Environmentalism, like any other noteworthy social movement, has been met with some resistance. Opposition to this movement has come both from the general public and from organized anti-environmental groups. The closeness, or lack thereof, between the organized groups' messages and those of the public has yet to be clearly defined. Given that organized groups are often more capable of getting their message out to a larger audience, it is important to know to what extent the thoughts and ideas they put forward are representative of those of the public. Without examining this relationship, responding to anti-environmental sentiment in the public will be difficult.In an effort to understand opposition towards environmentalism in the general public, this project examined the blogosphere. Anti-environmental weblog (blog) postings were subjected to a content analysis in order to reveal common themes present within them. The specific focus of the analysis was on the manner in which environmentalism was portrayed by its opponents, as opposed to points of factual disagreement. Comparisons were then made to the arguments of the organized anti-environmentalism factions, and a more complete picture of the opposition toward environmentalism was constructed. From this basis, recommendations for a response to anti-environmental sentiment from leaders in the area of sustainable development were given.

Using content analysis and in-depth interviews, this research undertakes a case study of the online progressive blogosphere as a social movement. Previous research into social movement applications of the Internet and computer-mediated communication (CMC) focuses on "street" movement application of Internet resources. These studies find that though Internet applications are a boon to movements, they offer nothing novel, instead allowing movements to perform normal tasks at a faster rate. More recently, scholars have begun to examine movements with stronger roots in the online world, or "e-movements." Earl and Schussman (2003, 2004) assert that not only do unique e-movements exist, but that they have important substantial differences from street movements. This research examines the progressive blogosphere (PB) as one of these e-movements. I examine the movement activity of the PB through the lens of framing and New Social Movements (NSM) in order to gain insight to where e-movements fit within our current knowledge structures. In the end, I find that though decentralized and informal, the PB movement utilizes existing framing tasks and processes in order to mobilize passive readers into active users. After analyzing the PB movements' identity construction, mobilization techniques, goals, and leadership structures, I propose the existence of a "user-based model" for e-movements.

Alors que les démocraties occidentales voient leur population toujours moins impliquée en politique, les outils numériques offriraient de nouvelles possibilités susceptibles de remobiliser les citoyens. Les blogs politiques, en particulier, permettraient à de nouvelles populations de publiciser à moindres coûts leurs opinions politiques en ligne. En parallèle à l’espace de l’action politique spécialisée et à l’espace médiatique, se formerait alors un nouvel espace de discussion et de publicisation d’idées politiques, ouvert à tous et susceptible de rencontrer une audience considérable. La question est alors de savoir si, aujourd’hui, les blogs politiques permettent à un nouveau type de producteurs de messages politiques d’accéder à de nouveaux publics. Nous démontrons que seuls les blogueurs ayant une visibilité antérieure dans le champ médiatique classique, de par leurs positions politiques ou professionnelles, sont susceptibles de rencontrer un public sur leur blog. Loin d’avoir permis à de nouveaux producteurs de messages politiques d’acquérir de l’audience, la blogosphère politique apparaît au contraire encastrée dans les champs politique et médiatique dont elle prolonge très largement les hiérarchies. Ainsi, notre travail tend à invalider la représentation enchantée d’une blogosphère politique qui, comme l’avançaient les tenants de la thèse cyber-optimiste, devait permettre à de nouveaux producteurs de messages politiques de rencontrer de nouveaux publics. / While the population of western democracies is less and less involved in politics, digital tools would seem to offer new possibilities to remobilize citizens. Political blogs can allow new people to publish their political opinions online. In addition to existing political and media spaces, a newspace of discussion and publication of political ideas would thus appear, allowing every citizen to participate and to be widely read. The question for research is whether political blogs today allow a new type of political message producer to reach a new audience. We demonstrate that only bloggers having previous visibility in the classic media field, due to their political or professional positions, can have a large audience on their blog. Far from having allowed new producers of political messages to attain a large audience, the political blogosphere seems on the contrary embedded in the political and media fields, of which it largely extends the hierarchies. Our work, accordingly, tends to invalidate the idea of a political blogosphere which, according to the cyber-optimistic thesis, would have allowed new producers of political messages to get new audience.

