Original scientific paper
The Normalization of the Blog in Journalism: Online Newspapers of Slovene Traditional Media
Igor Vobič
; Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Abstract
On the basis of an analysis of online newspapers from Slovene traditional media,
along with interviews with their editors, the author attempts to show that power
mechanisms normalize the blog as a form of communication in both the specific
discourse of online newspapers and in the broader journalistic discourse. This is
based on a combining of a Foucauldian understanding of the power of the norm
and modern discussions about the normalization of cyberspace and the normalizing
of the blog. The blog, which has in its technical structure the possibility of a
complete bringing into force of the right to communicate (of the right to report
and the right to receive) and promotes the idea of a critical public, moves, through
this prism, away from C. W. Mills’s concept of an ideal-typical model of the public
and assumes the characteristics of the mass. The blog enters a space where discourses
that are in a constant struggle for hegemony intertwine, and it is for this
reason that the blog has assumed a broader meaning and wider use – it has moved
beyond being characterized as a personal online journal. In the article the author
also confirms that, by including blogs, Slovene online newspapers draw upon the
discursive status of the blog as a promoter of public discussion. This leads us to
the pervasion of the discursive status of journalism and of the blog, whereby journalistic
responsibility and identity, as well as journalistic ethics, remain in crisis.
However, in the discursive core of the blog as a form of communication, as a result
of the coming into play of a wide range of interests, we lose the individual in
the subject of the blogger par excellence.
Keywords
blog; online newspapers; normalization of the blog; traditional media; Slovenia
Hrčak ID:
25571
URI
Publication date:
10.12.2007.
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