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-Victoria

References

Reference:

Baker, S. and Green, H., 2005, ‘Blogs will change your Business.’, In Businessweek May 2005, The Time McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Beecher, E., 2005, ‘The End of Serious Journalism?’ In Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power (pg 65-75), Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press.

Cohen, K.R., 2006, ‘A Welcome for Blogs.’ In Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20(2), 161-173.

Cubitt, S., 2005, ‘Distribution and Media Flows.’, In Cultural Politics 1(2), 193-214.

Howcraft, D. and Fitzgerald, B., [No Year], From Utopia to Dystopia: The Twin Faces of the Internet, , last accessed 17/05/2007.

Internet Advertising Bureau, 2007, ‘IAB/PwC UK Online Adspend Figures 2006.’ In Internet Advertising Bureau , last accessed 17/05/2007.

Jones, S. and Kucker, S., 2001,‘Computers, the internet, and virtual cultures.’ In Lull, J (ed), Culture in the Communication Age (pg. 212-223), London: Routledge.

Knobel, L., 2005, ‘Nullius in Verba.’, In Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power (pg 37-60), Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press.

Meikle, G., 2005, ‘Open Publishing, Open Technologies.’ In J. Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries (pg. 70-82), Malden: Blackwell.

Miles, A., 2004, ‘Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday.’ In Metro Magazine No. 143 (pg. 66-70).

Mosco, V., 2004, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace, Cambridge/Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

O’Shaughnessy, M. and Stadler, J., 2005, Media and Society: An Introduction (3rd ed.), Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press.

Rampono, L., 2005, ‘Blog in, Don’t Wait.’ In FairFax Digital, The Age October 25 2005, The Age Company, < http://www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/blog-in-dont-wait/2005/10/24/1130006035721.html>, last accessed 17/05/2007.

Rosen, J., 2005, ‘Each Nation its Own Press.’ In Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power (pg 21-36), Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press.

Rossiter, N., 2006, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Instituitions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Schultz, P., 2005, ‘The Producer as Power User’ In G. Cox & J. Krysa (eds.), Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer’ (pg. 111-125), New York: Autonomedia.

U.S Copyright Office, 2006, ‘Recipes.’ In U.S Copyright Office, , last accessed 17/05/2007.

Conclusion: the old and the new

From the above essay, the following can be drawn. The blogosphere has been perceived by many as a democratic space where one does not perpetually need to play the role of the consumer (Knobel 2005:45). While the nature of participatory culture allows people to know be active participants (Meikle 2005:71), which challenges the traditional paradigms of power, blogs are mostly a mere continuation of the classical power paradigm which can and is restricted by old systems of control. As Cohen (2006:162) says, blogs employ old and new media towards new effects of media, which can be interpreted as him saying that blogs employ old systems towards a new phenomenon, but the system that governs this new phenomenon is fundamentally, old.

Power & Hierarchy

While many bloggers have been called self-obsessed, wannabe journalists (Baker and Green 2005, Cohen 2006:162), they are undeniably gaining popularity as a useful platform for advertisers (Clark 2005:106). According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, in 2006, companies spent 3.989 billion on online advertising alone, causing internet advertising to experience a growth of 1.1%. Online advertising is appealing to businesses for a number of reasons mainly because posts on blogs are stored in a database for a very long time but more importantly, because it allows advertisers to reach their target audience without doing too much work. In the case of food blogs, it allows advertisers to access a pool of people who are interested in food and all things food-related. Continuing from the example of 101 cookbooks and Amazon.com, Swanson’s section “New Cookbook Releases” and “Heidi’s Cookbook Collection” provides links straight to Amazon.com. This is an example of how Amazon.com can skip the process of reaching the wrong audiences by choosing the right blog to host their advertisements. According to Mosco (2004:168), Amazon.com's business is booming, one of the few which is making money from web advertising. Another example would be Gluten-free girl’s blog, where on the side panel of the blog, she has advertisements of ingredients and books that she makes constant reference to. It can be drawn as a parallel to advertisements placed in food magazine that are for the sole purpose of promoting a certain product only now, the online factor makes advertising more efficient by reaching a more specific audience (people who are gluten intolerant) in a much wider space. The next question is deciding which blog advertising companies will place their advertisements on which leads to the concept of blog hierarchy.

