Blogging in the Global Society: Cultural, Political and Geographical Aspects

Citation

Ting, I. (2013), "Blogging in the Global Society: Cultural, Political and Geographical Aspects", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 339-339. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2013-0070

Blogs are claimed as the most important invention in the era of Web 2.0, which allows bloggers to post papers as well as to interact with the readers. Blogging in the Global Society discusses different aspects of blog research, including cultural, political and geographical issues. It also successfully shifts the focus of blog research from the area of information technology to the social sciences. Different cultures and cases of blogs in various countries (including Thailand, China, Ireland, the USA, Palestine, Latin America, etc.) are also included, which can provide readers an efficient way to establish necessary knowledge. As a researcher in IT, I enjoyed reading this book and strongly recommend it to anyone who would like to understand more about the art of blogs.

This book contains 15 chapters organised into three sections. The first section contains five chapters dealing with political aspects of blogs along with cultural, legal and ethical issues. Individual chapters deal with blogs as a source of democratic deliberation, citizen media and political conflict in Thailand, blogmongering in China, women's sport in the blogosphere's reflection on women's sports and self‐regulation in blogging.

Section 2 offers five case study chapters on blogs and blogging, ranging from basketball to US Hasidic concerns about estrangement to blogging in Ireland, Palestinian blogs and grieving blogs. In Section 3 readers learn specific blog analysis approaches and perspectives from five research papers: US political blogs according to different aspects of blog design, a uses‐and‐gratifications approach to blogging motivations in Latin America, the First Amendment's challenges to bloggers in the USA from a legal perspective, the hermeneutic analysis of blogs and future trends in blogging.

All chapters contain references for further reading, and the clear table of contents facilitates understanding of the book's structure. Compared with similar research paper aggregations, this book is superior in its organisation, showing that the editors clearly understand how to present knowledge. Most blog researchers should hold this book in their private collections.