Timeline of a Dissertation Topic · Wednesday November 15, 2006
I’m going to start “open sourcing” my MA by blogging about the various ideas and processes that are a part of my dissertation, also known as a “thesis” to those of you in North America. I think that documenting these activities in public will help me focus my thoughts and research before actually turning them into “academic product”, and also integrate nicely with my areas of interest, which include blogging as social/cultural/political tool and open source software and communities.
It’s Wednesday night at 11:51pm and my dissertation topic/research question is due by the end of the day on Friday. Most of my ideas thus far have been overly broad and not suitable for a relatively short (12,000 words) essay of inquiry such as this. Which is kind of crappy, because doesn’t “Creative Communities and Cooperative Commodities: Open Software Projects as Model for Grassroots Community Development” sound kind of cool? Well, part of any successful project is knowing how to stay simple and work within limitations. So today, I came up with four narrower ideas, and ran them past a few friends and a few geeks. The result? The Politics of Blogging: Do weblogs provide a viable alternative to mainstream media? won out.
Confession: I’ve been quite averse to the idea of doing my dissertation on blogging and bloggers. It feels a bit like the topic has been played out in the past few years, and overhyped to the point of exhaustion on my part. I have no interest in talking about the “blogosphere” or Web 2.0 or blogs as a utopian means of democratic global media participation. For instance, only 1% of the people in India have computers at home, and I’m sure the percentage is substantially less than that in many other countries. If one takes into account the proportion of the world’s population who have never even seen a blog or heard of blogging, let alone written a blog post or created content for the web, the result is a pretty upper-class, white, and possibly male space of activity. And maybe that will be the end conclusion of my research.
However, blogs and user-created content are still a relatively new subject as far as media and communication studies goes, and the area definitely lends itself to a combination of empirical and theoretical research, which is how I want to approach my dissertation. Writing about blogging may also have a broader appeal than writing about open source software or wikis, for instance. I do believe that blogs and the web have an important part to play in the democratisation and decentralisation of media creation, and that various web-based technologies can lower barriers and costs to independent publishing and grassroots campaigns, on all sides of the political spectrum. At least for people well-off enough and with the technological know-how. Which, of course, is a major problem with viewing communication technology of any kind in a utopian or emancipatory framework. Anyhoo, that’s for the paper.
So here is my tentative dissertation topic. I’m sure it will change quite a bit in the upcoming weeks and months, but I’m excited to throw myself into this project, and being enthusiastic about your area of research is a good thing, right?
The Politics of Blogging: Can weblogs and user-created content on the web provide a communicative framework from which to challenge the hegemony of corporate media?
That’s a mouthful and a half!
Please leave comments if you have any feedback or suggestions as to how I can improve these ideas, or if you think this is a stupid idea. Etc.
Timeline, starting with most recent ideas first:
Four ideas, two days before my dissertation topic is due
1) Wikis as collaborative public sphere (with emphasis on Wikipedia)
2) Creative Commons and “Copyleft” as resistance to corporate hegemony on the web
3) The Politics of Blogging: Do weblogs provide a viable alternative to mainstream media?
4) Linux and the Open Source Revolution: Cooperative Counterculture Software Narratives
Mid November feedback
“your topics are as you say rather general – having identified a general area of interest, you need to try and identify a specific question you want to research. Your fifth question gets closest to this.”
“Your best bet is to narrow down your reearch questions and then find a case study that you can research empirically.”
Early November brainstorming
Mediated self-disclosure, democratic space of self-disclosure? Google bombing/Pagerank, linking, blogs, Myspace, decentralisation, trust, resistance, “naming”, frameworks, public sphere, commodification, access to technology, empowerment, oppression, hierarchies, accessibility, democratisation of the media, bloggers as journalists, symbolic production on the web, capitalism, anarchy, “bad design” as good for users, networks, file sharing, language barriers, fragmentation, copyright law, free software, open source, “flaming” and “trolls”, utopia, dystopia, surveillance, encryption, free networks, wifi signals, hacking, spam, social networking, public/private dichotomy, free online courses and online pedagogy, Second Life, alienation, masculinity of the web, postfeminism and the web, “Male Geeks”, startups, online publishing, documentation, politics
Community and Commodity: Open Sourcing the Public Sphere
Creative Communities and Cooperative Commodities: Open Software Projects as Model for Grassroots Community Development
Sometime early in September
Democracy and Dialogue on the Web
Resistance and Acquisition – Communities and Markets in the Online Public Sphere
Enlightenment and the Internet – An Exploration of the Online Lifeworld
Finding Hope in the Technological Abyss – Open Source Communities and the Public Sphere
Open Sourcing the Independent Voice – Grassroots Music Communities and the Internet
The (un)Realities of Online Interaction
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optimuscrime writes:
Awesome. I’m actually doing an MSc thesis on blogging (conflicting identities and disclosure/discovery in the workplace), and one of the other guys in my program is doing a PhD dissertation on open source software. Hooray for squeezing our secret nerdloves into our research.
Okay. As for your topic. One of the things I got thinking about was this: Think about why your thesis will still be relevant in five years. A danger of studying this stuff is focusing on elements that are rapidly changing and emerging. I found it really useful to read papers from the late 90s about Geocities and personal webpages and look at how those that still have relevance differed from those that became really dated. I would think about not only finding your topic, but also finding your theoretical ‘base’—the lens through which you’ll examine the topic.
posted Nov 15, 08:51 PM ~ #
Philip Ashlock writes:
I wish I’d thrown in my two cents earlier, but maybe I still have something to contribute. Some of the biggest concepts that are filling my head these days are part of a new revolution in openness on the internet. This includes things like unconferences (eg. Barcamp), Six Aparts’ Open Media Profile + OpenID, and organizations that push the open source philosophy in new directions – most notably OpenCourseWare. I think OpenCourseWare and One Laptop Per Child have the potential to have the most global impact, whereas most forms of “the architecture of participation” in the developed world assume that everyone has their own trendy Apple laptop and a constant ubiquitous wifi connection.
posted Nov 16, 01:40 PM ~ #