Announcement: Svetlana Makeyeva Presents Her Current Research at the Annual Dissertation Colloquium BOND

Svetlana Makeyeva presents:
“Emergence and Rise of American Politicosphere: Overview of the Bloggers’ Personal Historical Narratives”

BOND 2010 Saturday, 30 January 2010 at 13:00

TU Dortmund
Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften
Amerikanistik
Emil-Figge-Str. 50, Room 0.406
44221 Dortmund

Abstract
The “history of blogosphere” is very short, yet very complex. This presentation is an overview of the personal historical narratives about the emergence and rise of what is defined today as an American political blogosphere, the U.S. political Web or the U.S. politicosphere.
Within blogosphere, it is asserted to be “common knowledge” that the term “weblog” was coined in December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom. In 1998, American webloggers became a self-conscious community (Rosenberg, 2009). In January 1999, Cameron Barrett of CamWorld published an essay called “Anatomy of a Weblog,” which adopted the term “weblog” and described the main technical features of the format. In 1999, Peter Merholz of Peterme announced about his decision to pronounce “weblog” as “wee’-blog”, “Or ‘blog’ for short.”
So, what is a “blog”? There is obviously not one dominant definition of what “blog” stands for. It has always been a matter of definition and a question of acceptance of this definition by bloggers-practitioners, who make up a community of communities. In September 1999, Brad L. Graham of The BradLands jokingly named this— already enormous!— collection of the interconnected communities as “blogosphere”.
Blogging tools were “predestined” to be popularized and politicized. “The rise of bloggers as part of modern politics has no precise start date,” writes political blog-admirer David D. Perlmutter, “but it does have an origins myth: the run of Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2003 to 2004.” (2008) By 2007, the situation on the Web got beyond a joke. At first ignored, the mainstream political news media migrated on-line and embraced the blog-format. Blogosphere became a political battleground temporarily won by pro-Obama internet users. The launch of the first official White House blog by President Obama marked a “golden age” for both, blog as a format and political blogging as a popular genre in the United States of America. My presentation is a glimpse at the American politicosphere’s “history” narrated by bloggers-historians.

The presentation will be available in PPT format in my EWS working space.