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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.