Accelerated Adolescence

Anthropology and Sociology

The advent of the blog isn't really a new concept. Though, widespread usage of the internet coupled with leaps and bounds in the general populace's knowledge about computers has skyrocketed the number of blogs. Myspace, perhaps the worst platform in existence (also owned by Rupert Murdoch), has millions upon millions of page views per day. For more information on blogs and the invention of the blog, click here and leave obnoxious comments, I'm sure that my brother will humor you and post a blog on the history of blogs, or just click here. However, studying blogs is going to be an emergingly popular phenomenon for several reasons. Blogs are fascinating, generally easy to find and access, a bit voyeuristic, and an especially easy way to delve into what's going on in youth culture (if a middle school principal is capable of accessing a student's blog, you'd better believe that it's easy).

I see this an emerging trend in research; the weblog has been around for about a decade now and it's clearly not about to get washed out. Weblogs are also a fantastic way for historians (and social historians) to find and identify primary sources. A search on google for september 11th yielded this site, more primary sources than most historians are willing to wade through. Researchers are likely to ask questions about the communities of bloggers and how accurate a reflection they are of contemporary culture. Likely, they'll find that, for only a little while, the poorer communities are being denied access to the blogosphere, due mainly to financial restrictions. However, as costs come down, I expect blogs to remain highly attractive to most people because of their potential for anonymity and time response delays that allow posters to challenge authors and other posters without immediate feedback. If you don't believe me that everyone is has a blog, there are even gang blogs that serve as communication tools for street gangs.

I predict, however, that blogs will become an increasing concern of the lower levels of schooling and the state. Because there are concerns of equity, not every child has access to a computer and the internet at home nor is it necessarily a right of children to have access if their parents do own a computer, using the internet or networks at school is the only pedagogical forum available for teachers to introduce these technologies to students. For these reasons, blogs will remain outside of the sphere of public education, and will, thus, provide a rich community of child culture for those with access. A few researchers will be concerned with literacy rates and the degree to which literacy is either, reflected by blog usage or blog usage improves literacy. Both are likely to be true, though I suspect that the level of the blogs that one frequents is likely to be directly correlated with their ability to read as well as their constructed self-image of intelectualism etc... However, I suspect, the primary interest of the state will be its usual dual nature. Rather than promote free speech, criticism, and critical thinking, schools will be concerned with controlling the behavior of its students (which can be readily seen with the manifold increase of school doping programs, especially poor black males) and identifying and punishing/removing of potentially dangerous students.

In my experience, that students learn anything and teachers manage to teach anything is entirely in spite of schoool administrators and disciplinarians. Students who are neglected and abused at home are the most frequent troublemakers at school. The primary reason that students get drugged is because they visit a psychologist or a psychotherapist. The primary reason that studnets see such a person is because they are making trouble for their teachers. If I, momma's boy Mendon, the obedient wonder, the facile teacher pleaser, had struggles with school administrators and authoritarians, I imagine that children who have an unsporrtive, unloving, neglectful home have great difficulties. I spent all of Junior High and High School feeling as though I had been imprisoned in my school and, to some degree, I was right. I imagine that schools that do not have the fabulous funding that mine did are likely to emulate prisons even more.

Thus, as students increasingly use blogs as a forum, their very forum will be used against them as a form of monitoring and censorship. It seems odd to me that we willingly post private aspects about our lives on the internet for others to see. Rather than attempting to hide from Big Brother, we are capitulating out of the sense that our anonimity is virtually guaranteed by the billions upon billions of other useless websites competing for people's attention. Thus, only those people who find us by chance and those to whom we directly advertise are likely to know anything about us. This will certainly be interesting in twenty years or so when the young blogging community goes public and begins joining politics and the realm of authority. It's interesting, if one can get dooced for what one posted recently, will people's blogs from when they were adolescents be dug up to justify their termination? Certainly, I predict that politicians blogs will some day get them into a lot of trouble. If I still had a job, I'm sure that I would have been dooced by now. To what degree this concerns the average blogger, I'm not sure. Just beware that there are only loose ethical concerns to research in anthropology and sociology. Despite being a human subject, a public blog may be considered differently by IRBs; your blog posts might end up quoted in a journal article or being reported to the police.

Posted by Mendon at April 14, 2006 12:00 PM