This dissertation constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to electronic narratives, which explores the impact of recent technological developments in the literary field. The work of theorists and scholars such as Henry Jenkins, Jean Baudrillard, Lev Manovich, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Erving Goffman, Sherry Turkle, George Landow, Marie-Laure Ryan and Espen Aarseth, among many others, are applied to the study of how key sociological and narratological concepts acquire new meanings when implemented in an electronic environment. More specifically, this research provides evidence of how emerging media culture challenges the traditional concepts of authorship, textuality, fictionality, sequential structure, and readership, with tendencies toward anonimity, pseudonymity, collaborative authorship, hypertextual narrative structures, and the reader's involvement in the creative process. Chapter One lays out the methodology used for the study of blog-fictions. This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach to blogging which combines the contributions made in several fields of study within digital humanities: computer-mediated communication theory, hypertext theory, Internet ethnography, social network theory, narratology of hypertext, research on blogging and Web 2.0, ludology and performance studies. The purpose of this chapter is to conceptualize the study of blog-fictions both as an expression of information society in its current state, and as a new fictional genre that challenges traditional narrative concepts. In Chapter Two ("Blogosphere: a network of social convergences"), the center of analysis concerns the study of the blogger as a social type who reproduces its social life on the Internet. This chapter studies the peculiar and new ways in which bloggers communicate with each other and create social networks through the production and distribution of texts, hyperlinks, and multimedia artifacts. Chapter Three presents a theory of the blog-text focussing on its structure and defining features. Finally, Chapter Four analyzes how the socio-aesthetic and narrative concepts studied in previous chapters are reflected in blog-novels written in Spanish by Argentinean author Hernan Casciari. This research contributes to literary studies in general by acknowledging that electronic fictions and blog-fictions constitute an emerging literary genre with its own identifiable features, and are molded by the culture of the information society.

The media landscape is changing, the blogs has taken focus from the traditional media. The PR industry is having a hard time following the rapid development, especially developing an ethical framework. This study aims to examine how PR-practitioners who works at PR- agencies, members of the industry association PRECIS, discuss blog cooperations as a tool on behalf of their clients. The study also examines how the collaboration between the agency and the blogger operate, especially how practitioners discuss issues concerning ethics and moral in their blog cooperations. This study is based on qualitative interviews with PR-practitioners who describes their thoughts of working with blogs as a tool and how they reflect on ethics, rules and frameworks. The findings of this research indicate that there is an uncertainty in the industry due to how practitioners approach to an ethical framework. The findings also show that practitioners see the blog as a great asset and that the medium is under constant development.

This diploma thesis, The phenomenon of digital labor and its diverse practice in use of blogs in the Czech Republic, aims to bring the current definition of the concept of digital labor and its applicability into the Czech blogosphere. The theoretical part of this work focuses on the demarcation, definition of, and perception of the concept of digital labor, and the blogosphere, which is mainly based on theoretical concepts of Christian Fuchs, Sebastian Sevignani, Ursula Huws, Trebor Scholz, that proceeded the political economic theory of Karl Marx. The analytical part of the thesis presents the environment of the Czech blogosphere, which is based on the interpretation of the data of quantitative research conducted in the Czech Republic as part of a wider project IPREX BLOGBAROMETERM in 2014 and 2015 and secondly on qualitative research, which aims to answer the research question, if Czech bloggers perceive their creative activity as work and leisure activities, or merge their very different activities in one. Keywords Digital labor, digital work, blog, blogosphere, playbour, prosumption, Fuchs

Book Summary:The Encyclopedia of Women in Today′s World looks at women today and delves into contexts of being female in the 21st century. The scope of the Encyclopedia focuses on women′s status starting approximately in the year 2000 and going forward. From A-to-Z, this work covers the spectrum of defining women in the contemporary world. Signed entries (with cross-references and recommended readings) cover the full range of issues in contemporary women′s studies, with volumes including information relevant to the following academic disciplinary contexts: arts and media; business and economics; criminal justice; education; family studies; health; media; military; politics; science and technology; sports; religion; and women in different cultures and countries.

