When I studied for my undergraduate degree
I went to a small liberal arts college in
Holland. You may have met some small liberal
arts students before – we tend to be quite
pretentious and want to know a little bit
about everything (!) and when we were studying
for our exams, we were sitting in the computer
room while the Arab Spring erupted: revolutions
in Egypt, revolutions in Libya, Tunisia…
and we were following the news of these revolutions
via live blogs on Al Jazeera, the BBC. And
wherever something happened, whenever an update
or a tweet or a Youtube video was posted,
we cared. When the UN took action, we celebrated,
even though none of us were from Egypt, or
Libya, or even in the region of that. It wasn’t
our revolution, and yet, it felt like it was.
So, what I’m looking to investigate with
my research is exactly how these life blogs
are making us care more than traditional news
articles do. And what I’ve already done
is I’ve spoken to the editor in chief of
a Dutch news website that tend to use a lot
of live blogs, and he said to me ‘when I
write live blogs, it feels as if the audience
is sitting right next to me, and they’re
reading with me over my shoulder. So, it’s
not just the audience that feel that way,
it’s the journalists as well. And therefore
I believe that inside the text and the way
that they’re writing, they’re using certain
words, certain phrases, certain grammatical
structures that make us feel that we are part
of what’s going on, of what they are writing
about. So what I’m doing is, firstly, I’m
investigating the three stages of live blogs,
which would be the three stages of any news
article: the production; the actual text itself;
and the consumption as well. Now, the production
and the consumption, what I’m doing is I’m
interviewing people that are involved in that,
meaning journalists, on the production side
and audiences on the consumption side. I’m
asking audiences ‘if you read this news
article, how do you feel?’ and asking other
people ‘follow this live blog, and now tell
me how you feel about this event.’ And what
I’m doing for the text part is that I’m
analysing the text for three different types
of proximities. Now, I believe that temporal
proximity is getting closer through live blogs
because updates are updated immediately as
something happens, you can follow it as something
happens. Spatial proximity I believe can be
changed by instead of using words like ‘there,’
live blogs are using words like ‘here’
and ‘now.’ And lastly, social proximity
is being changed, and I believe that’s because
through Youtube videos being filmed inside
the revolution that’s happened, we feel
like we’re on the street with these people,
because they are using words like ‘he’
and ‘she’ and ‘us,’ we feel like we
are part of what is going on. So hopefully,
with my research, we will be able to investigate
what it is inside the text that is making
people care so much more. So that instead
of us being so far separated from what’s
going on and thinking about their revolution,
we can think about what is happening to us,
as one global world, and all be involved together.
