Ready for lift off

This is my first blogentry I write in English. I'd better get used to it, because in the next months I'm hoping to build a new network around my blog. Since februari this year I have been writing in Dutch, but I noticed I hardly got any response on the things I wrote. Initially I wrote for myself mainly, just to order my thoughts. But now I'm facing the beginning of my masters thesis and I'm going to investigate the phenomenon of weblogging. Since there is little scientific publications on weblogging I have to find other ways of getting enough input for my thesis. And that's why I'm starting an English weblog. To try and get input from bloggers themselves!

What my thesis is going to be about? I haven't got my research questions formulated yet, but I do know one part is to describe the weblog as a communicationtool and compare the weblog to other types of communicationtools used on the internet, such as chatboxes, fora etc. The other part of my thesis will consist of a philosophical investigation of the weblog. A Dutch philosopher (Jos de Mul) has written about personal homepages as a tool in the construction of personal identity in the postmodern world. That's a very interesting subject. An other thing that I noticed about blogging is that the communicational culture amongst them has some resemblance with the ideal speech idea of Habermas. In short that is: respect for the opinions of the other, no differences in power between the persons joining the conversation and transparancy. It is worthwhile to investigate whether my ideas about this are true in some way.

These are the subjects I'm going to write about in the next months. For everyone who wants to know more about me: I will create an 'about me' section in the next few days.

Permalink | TrackBack (by Elmine Wijnia on December 4, 2003 11:23 AM)