Monetising the Dividual Self

The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia

Julian Hopkins

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781789201192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining theoretical and empirical discussions with shorter "thick description" case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers – precursors to current social media "microcelebrities" and "influencers." It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous and authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles. It argues that lifestyle blogs are dialogically constituted between the blogger, the readers, and the blog itself, and challenges the assumption of a unitary self by proposing that lifestyle blogs can best be understood in terms of the "dividual self."

CHAPTER 1

The Blog as Assemblage

Agency and Affordances

As with other media, the entanglement of technology, society and culture is at the core of an analysis of blogs, and this chapter discusses how my baseline theoretical approach guided by actor-network theory (ANT) and Bourdieuian field theory developed. As my fieldwork progressed, I struggled with defining blogs in a manner that took into account their specific technological features without using deterministic explanations of emerging practices, and this led me to the concept of affordances first proposed by Gibson (1977). This concept explains how animals encounter objects as material cues for action, and bloggers also encounter blog interfaces as material in this sense. However, as will be discussed below, the coded software ‘features’ are in fact themselves afforded by other technologies. Therefore, I have distinguished between those affordances that were inherent to a practical definition of blogs and those that were more identifiable as contingently emergent blogging practices. Another important development followed the invalidation of my initial expectation, based on Bourdieu’s discussion of the ‘fundamental law’ of cultural fields (1993), that a dialectical movement would emerge between groups of bloggers who stood by the fundamental principle of authenticity and those who ‘sold out’ to advertisers. This did not happen, and while seeking to integrate technology, media, social practices and agency, I came to appreciate the usefulness of the assemblage perspective, a model that emphasises rhizomatic multiplicities of causally related components rather than the relatively bounded dialectically driven spheres that a Bourdieuian approach implies. The model that emerged is methodologically driven by ethnography and ANT, outlines a typology of blog affordances, and is framed in an assemblage approach. It is proposed as a heuristic model for anchoring analyses of blogs that also has a potential for being applied to social media in general.

The Blog Medium: Affordances, Actor-Network Theory and Assemblage

What most users encounter in practice as ‘the internet’ is a series of variously interactive webpages displayed on a web browser, or apps on their mobile device. To the everyday user ‘the internet’ is as relevant as phone wires to a fixed line user – it only becomes relevant when it does not work. The internet is more usefully seen as a repository and distribution mechanism for a variety of media that can be identified by the modalities afforded by their interfaces and by associated practices. For example, a web forum offers written word and visual modalities – this would describe most web content, but forums are distinguished by the practice of engaging in threaded conversation and a broadly egalitarian access to interactional space. Podcasts, however, employ audio modalities only and correspond more to the classic one-to-many broadcast model.

When defining blogs we need to therefore understand both the modalities and the associated practices. In early works, blogs were classified as a genre (with sub-genres) operating through the medium of the internet. Plotting a continuum of ‘web genre[s] [along …] three dimensions of comparison … frequency of update, symmetry of communicative exchange, and multimodality’, Herring, Kouper et al. (2004: 10) described the blog as a hybrid genre bridging the gap between more static webpage communication and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). Expanding from Blood’s three ‘types’ (‘filters, personal journals, and notebooks’), they used five ‘blog types’ in their study: Personal journal, Filter, K-log, Mixed, and Other (Herring, Kouper et al. 2004: 2–6). However, Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht highlighted the difficulties inherent in classifying an emergent mediatic form, saying that the ‘extraordinarily diverse content of blog posts would seem to burst the bounds of a single genre’ (2004: 230).

As the debate developed, other approaches that also took into account the specifics of blog affordances suggested that blogs were a medium themselves. Teachout argued that a blog is ‘an end in itself, a medium whose distinctive properties arose from the opportunities for personal expression that it offered’ (2005: 45), and boyd (2006) argued that comparing blogs alongside other genres (such as a diary) obscures the specificity of blogging practices that shape the blog as medium. Emphasising cultural factors rather than ‘technologically defined’ boundaries (2006: para 36) she argued that blogs ‘allow people to extend themselves into a networked digital environment’ (2006: para 32). Using a metaphor of paper, television or radio, she notes that blogs support the expression of many genres – journalistic, diaristic and so on – and concludes: ‘blogs are not a genre of communication, but a medium through which communication occurs’ (2006: para 58).

