Thesis intro
Tuesday, January 31
5:52 PM
I've been doing a lot of writing for my project lately. For Monday I had to turn in a revised proposal as well as an intro and a 3-4 page excerpt. Lots of work still to do on those: my number one priority right now is familiarizing myself with the corpus so I can write with more (genuine) authority.
Unfortunarely, I left the disk with my sample pages in the lounge. Here's the intro:
Since the mid-nineties, the medium that would eventually come to be known as the "weblog" or "blog" has become increasingly prominent. As of November 2004, more than 8 million Americans had created weblogs, and twenty-seven percent of American Internet users, roughly 32 million people, claimed to be blog readers. Coinciding with their increased popularity, weblogs have also diversified into an increasing number of genres, which theorists have classified in a number of — for the most part — arbitrarily determined ways. Despite persistent disagreement as to the proper way to classify blog types, every study of the "blogosphere" has invariably found the ostensibly autobiographical, diary-style webpage to be by far the most common form of weblog. The goal of this paper is first, to analyze the seven autobiographical blogs which voters chose as finalists for the "best writing of a weblog" Weblog Awards category in order to determine commonalities which might justify grouping them together into a single, diary-weblog genre, and then second, to examine the narrative aspects of these weblogs to determine the "expectations, motivations, and terms of success" within that genre.
Alles Wird Gut