Whilst the idea that the internet and more significantly, blogging, is a space that is free from gatekeeping and editorial restrictions (Beecher 2005:70), the idea of bloggers having a hierarchy challenges the entire notion. As Cohen (2006) says, there is a level of ‘earned’ publicity that works within the blogosphere. This implies that there are obvious power differences between each blog and this disputes the notion of the utopian internet whereby everyone is supposedly ‘liberated’ on this democratic platform (Howcraft and Fitzgerald: no date). Blogs such as 101cookbooks, Vanilla Garlic and Gluten-free Girl are definitely considered high on the hierarchy scale as can be seen from the ‘authority’ scale on technorati.com which keeps track of all available blogs. 101cookbooks has an authority of 1, 453, Vanilla Garlic has an authority of 170 and Gluten-free Girl has an authority of 377. Authority refers to the number of references or links that have been made to a particular blog therefore, as can be seen, the above food blogs, these blogs have ‘authority’ as technorati.com so aptly puts it. Having a blog on the higher end of the hierarchy is like being an A-list celebrity, with the status comes the economic benefits of advertising and the ability to garnering even more publicity. The economic factor has been explored in the above paragraphs and to explore the idea of ‘free’ publicity this essay will look at articles that have featured their blogs. Vanilla Garlic has gained much publicity in the Sacramento area, where he is based, having been featured in a food website Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento News & Review. 101cookbooks has a much larger repertoire, having been featured in the New York Times, Food & Wine magazine and was a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards. Drawing this as a comparison to celebrities, the more popular a celebrity is, the more gossip and news there will be about them in the tabloids which then increases their celebrity status. This can then be seen as a continuation of traditional forms of power, where the more powerful get more power while the dominated will always be struggling to break this mould. As Wellman and Gulia (as cited in Jones and Kucker 2001:213) say, the internet is not a separate entity from ‘real’ life, they cannot be disassociated from one another. This therefore accentuates the point that despite the internet and more specifically, the blogosphere being a new culture, the paradigms of power and control are still extensions from the offline, ‘real’ world.

Economic Implications- Advertising

The rise in advertising on blogs challenges this notion that there are no economic factors involved in food blogging. Businessweek’s article ‘Blogs will Change Your Business’ from May 2005, highlights the positives of tracking the developments of the blogosphere, especially so because of its economic implications. Blogs can be perceived as the internet’s way of narrowcasting as can be seen from the food blogging, where there is a food blogging community (i.e Australian food blogger’s ring, Sacramento food blogs), everyone is linked to one another. All 3 sites, Vanilla Garlic, 101 Cookbooks and Gluten-free girl have Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit in their links list. While 101 Cookbooks and Vanilla Garlic have Gluten-free Girl in theirs and both Vanilla Garlic and Gluten-free Girl have 101 Cookbooks in their links list. This is proof of the narrowcasting phenomenon and it gives advertisers a valuable fountain of information, providing them with the perfect tool to target specific demographics (Baker and Green 2005). This then brings up the question of whether or not a shift in power has occurred. On one hand, it seems as though these food bloggers can now decide what they want to be a apart of. To further elaborate this point, this essay will draw examples from the 3 blogs. Looking at 101cookbooks.com, Swanson has advertisements for fellow blogger’s cookbook “Chocolate & Zucchini”, this reinstates her commitment to food blogging. Yet there are also advertisements for Amazon.com as well. These advertisements are specifically targeted at her audience and this brings up the issue of blogs being used for economic purposes. This is very much in coherence with the idea of niche marketing. By placing advertisements on every page of 101cookbooks.com, Amazon.com assumes that consumers of the blog will be interested in the selected book titles. The essay will explore more of the economic implications further on in the essay. Returning to the point on the shift in power, Swanson has now assumed the role of the producer placing her in a position to guide her readers on what to think about. As Rosen (2005) says “If the great mass of bloggers are not aiming for large audiences-how can they matter?” This provides evidence that the ‘purity’ of the blogosphere and the disregard for power is a misconception. This in turn justifies the argument that despite the many assumptions that blogging is “egalitarian” as Liesl Rampono, journalist for The Age, says, the idea that all bloggers are the same on the hierarchy scale is untrue. The following paragraph will explore the relationship between the economic implications of blogs and the hierarchy of bloggers.

Creative labour & the Gift Economy

An area of interest about the blogging phenomenon is the idea of creative labour. These food blogs that the essay explores are well-kept, aesthetically pleasing and are updated on a constant level. In addition these bloggers do not rely solely on their blogs for their income, all of them have stable day jobs as can be seen from the fact that Heidi is a photographer and food writer who has been featured in The Washington Post, Garrett, author of Vanilla Garlic is a food writer based in Sacramento while Shauna, creator of Gluten Free Girl is a freelance writer. According to Rossiter (2006), such creative labour shows evidence of the fragmented post-modernist society but more importantly, it provides a platform to contest the ‘labour-power’ system of the capitalist society that we currently reside in. The new ‘labour-power’ system as Rossiter goes on to describe is in the form of intellectual property whereby unless such creativity is placed under the appropriate economic, social and political environment, it will retain its potential to be translated but will not deem any wages. Continuing this idea of the audience and creative labour is Sean Cubitt’s (2005) article ‘Distribution and Media Flows’ where he states that the audience not only pays to consume information, they are now paying to contribute to this public sphere. In the case of these food bloggers, they are paying for the bandwidth they use, spending their time and energy to do free labour, contributing to the blogosphere without earning a wage. This idea of a gift economy is according to Ippolito (2001) is what attracted many internet users to sharing on the internet without expecting payment but now such an economy is disappearing. This then brings the essay to question whether blogging is succumbing to the traditional paradigm of power, where users have to now pay the producer of the service or information that they want to access. The gift economy could have probably been perceived as a challenge to the typical notion of a power relationship because people did not have to pay to be part of the internet culture. Ippolito states that the fact that people have to pay yearly fees to retain their domain names is already obvious that the gift economy is diminishing (160). This shows that the blogosphere, because users can create blogs and maintain their blogs for free, is still located in this gift economy. Yet, if they do want to increase the freedom they have to customize and increase the potential of their blog, they can pay a sum of money to create their own domain name, without having to keep the ‘.blogspot.com’ tag. 101cookbooks is an example of a blog that has shifted from the amateur ‘.blogspot.com’ to its own domain and as another blogger from deliciousdays.com, suggests, the domain name is part of the ‘sell-ability’ of the blog as a business. Therefore, it reverts back to the traditional paradigm of power, those with power buy the domain name to keep those who have less power at the bottom. Yet perhaps the internet is still more democratic than other media platforms in that anyone, as long as they can afford a domain name, is free to buy one with much ease, on the other hand, buying a media company is much more complicated.

