over the same wires and airwaves, using the same protocols and standards...[thus] eliminating the channel-segregation that previously reinforced the independence (or mutual deafness) of classes of actors at these levels of scale, enabling (or more accurately in many cases, forcing) them to represent themselves to one another via a common medium, and increasingly...in ways that are universally visible, searchable and persistent." The common medium that social actors - big and small - are using, Kelly says, is blogging.
Blogs have increasingly become a key interface for public interaction, Kelly observes. However, in assessing those who care about the content of any given blog, Kelly found that it is not the world at large but pecifically interested others - that is, interest groups, communities of practice, and all manner of networks that exist offline as well. "Online readers typically navigate hyperlinked chains of related stories, bouncing between numerous websites, returning periodically to favored starting points to pick up new trails....As the number of blogs has increased in recent years, this 'citizen-generated' network is quickly becoming the Internet's most important connective tissue....It is not simply 'media' in the familiar sense of packets of 'content' consumed by 'audiences'."
Kelly next offers a baseline: distribution of dynamic links among top 100 sites. As opposed to the "static links" that do not change very often, and are typically found in the blogroll (a set of links a blogger chooses to place in a sidebar), dynamic links change frequently, and typically represent links embedded in blog posts. Analysis of dynamic links allows identification of groups of bloggers who are more "attentive" to similar online links, Kelly asserts. Figure 1 on page 5 shows the distribution of dynamic links over the past year from the 10,000 most highly linked English-language blogs. The top 100 outlinks (websites linked to by these blogs) account for a large proportion (37.6%) of all dynamic links. Indeed, the top 20 outlinks alone account for nearly a quarter (22.4%) of all dynamic links. Of the top 10,000 outlinks, only 40.5% are blogs, and these account for only 28.5% of dynamic links. The top 10 mainstream media sites, led by nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, and bbc.com, account for 10.9% of all dynamic links. By contrast, the top 10 blogs account for only 3.2% of dynamic outlinks. "Legacy media institutions are clearly champion players in the blogosphere."
A map on page 6 shows how - despite the large number of interest-specific, niche sites on the internet - websites of the legacy media, along with newer players like YouTube and Wikipedia, in fact form a locus of common attention for the blogosphere. Kelly finds that bloggers do, however, link preferentially to other bloggers who share common interests, a tendency especially pronounced for political bloggers.
The English language blogosphere contains bloggers from across the world, and a map on page 7 illustrates the prominence of US political discourse in the network. To be clear, Kelly stresses, this does not mean that most English language blogs are political. Rather, it means that political discourse organises more bloggers into densely linked network neighbourhoods than any other topic of online discourse. In addition to clearly political clusters, which are embedded in either liberal or conservative network poles, and non-political clusters, such as exist around topics like technology and parenting, there are two "attentive clusters": law and security. Attentive clusters of bloggers with similar outlink preferences can be detected wherever a large group of bloggers collect around a set of concerns or issues. The degree to which the particular outlink is of disproportionate interest to the attentive cluster being analysed is measured by the group focus index (GFI). Kelly provides several examples of how the GFI works to demonstrate "how the walls between 'media' and 'civil society' are softening."
The data in figure 12 and table 1 of the paper indicate that "a new class of communicative actors, mainly NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and special purpose news and information sites, are linked by specialized (in this case, politicized) sets of bloggers, while the media in general hold a more central position in the attention economy of the blogosphere." Data Kelly cites here indicate that national media contain a great many more politically polarised sites than operate locally. At the national level, broadcast entities are the least politically skewed, followed by newspapers. These media function as they do offline, as "general-interest intermediaries" drawing a range of readers/viewers from across the political spectrum. Magazine sites are more skewed, Kelly finds, mirroring print magazines' greater specialisation. And web-native media are the most skewed of all forms of news and information website. "We see the essential pattern again: legacy media hold the center, online only media fray the edges."
In short:
- Most links from blogs are not to other blogs, but to a range of online sites among which MSM outlets are the most prominent. "Legacy media entities are at the center of attention across the blogosphere, continuing to fulfill the role they have aspired to in the past: to be general interest intermediaries at the crossroads of public discourse. There is nothing in the actual behavior of bloggers to suggest this role would diminish..."
- Journalists are keenly attentive to blogs, often mining them for story leads and background research.
- The blogosphere is becoming as important as the front page of the paper for landing eyeballs on a journalist's article.
- The growing networked public sphere is not just changing the relationship among actors in the political landscape: it is changing the kinds of actors found there, and changing what 'media' is actually doing....And so it is not unreasonable to fear that the centrifugal force exerted by hundreds of thousands of bloggers will sunder a public sphere long held together by journalistic institutions."
Kelly concludes that, "As this analysis demonstrates, the question of how blogs are affecting the public sphere is not a straightforward matter of whether they undermine the MSM's ability to provide a platform for public agenda-setting and exposure to cross-cutting political views. The full story is deeper and more nuanced. While the Internet, vivified by blogs, fractures the landscape of public discourse across a great many new actors, a core activity of bloggers is to focus attention back to the MSM, particularly to institutional journalism. The structured tissue of bloggers, each not a voice in the woods but a member of cross-cutting communities, creates a new medium of social knowing, but one which so far appears favorable to the presence of the kinds of high-visibility, central platforms represented by legacy media institutions."