Defining the blog was an early challenge during the fieldwork, and the reminders from both boyd and Teachout to integrate sociocultural uses of media technologies into the definition of a blog was important. Their arguments affirm the limitations of defining a medium by its technical properties, but not their irrelevance.

Relational Affordances

The concept of affordances is increasingly used in studies of digital media (Baym 2010; Evans et al. 2017; Jenkins and Carpentier 2013; Wellman et al. 2003), and others have applied it more specifically to social media (e.g. Germann Molz and Paris 2013; Gibbs, Rozaidi and Eisenberg 2013; Hsieh 2012; Treem and Leonardi 2012). In analyses of blogging Graves lists some of ‘blogging’s journalistic affordances’ as: ‘many eyeballs’, ‘fixity’, ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘editorial freedom’ (2007: 340–42), and Al-Ani, Mark and Semaan provide some general descriptions of blog affordances – ‘forming communities, expressing identity, receiving support from others, and expressing views of the war’ (2010). Others such as Luehmann (2008) and Herring, Scheidt et al. (2005) use the term but do not develop it in detail. Discussing the uses of blogs for teaching, Tan and Sale also do not engage with specifics of affordances as a concept, referring to Wellman et al. (2003) and arguing that the ‘[m]ost significant [affordance] is the capability for ongoing organized knowledge building, incorporating the integration of a range of hyperlinked multimedia’ (2010: 2). The concept of affordances tends to be used imprecisely (Evans et al. 2017), and the frequent use of a prefixing qualifier also suggests there is ambiguity in how it is understood, suggesting that there is a need for a more detailed theoretical consideration of the term (Hopkins 2016a).

When cognitive psychologist Gibson invented the noun ‘affordance’, he explained that it ‘implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment’ (1986: 127) where an object offers the potential to be used in various ways, but different animals cannot use it in the same way. For example, a pond’s surface affords support to a water strider insect but not to a human – hence, ‘an affordance of support for a species of animal [has] to be measured relative to the animal’ (1986: 127; original emphasis). Affordances are thus relational. They are inherent in and limited by physical properties of the object, but they are only empirically relevant when actualised through interaction with other actors or actants. In a frequently cited article, Hutchby addresses the perennial technodeterminist debate by arguing that affordances offer a ‘“third way” between the ([social] constructivist) emphasis on the shaping power of human agency and the (realist) emphasis on the constraining power of technical capacities’ and defines affordances as ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’ (2001: 444).

The appeal of affordances stems from the need to avoid positioning technology as determinative of particular sociocultural outcomes, or situating the use of technology as completely socially constructed, and thus merges with the debates around sociotechnology (e.g. Pfaffenberger 1992). Recalling MacKenzie and Wajcman’s argument that there is a place for a form of ‘“soft” determinism’ (1999: 4) that acknowledges the limitations and directional pressures that technologies place upon their uses (see also Schroeder 2018), Graves suggests that the ‘real power of the concept of a technological “affordance” derives … from the way it hints that potential exerts its own pull’ (2007: 335). The verb ‘to afford’ means that it is not the outcome alone that we look at but also the technology and see what it allows and/or suggests. Thus, in using affordances we do not ignore the way in which technologies can, and often do, put users on particular paths. For example, discussing telephones, Hutchby suggests that ‘there may be specific forms of interaction’ that have developed as a result of ‘a complex interplay between the normative structures of conversational interaction and [telephones’] communicative affordances’ (Hutchby 2001, cited in Hutchby 2003: 585; original emphasis). More recently, Schrock has argued that conceptualising ‘communicative affordances’ and avoiding an exclusive focus on features adds to the study of communication by allowing comparison over time and across specific technologies – for example, affordances of wearable technologies may ‘carry over from mobile media’ (2015: 1239), and, in turn, the portability of mobile media has some similarities with printed books (2015: 1236). He also argues that whereas Gibson’s approach was focused on the direct perception of utility based on immediate needs, utility can also be perceived in relation to goals that precede the use of a medium – for example, using a social network site to announce the birth of a child – in other words, affordances often develop from pre-existing sociocultural practices. Understanding affordances with relation to perceptions of utility that derive from our human ability to reflect on our situation, set ourselves a goal, and recalibrate our actions as we advance towards it, re-emphasises human agency and helps to explain both how users may adapt new technologies to existing practices, as well as follow new practices suggested or framed by these technologies.

