Blog’s Identification
Zornick posted the blog about shooting tragedy of Giffords on Jan 8. 2010 at 2:14 pm. The Blog post was published on ThinkProgress.org, which is a news-blog post from Center for American Progress Action Fund. In the title, author put the word UPDATE in parentheses with capitalized to show that this blog was showed the update of what happened after the tragedy. Blog post were made as describe what happened with quoted statements from eminent politicians, such as Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Kelly, and President Barack Obama. The text-post was featured with pictures as well as links to other blog post related with the topic. There are 13 links of resources provided. The list of those cited resources was posted at the end of the blog post.
The blogger allowed readers to mashup the blog post with other social networking tools. When it was retrieved, January 11, 2011 at 08.30PM, the blog post had been tweeted by 46 users and liked by 857 Facebook users. In total, 1891 comments were posted for this blog. The blog comment area was featured with “like” tab and “reply” tab. In the comments, it was clear those readers not only commenting, but they were arguing, insulting one another, and flagging other reader’s comments. For examples, “So don't put your stupid words into my mouth”, “go f*** yourself you subhuman f***”, “Look in the mirror you Leftist hate monger!”, and “This comment was flagged for review.” The blog post comments can also being shorts in fourth modes: popular now, best rating, newest first, and older first. The blog post can be subscribed with email or RSS feed. Links for users to contact the blogger and make a donation, advertisements, blog rolls, and archives drop down menu are some additional features that can be found on this blog.
Analysis
According to Blood (2002), blog genre can be divided into filters, personal journals, and notebooks. While as, Krishnamurthy (2002) categorize blog genre into fourth, which are online diaries, support group, enhanced column, and collaborative content. Enhanced column on Krishnamurthy by Halavais (2002) and Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright (2004) was identified has the same characteristics with filters. Zornic’s blog (Jan 8, 2011) can be categorized as filters blog. Where the blog post has these three characteristics: 1) the blog post content are about current events, which just happened and has a big impact to people, especially for people in Arizona, USA; 2) the blogs were posted for external information; and 3) readers can react and make a comment to the events in the blog comment area. In term of structural features, the blog has most of feature mentioned on Herring, et al. (2004). Those freatures are “archives, badges, images, comments allowed, link to email blog author, ads, and search function (p.7)”.
In one hand, the development of social computing has positive impacts that we mentioned which are more features and more options. On the other hand, it also has negative impacts for social life. Some of these negative impacts mentioned by Boyd and Ellison (2007) are difficulty on differentiate the truth and not truth, difficulty on controlling privacy, and change in social interaction online. These negative impacts clearly can be identified from Zornick’s blog (Jan 8, 2011). When the tragedy happened, the blogger want to deliver the information quickly, while as the information still not being verified. The blogger could not explain the accuracy of information, except mentioned some unverified information. When the comment of blog posting is enabling for everyone, there is a possibility of coming in to the comment post, the inappropriate posting. The blogger seems try to maintain the comment by flagging inappropriate comments, but other inappropriate comments still keep come into the comment forum. Moreover, disagreeing on posting, and different on political ideology, religion, ethnicity, etc. caused the readers of this blog involved on online conflict, which is the latent functionality of the social computing.
Conclusion
Social computing is a study that concern about the emerging and transforming of social behavior with the improvement of communication and interaction through the online platform. The online platform can be blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging (IM), etc. The positive aspects of improvement in social computing are 1) news and information can be broadcasted quickly to the entire world people without restriction of time and region; 2) people can have collaboration on improving knowledge and research; and 3) the free version of the tools can be used as an alternative to replace pay version software. The negative impact of social computing are 1) challenge of the quality and trustiness of information; 2) challenge on providing privacy and security for sites/tools users; and 3) challenge on developing suitable ethic regarding to copyright and property rights.
References
Blood, R. (2002). The weblog handbook: Practical advice on creating and maintaining your blog. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub.
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Halavais, A. (2002). Blogs and the “Social Weather. Internet Research 30.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2004 Proceedings of the (Vol. 0, pp. 101-111). Ieee. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/wrapper.htm?arnumber=1265271
Krishnamurthy, S. (2002). The Multidimensionality of Blog Conversations: The Virtual Enactment of September 11. Internet Research 30 (Vol. 3).
Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work CSCW 04 (Vol. 6, pp. 222-231). ACM Press. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1031607.1031643
Zornic, G., (Jan 8, 2011). [UPDATED] Democratic Rep. Grabrielle Giffords, 18 Others Shot at Even in Arizona; Judge, Child among Dead. Retrieved from http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/08/democratic-rep-gabrielle-giffords-shot-at-event-in-arizona/