In this thesis, we propose a system for finding friend groups in Blogosphere. This system includes two parts: The first part can traverse the Blogosphere so as to obtain the friend network; and the second part is used to find friend groups from the friend network. Our practical performance was tested on Wretch, which is the largest Blogosphere in Taiwan. In today's blog service environment, the establishments of friend relationships are usually unidirectional, i.e., a blogger can add any other as his friend without confirmation. Traditional methods such as clique/club or 2-clique/club are not suitable because the bidirectional link is built incompletely in the social network under such circumstances. To solve this problem, we propose the 1.5-club based on transitive extension. We further make a comparison among the results of finding groups by 1-club, 1.5-club, 2-club and k-clique, and analyze the historical data of social networks from over almost one year. The experimental results show that our proposed method is effective and promising.

Communities in cyberspace have been present since the earliest days of home computers, when connecting to the web meant logging in to the WELL program. In 1994, when the Internet became more accessible to the public, and home computers were no longer considered a novelty, millions flocked to this new, virtual frontier that allowed them to connect with anyone around the globe. Folkloristics has been largely concerned with the tangible—what we can touch, hear, taste, and see. As the frontier of the web expanded, many folklorists contracted away from using it as a means to explore a new branch of folklore: virtual communities and all of the folkloric nuances that they possess. Fortunately, in recent years, folklorists have recognized the value and validity of the Internet folklore. This thesis is concerned with a very specific folk group, Mormon mommy bloggers, and how they function both in the blogosphere at large and the smaller niche of Mormon blogs, the bloggernacle. Mormon mommy blogs are distinctive in their vernacular, post material, and side bar badges. These blogs also provide a window not just into Mormon life, but also ideas about how faith can interact with identity and womanhood. Mormon mommy blogs are a vibrant genre of both Internet folklore and Mormon folklore. Mormon mommy blogs also serve as ways to undertake record-keeping for posterity and, for some, are a means of proselytizing, which are two important aspects of Mormon culture. Mormon mommy blogs also allow for frank conversations about expectations of the Mormon culture and the impossibilities of being the perfect Mormon woman. For non-Mormons, Mormon mommy blogs are a form of escapism into the lives of women who are confounding the notion that housewives and mothers are woefully unfulfilled. The fields of folkloristics, women and gender studies, and even religious studies could all benefit from examining mommy and Mormon mommy blogs. (102 pages)

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka aktiva bloggares syn på yrket bloggare, sin egen blogg och bloggandet i allmänhet. Bloggen som yrke är ett område där tidigare forskning undersöker läsarnas och företagens interaktion med bloggaren. Det saknas dock ännu forskning som undersöker bloggarnas perspektiv på yrket och vad yrket kan innebära. Undersökningen fokuserar på den professionella sidan av bloggandet och utgörs av en kvalitativ intervjustudie med 13 respondenter. Resultaten diskuteras utifrån tidigare forskning samt teorier med utgångspunkt från olika marknadsföringsbegrepp. Resultaten visar att bloggarna är glada och stolta över vad de gör, men samtidigt upplever de att det finns en skepsis och oförstående från många. Bloggen ses inte som ett riktigt yrke, men i realiteten bevisar bloggarna att det kan vara allt från ens huvudsakliga yrke, till en hobby eller till ens digitala CV. Bloggen blir ett CV då det är en översikt över allt man gör samlat på ett ställe med kontinuerlig uppdatering. Enligt respondenterna ses bloggare som yrke fortfarande på med tveksamma ögon från stora delar av samhället. Det framkommer även att det ännu råder mycket okunskap, såväl bland bloggare som hos företag, kring hur man förhåller sig inom lagen när man arbetar med marknadsföring via bloggar. / The purpose of this study was to investigate and account for active bloggers view of the blogging profession, their blog and blogging in general. Previous research has been made about blogging and the interaction with the readers. This study revolves around the blogging profession and professional parts of working as a blogger and a qualitative selection of respondents led to 13 interviews. We discuss our results by applying marketing concepts as a point of departure. Looking closely into the subject makes it easy to see that the bloggers are happy with and proud of what they do, but they feel that the profession is still seen with skepticism and incomprehension from a lot of people. The blog is not considered as a real job, but in reality it can be anything from one's main occupation, just a hobby to one´s digital CV. The blog becomes a CV since it´s a place where you can store and display what you do and have done, with continual update. The study also concluded that even amongst the bloggers and the companies working alongside them, the industry is still evolving. Especially when it comes to advertising and marketing through blogs and maintaining legal working boundaries between blogger and company. According to our respondents the blogging profession still struggles when being scrutinized by bystanders.