MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

People who blog do so for a myriad of reasons. Some bloggers post personal messages for others to read and/or interact with. While others post or aggregate content from and/or link to other sources and interact with and/or allow readers to post comments. A number of bloggers have developed their expertise around a particular topic(s) or specialty. And, specific professional journalists are blogging in order to communicate and interact with their news audience as well as observe developing audience trends. On the political front and the world stage we have witnessed the significance of blogging to political organizing, dissent, and demonstrations by protestors during the Arab Spring in 2011 and the Occupy Wall Movement of 2012.

Blogging represents a paradigm shift in the production, creation, and dissemination of information, including news, from an historic top-down, centralized and controlled, mainly one-way communication system, to a bottom-up, audience-generated, dynamic and interactive participatory communication system. Thus, blogging is furthering public or citizen participation and involvement in our democracy and therefore generating greater benefits to the society.

Yet critics of blogging have argued that minorities and women are inadequately represented in many blogging organizations and they wonder whether this lack of diversity replicates or reproduces the same problems of inequality that is prevalent in Old Media.

Thus, is blogging in the 21st century representative of an increasingly diverse and multicultural audience? Or, is it continuing an historic practice of being largely a white male phenomenon?

To attempt to answer these questions I propose conducting an in depth investigation of selected blogging organizations in the U.S. using political economy and critical race theory. Additionally, I propose to examine which of these selected organizations function as journalists or not.