To an audience of “I”: A discussion of the digital, narrativity and performance in internet blog research

Abstract

Purpose

This paper attempts to conceive the “narrated event” by considering the use of open‐ended a‐synchronous “blogs” in a current PhD study looking at the perceptions of 30 senior secondary students over their final year of secondary schooling.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper discusses the role of identity‐play in the construction of narrative accounts and specifically, how those accounts, when solicited in a blog study, might come to represent a “performance” of the narrator.

Findings

The implications of how we, as qualitative researchers, obtain our data places limitations on what kind of voice we allow the subjects of our enquiry. “Agency” requires dialogic interaction which “brings self and other together so that they may question, debate, and challenge one another” (Conquergood). Not only the ear, but also the voice of the listener thus bind the extent to which the subject can narrate their own stories. Thus, the subject is reflective, she constructs a dialogue where “underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject” (Deleuze).

Originality/value

By employing dialogic/performative narrative methods (Riessman), along with online methods (Fielding), this paper positions online blogs within the broader methodological discussions around identity and narrative by facilitating a conversation between subjectivity, trustworthiness, the value of blogs as meaningful data, and how a conceptualisation of blogs as narrative performance helps give agency to those “tellings”.

Citation

Duggan, S. (2013), "To an audience of “I”: A discussion of the digital, narrativity and performance in internet blog research", Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 25-32. https://doi.org/10.1108/14439881311314513