Affording Software

This process of adaptation is especially relevant when considering the iterative development of software, and an extra layer of complexity is introduced to the use of affordances as an explanatory tool because the interface that presents itself to the blogger is itself afforded by a combination of soft- and hardware that the coders use to develop the interface. We can look at the mouse cursor that was a significant development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), a design approach that transformed the popular accessibility of personal computers (e.g. Norman 2013: 20). A computer’s affordances exist independently from what the screen shows (Norman 1999: 40), and the GUI is the primary mechanism by which the uses of computers are signalled to users. These signals are interpreted through cultural lenses, and it is interesting to note that Gibson did not limit his discussion of affordances to the physical environment, noting that the ‘richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are [for humans] provided by … other people’ (Gibson 1986: 135). These rich and elaborate sociocultural environments are diverse and subjective, and the coded affordances built into programs are also created by people with diverse social, cultural, economic and political intentions. In addition, software can be easily updated and changed, and this malleability suggests that digital media is a uniquely human technology – perhaps the most human of all technologies – that can be considered alongside other abstract human creations such as language or art.

However, the user would not know the meaning of the changing cursor unless she was already familiar with the use of the mouse, or at least a touch screen. This highlights the relevance of literacies – the ability to ‘read’ such signals and act upon them. Thus, Norman also emphasises relationality and notes that the ‘presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting’ (2013: 11). In this example, the affordance exists because the web browser has been coded to identify and signal hyperlinks, combined with the ability of the user to respond to the visual cue by clicking the mouse. Whereas considering how software is developed reminds us of the social malleability of (digital) technology, considering digital literacies emphasises the limitations to uses in everyday practice. A small minority of software users may be able to hack into software and change it, but for most users the interface has a utilitarian materiality with which they engage as ‘worldly artefact[s]’ (Hutchby 2003: 586), using the features as given, and without seeking to change them. This fundamental difference of software as materiality suggests that there is a need to adapt Gibson’s original approach.

Qualifying Affordances

It is notable that the meaning of ‘affordances’ is often taken for granted – sometimes to the extent of not defining it nor referring to leading sources such as Gibson (1986) or Norman (2013). In addition, the frequent use of a prefixing qualifier for affordances suggests a need to refine the concept, as implied by Hutchby’s distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘relational’ aspects of affordances. For example, ‘social affordances’ seems to have been first used by Wellman et al. (2003), who loosely define ‘internet social affordances’ as things that ‘can influence everyday life’ (2003) and do not refer to Gibson. Germann Molz and Paris (2013) and Hsieh (2012) have also recently argued for the use of ‘social affordances’ to explore the interaction of social media and particular types of mediated social relations. Germann Molz and Paris argue that ‘possibilities for togetherness are shaped, but not determined, by the technologies flashpackers [recreational travellers] use on the road’ (2013: 18) and note that ‘social affordances … afford certain forms of sociability’ between flashpackers and relevant others (2013: 5; original emphasis). Addressing the digital divide, Hsieh (2012) notes that the ‘social affordances of ICTs are technologically bounded and socially constructed’ and uses the concept to explain both the limitations of social media and how social networking advantages are only afforded to those with particular digital literacy skills deriving from their social context. Gibbs et al. also use a qualifier, describing ‘“strategic affordances” … that draw on organizational members’ desires for strategic ambiguity’ (2013: 105).

