Friday 5 October 2012

Can Blogs Be Virtual Communities?

To answer this question, Anita Blanchard examined a very active blog, the Julie/Julia Project which followed the blog author, Julie Powell, as she cooked her way through Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. During its one year existence, the Julie/Julia Project had regular updates on most weekdays and also on many weekends. It was a very popular blog with hundreds and then thousands of daily hits. There were frequent comments by readers. Julie would sometimes respond to the comments; other commenters would also respond to each others' comments.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Personality and Culture Influence Self-presentation and Self-disclosure on SNSs

Baiyun Chen and Justin Marcus conducted a non-experimental study to investigate how university students (N = 463) use Facebook, and examined the roles that personality and culture play in disclosure of information in online SNS-based environments. The research seeked to extend existing theory on self-disclosure to the online arena in higher educational institutions and contribute to the knowledge base and understanding about the use of a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook, by college students.