Online community and the personal diary: Writing to connect at Open Diary

Martinviita, Annamari

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.089

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Since then, much work has been produced showing that community experiences can indeed take place in a variety of online environments (e.g. Martinviita, 2016a;Obst, Zinkiewicz & Smith, 2002;Rotman, Goldberg & Preece, 2009;Welbourne, Blanchard & Boughton, 2009). This work often centres -quite understandably -on the connections among the participants, and the quality of those connections in terms of producing the feelings of belonging and shared identity associated with community experiences (see Chayko [2014] for a useful overview of the many views into online community in research thus far).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The many faces of online community

Martinviita¹

2018

Apples

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This article discusses the meaning and function of "community" as a discourse on the image-sharing website Imgur. The analysis shows that the community term has many meanings and serves as a shorthand for a wide variety of social pract ices, and these meanings are shaped by the experiences of social action leading to the use of the term. Based on ethnographic data, nexus analysis provides an understanding of how the interactions related to community on the site come to take place the way they do. In conceiving of these interactions as mediated discourse, the article provides a fresh approach to the long-established academic discussion on the definition of community, suggesting a new conception of the community term as a boundary object, which takes on various meanings and functions as it is employed in social action. On Imgur, the community term is associated with an imagined connection to similar others, a shared culture, and the commitment to participation required by the intertextuality of the site content and the challenge of learning to read and create the content that is popular on the site.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The many faces of online community

Martinviita¹

2018

Apples

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“…It should be noted that some of these platforms have been active on the Internet since 1995. Despite the great transformations that the Internet has undergone, many diarists have gone on writing their online diaries on a regular basis, as they started doing more than twenty years ago (Martinviita, 2016).…”

Section: Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

Diaries as technologies for sense-making and self-transformation in times of vulnerability.

Marcos

Zittoun

Gillespie

2023

Preprint

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Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows,” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: 1) imagination of the future and preparation to encounter difficulties; 2) distancing from one's own experience; and 3) creating personal commitments. Our longitudinal data comprised three public online diaries written over more than twenty years, belonging to three anonymous individuals selected from a database of more than 400 diaries. We analyzed these three diaries by iterating between qualitative and quantitative analysis. We conclude that: 1) beyond their expressive dimension, diaries are technologies that support the sense-making process, but not without difficulties; 2) diaries form a self-generated space for dialogue with oneself in which the diarist also becomes aware of the social nature of her life story; 3) diaries are not only technologies for the Socratic “know thyself” but also technologies to work on oneself, especially in terms of the personal perspective on the past or the future; and 4) the practice of diary writing goes beyond sense-making towards personal development and the desire to transform one's life trajectory.

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“…This anonymity was one of the mainstays of popular early sites like OpenDiary.com, which was online from 1998-2014, and was important to many online diarists. In a study of Open Diary users in 2006-8, Annamari Martinviita found that many of their informants felt that the anonymity allowed them to write about very intimate details of their lives, and that the ability to communicate openly about their lives, with no fear of the conversations impacting upon their everyday lives, was very important to them 11 . With Facebook, using real names has become increasingly common in social media, but there are still many platforms where people share diary-like material either using a pseudonym or completely anonymously.…”

Section: How Technology Shapes Diariesmentioning

confidence: 99%