From the field of human-computer interaction, Sun (2004) points to Brerentsen and Trettvik for whom affordances emerge ‘as activity-relationships between actors and objects’ (quoted in Sun 2004: 56). Sun distinguishes between ‘instrumental affordances’ that emerge ‘from use interactions in the material context’ and ‘social affordances’ that are ‘the affordances on the activity level emerging from use interactions in the socio-cultural and historical context’ (2004: 57). The ‘instrumental affordances’ recalls Hutchby’s ‘functional affordances’, and the important recognition of the ‘material context’ is echoed in Treem and Leonardi’s argument that ‘the affordances of one technology are often the same or similar across diverse organizational settings because the material features of the technology place limits on the kinds of interpretations people can form of it and the uses to which it can be put’ (2012: 146; emphasis added). These points highlight the agency of non-human technologies, a key aspect of the concept of affordances that is sometimes overlooked in favour of emphasising the cultural adaptation of technologies (e.g. D. Miller 2016: 37–40). It also points to a link with actor-network theory that we will return to below. Recent work by Evans et al. (2017) has distinguished between ‘features’ and ‘outcomes’ and argued that these are mediated by affordances. In this argument, features are often mistakenly identified as affordances, but here I will argue that it is also possible to see these features as affordances in themselves, albeit in relation to a different context.

Technologies have limitations that need to be identified – these do not determine outcomes but may help to explain patterns of use within and across different sociocultural contexts. A blog is an interface designed by humans and as such the ‘features’ – such as the modular architecture of plug-ins or the ability to create hyperlinks – are all in effect afforded by a combination of microprocessor technology and binary coding language that developed through historically contingent processes that can be investigated in their own right (e.g. Berners-Lee 1996; Ceruzzi 1999). This latter point is important when we consider digital technologies such as social media platforms that are explicitly designed with particular sociocultural relational outcomes in mind (e.g. Bucher 2013). Hence, ‘features’ or ‘properties’ of a software platform are in fact affordances that are enabled by an underlying level of the technology – an idea echoed by Michael, who discusses possible ‘cascades’ of affordances, whereby the use of one technology affords the use of another (2000: 112). A skilled coder could manipulate these affordances, but in practice most people engage with media technologies as users, taking the ‘features’ as given, without seeking to change them. Therefore, these ‘features’ could be termed ‘foundational’ or ‘a priori’ affordances, because they are a necessary precondition to the types of affordances that the user can develop – with, for example, the hyperlink becoming a means to engage in associations and develop socialities with other bloggers and readers online. These emergent affordances are the ones most relevant to an anthropological study of blogging, as they can be used as an empirical lens to shed light on the interaction of technology and people in emerging practices, socialities and genres. Table 1.1 proposes a typology of the different affordances that was developed during the fieldwork, along with associated blogging practices.

Table 1.1 Blog affordances.

Actor-Network Theory

By allowing agency for both human and non-human actors/actants, as well as ‘non-individual[s]’ (Latour 1998), Actor-Network Theory (ANT) usefully complements the concept of affordances. The term ‘actor-networks’ encompasses the interaction between components (networks) and the agency of those components (actors/actants), both as separate entities and as a whole actor-network. Instead of assuming pre-existing structures that have ‘already been assembled and [act] on the whole’ (Latour 2005: 43), ANT focuses on empirical traces of these interactions as a means to analyse emergent phenomena, and the discussion of affordances above outlines one way of doing this.

In addition to an economic analysis based on ANT (in Chapter 7), this book uses three key concepts from ANT. First is the ‘actant’ – ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ (Latour 2005: 71) – this encompasses human and non-human agency and will be used to refer to a blog in particular, as well as other components. All act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Brief Chronology of Personal and Lifestyle Blogging in Malaysia
• Introduction. Anthroblogia: Participant Observation and Blogging in Malaysia
• Chapter 1. The Blog as Assemblage: Agency and Affordances
• Chapter 2. January 2006: Blogwars, Hit Sluts and Authenticity in the Personal Blogosphere
• Chapter 3. The Blogger and Her Blog: (Dis)Assembling the Dividual Self
• Chapter 4. May 2007: Assembling Genres
• Chapter 5. Assembling Blogs and Bloggers
• Chapter 6. April 2007: Voicy Consumers and Negotiating Networked Publics
• Chapter 7. Assembling a Blog Market
• Chapter 8. January 2009: Negotiating the Authentic Advertorial
• Chapter 9. Assembling Lifestyles
• Chapter 10. October 2009: Regional Blogmeet
• Conclusions. The Dividual Self and Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog
• References
• Index