The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

12 Introduction
of new concepts have entered our daily lives and new words are only gradually
finding their way into the lexicon to describe them. Sometimes the rapid development
seems hard to keep up with, but the same phenomenon has undoubtedly
been experienced countless times before in the history of human culture, whenever
a technological revolution took place.
Easing the change somewhat, not everything is as truly novel as it may
initially seem. Many supposedly new forms of discourse are closely modeled
on pre-digital antecedents. Email has at least superficial parallels with paperbased
mail and Internet chat has functional ties to face-to-face conversation.
If we critically examine our specialized vocabulary to describe the Internet, it
becomes apparent that it abounds with metaphors (website, page, browser). As
with any unfamiliar thing or practice, we conceptualize what is new in terms
of what we already know – but whether or not the link can always be formally
justified is another issue.
1.2 Issues of definition
What, then, is a corporate blog? Consultant Debbie Weil defines corporate
blogging as “the use of blogs [by business professionals] to further organizational
goals” (Weil, 2006, p. 1). Along the same lines, Web entrepreneur David Sifry
describes corporate bloggers as:
[..]people who blog in an official or semi-official capacity at a company,
or are so affiliated with the company where they work that
even though they are not officially spokespeople for the company,
they are clearly affiliated. (Sifry, 2004, no pagination)
Sifry’s longer definition emphasizes that corporate blogs are written by the
employees of a company, delineating them from self-employed or freelance writers
who make their living by blogging and are thus also “business bloggers” in a
sense. In spite of this, I have chosen to adopt Weil’s shorter definition, because it
stresses that corporate blogs are created to pursue organizational goals. 1 When
an individual writes a blog for his own ends, whether motivated by the desire to
release emotional tension, for artistic expression, to communicate with friends
and family, to gain popularity with a wider audience or to record information, I
subsume all these activities under the term private blogging. 2 Private blogging,
as the older and more prototypical category than corporate and organizational
blogging, is discussed in detail in chapter 2.
Though this simple description clarifies the corporate in corporate blogging,
it leaves the term blog for definition. Blogs (a clipped contraction of web logs)
are described in the academic literature as “frequently modified web pages in
which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (Herring et al.,
1 I use the terms organizational goal and goal-orientation to denote the objectives pursued
by organizations when they communicate, in contrast to the broader concept of communicative
purpose that also applies to individuals.
2 In this thesis I will use the terms private persons and private blogs/bloggers/blogging exclusively
to refer to individuals who blog non-professionally for reasons of personal enjoyment,
civic involvement, to express their opinion, debate politics, etc. I chose to avoid the adjective
personal in this context because it suggests something about the content of private blogs that
can’t be generalized (that they are about the personal experiences of the blogger). To avoid
confusion, I refrain from using private in its other sense of “not publicly accessible”.