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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1219-8144
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Sociology
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Robert Zussman
Second Advisor
Millicent Thayer
Third Advisor
Sanjiv Gupta
Fourth Advisor
Leda Cooks
Subject Categories
Sociology
Abstract
The public/private distinction is one of the most influential concepts of the modern era, both in terms of social theory and everyday life. For many, public and private have been treated as completely separate. The assumption that public and private are a dichotomous pair has influenced numerous aspects of social life, ranging from the gendered division of labor to the development of the suburb. However, the division between the public and private realms has proven to be permeable; the public and private realms have bled over into one another, and can no longer be treated as dichotomous. Information and communication technologies have been pivotal in these shifting conceptions of publicity and privacy. Based on a study of personal bloggers — individuals who write about their everyday lives on the Internet — this study finds that public and private are best understood in terms of the relationship among information, audience, and control over access to information. Bloggers conceptualize publicity and privacy relative to the information they make available online, and actively work to balance the benefits of writing online with the risks of granting readers access to that content. They manage this tension through a variety of techniques ranging from use of software controls (commonly used on some blogging platforms) to maintaining multiple blog documents. Through this process, bloggers continuously create and destroy both content and audiences. The end result is a vision of public and private that consists of “public” as synonymous with “widely accessible” and “private” as synonymous with “limited access”.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/14104739
Recommended Citation
Ford, Sarah, "Public and Private in the Blogosphere" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1575.
https://doi.org/10.7275/14104739
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1575
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.