On Baby-Boomers and Millennials: The Audience Responds to My Presentation

The structer of my presentation with comments:

Slide 1: Title
The title of my presentation was “Emergence and Rise of the U.S. Politicosphere:
Overview of the Bloggers’ Personal Historical Narratives”.

Slide 2: The U.S.A.: Google Maps Satellite Image (2010)
I started my presentation with the demonstration of the physical map of the United States of America.

Slide 3. Visual Representation of the U.S. Politicosphere
(. 30 Jan. 2010)
The next slide contained the screen shoot of http://politicosphere.net/map, the visual representation of the U.S. politicosphere. I explained how the online political debate map, presented with its nodes and edges, works.

Slide 4. Quote
This slide contained a quote from an on-line article “Social Scientists Create Maps of Online Interactions” by Jeffrey R. Young:

“If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.

Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints in the sand.

"We're entering the golden age of social science," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "We know more than we ever did about what's on people's minds."

Slide 5. Why Map “Politicosphere”?
This slide contained a list of suggestions “Why Map Politicosphere”:

• To represent a particular space on the Web: “It exists.”
• To locate yourself on/within it: “I exist.”
• To represent a community of the like: “We exist.”
• To differentiate oneself from the other/others: “They exist.”
• To [symbolically] depict complexity of the relationships/hierarchy between objects and spaces, “real” or “imagined”.
• To narrate history.

My comment to this slide was: “Despite the diversity in appearance, content, and function, each map is employed, either explicitly or implicitly, in telling a story. The map of the U.S. political Web has a narrative aspect as well. It does not only represent particular space on the Web, but also represents time, history, technological progress and the images of the contemporary American politicosphere, which appeal to us as being “logical” and “making sense”. Today, I will not go deep into the history of the cartography of the U.S. politicosphere…”
Slide 6. The Main Purposes of the Presentation
“…The main purpose of this presentation,” I continued. “Is an overview of the personal historical narratives about the emergence and rise of what is defined today as the U.S. politicosphere or the U.S. political Web. When did politicosphere emerge? How did it rise?” I introduced the main purposed of my presentation:

• Provide an overview of the personal historical narratives about the emergence and rise of the U.S. politicosphere.
• Consult “histories” narrated by bloggers-practitioners.
• Filter and compare the content of the historical narratives for the arguments and opinions on the emergence and rise of the American politicosphere. Compare the dates provided.
• If possible, investigate the political stands of the bloggers-historians.

Slide 7. Requirements to the Historical Narratives for the Purpose of This Study
I introduced the requirements to the historical narratives selected for the purpose of my study. There were, basically, only five major requirements I came up with:

• The book selected for the analysis falls under the category of a “history”; or contains a chapter/chapters serving narrating the history of the blogging.
• The historical narrative selected for the purpose of this study was written by a blogger-practitioner.
• The historical narrative got published and issued as a book.
• The historical narrative received coverage (positive or negative) in the American blogosphere and mainstream media.

Slide 8. The Historical Narratives Selected for this Study:
Slide 8 contained four pictures of the books I have selected for analysis. Here is the bibliography:

1. Blood, Rebecca. The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002.
2. Blood, Rebecca. We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002.
3. Perlmutter, David. Blogwars: The New Political Battleground. USA: Oxford University Press, 2008.
4. Rosenberg, Scott. “The Rise of Political Blogging”, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Click on the number (1,2,3 and 4) to visit the amazon.com webpage and compare the prizes of the books. To be honest, the books were expensive, when I purchased them. Until you really need them for “my PhD shelf”, go to the library and check them out there. (Good luck! I did not find these books in our TU Dortmund library, unfortunately!). Blood’s books are cheaper now, though.

Slide 9. Key Terms
I thought it was necessary to mention the key terms before my "narration". I think, such slides are very helpful in preparing the stomachs of my audience to digesting the material I am about to present. Very often, the majority of my audience in TU DO never happened to hear these weird English words...

• The Web
• Weblog (to weblog; a weblogger)
• Filter-weblog
• Ye Old Skool
• Blog (to blog; a blogger)
• On-line diary
• Blogger.com
• Warblog
• Celebogs
• Community-blog/multi-authored blog
• Weblog/Blog-community
• Blogosphere
• Political blog (political blogger)
• Conservative/Infopros/Liberal
• Politicosphere
• Historical narrative

(more text coming soon)