2. BLOGGING AS WORK
A fundamental claim in this paper is that blogging is a form of social work with the sole aim of doing grassroots
reporting, commenting on events, analyzing reactions to happenings and ultimately effecting social change via people-
oriented actions. Opinions can be formulated on weblogs for eventual transformation into major developmental policies
that have far reaching implications on the life, aspiration and future of a people. We hold that blogging, by its potential
to shape news reportage and be used as an effective tool of socialization to influence the public mood, is rooted in social
action. Following Schmidt (2007), therefore, one can safely claim that “blogging practices show the duality of structure
and agency inherent in all social action.”
Drezner & Farrell (2004) rightly observe that: “Blogging as an activity is almost exclusively a part-time, voluntary,
solipsistic enterprise.” The implication is that it takes commitment on the part of regular bloggers to blog events for
their ardent audiences, and possibly monitor the coverage of strategic events in the mainstream media. Underlying
grassroots reportage is bloggers' motivation to effect social change by wielding enormous influence on the mainstream
media (cf. Adamic & Glance, 2005; Gill, 2004). That it is mostly an unpaid job people take up is one convincing proof
that blogging is social work. The influence of weblogs can never be underestimated because “blogs appear to play an
increasingly important role as a forum of public debate, with knock-on consequences for the media and for
politics” (Drezner & Farrell, 2004). They also have “a first-mover advantage in socially constructing interpretive frames
for understanding current events.”
Schmidt (2007), in his adaptation of the sociological structuration theory, argues that all social action is characterized by
a “duality of structure and agency.” Expounding on his analytical model, he asserts that there is a connection between
the micro-level of individual action and the macro-level of social structures which leads one to a better understanding
and interpretation of social action. Moreover, he advocates an interdependent relationship between micro-level actions
and macro-level structures and situates the framework to blogging, as follows:
Applied to the phenomenon of blogs, this approach leads to the idea of blogging practices, which in the
most general sense consist of individual episodes in which a blogger uses specific sotware to attain
specific communicative goals. These episodes are framed ... by three structural elements: rules, relations,
and code. Through a blogging episode ... the blogger (re)produces aspects of the guiding rules,
(re)establishes social relations, and stabilizes or changes the way software-code is designed and
employed.
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Convention