Producer & Consumer

The ability of the ordinary person to generate their own content alters the producer-consumer relationship. The producer-consumer relationship can be described as the linear flow of information as mentioned in the previous paragraph. However the alteration in this relationship is made obvious when the consumer can now assume the role of the producer. In terms of food blogs, the writers of such food blogs are ‘ordinary’ people who write about their experiences with food-related issues and yet when other people begin reading and consuming the words and ideas of these bloggers, these writers have now assumed the role of the producer. Looking at 101cookbooks.com, the author, Heidi Swanson clearly assumes the role of the producer when she offers her advice on how to go about preparing certain dishes. She provides detailed instructions and shares her opinions of recipes or food dishes. Drawing an example this entry, entitled “A Frozen Yoghurt Recipe to Rival Pinkberry’s Recipe”, she begins by offering her opinion that the recipe she has tried out was better than one that the LA Times had previously reported on. This is an example of her producing information after she had consumed the recipe from a cookbook and the review in the LA Times. As Schultz (2005) says, in terms of blogging, the producer is a power user, whereby she "serves as a redirector, a filter, amplifier, repeater, reporter and commentor of actualities", which is a reflection of what Swanson and the other bloggers are doing. The flow of information is no longer linear anymore because she now has the platform to voice her opinions about the information that she has consumed which then generates another stream of information.

Blogging...

The idea of blogging can be suggested to have been derived from the concept of open publishing which Graham Meikle (2005) characterises as process where no gatekeeping is exercised and “the content if generate by anyone who decides to take part”. It is due to the fact that anyone can contribute to this public domain of information that people now see a shift in power relations (Cohen 2006:163). The traditional paradigm of power was straightforward in that the dominant party was that of the producer and information and messages flowed in a linear pattern to the audience (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler 2005:6). Audiences, as O’Shaughnessy and Stadler say, undoubtedly shape such information that is being placed into the public sphere, however the shift the blogosphere is creating is that audiences no longer need to rely on media conglomerates to produce the content they want, they are now able to generate such content themselves (Rosen 2005:27).

Another point to note about the blogosphere is that because of the way it has been crafted, the idea of intellectual property is difficult to impose restrictions on. All the content that is published on blogs can be considered as intellectual property because as Cubitt (2005) says, as long as an idea is expressed in a tangible, material form, it can be regarded as intellectual property that can be distributed throughout the internet and other media platforms. In the case of food blogs, even though a recipe may be counted as the author’s own creation, the recipe is not subject to copyright laws under the U.S copyright laws (U.S Copyright Office 2006) however all accompanying text may be deemed possible to copyright. The blogger ‘Terms of Service’ document states that blogger does not exercise control over the content being posted which means that these bloggers will probably face other forms of limitations with regards to their blog posts. While it seems as though blogging will then allow everyone to be heard because there is no gatekeeper, other social issues may place restrictions on these bloggers.

Introduction: Where the essay is going...

Blogs are the more than the traditional homepage, they are, as Adrian Miles (2004) describes “an internet based personal publishing system” that works as a Content Management System (CMS) which permits the administration of information across the entire site. According to technorati.com, there are more than 80.6 million blogs on the internet out of which, 18 are updated every second. However, the impact of blogging in the public sphere now raises questions of power and how these blogs now challenge classical perceptions of power. Due to the fact that blogs can be perceived as the epitome of participatory culture and as Baker and Green (2005) of Businessweek say, blogs are sites of power, does this mean that society and larger corporations have to exercise new mechanisms of control in order to retain the societal ‘balance’ of power? This essay will use food blogs to discuss the issues blogging has raised and suggest that despite the being a new phenomenon, the blogosphere still exercises and responds to old paradigms of power and can be controlled by old systems of regulation.

In lieu of the constant referral to food blogs, a definition for the term would be convenient. A food blog shall refer to a blog that is devoted to the discussion of issues that are food related. As an article from Epicure, a section from The Age, says, food blogging takes the typical journal writing a step further but solely focussing on all things food related. With this in mind, this essay will explore the power dynamics the blogosphere dabbles with by specifically exploring three food blogs, glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com, 101cookbooks.com and vanillagarlic.blogspot.com.

Final Essay Question

Qn 3: In terms of blogs, discuss how participatory culture has impacted on the public sphere both in respect to the way in which it disrupts old paradigms of power, and entrenches new mechanisms of control.