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Stephanie Hendrick / Therese Örnberg

Stephanie Hendrick is a drama/English/culture teacher at Umeå University and Östra Gymnasium. She has recently completed her master�s thesis on social networking and blogging and is eagerly looking forward to beginning a PhD dealing with discourse features common to blogging (keeping fingers crossed that topic is accepted :-). Stephanie is a native of the USA, but has moved around enough to now call Umeå home, as three years is the longest time she has lived in one place. She is passionate about blogging, examining patterns of social networking, or basically asking �why�. When Stephanie is not busy being mother to her incomparable three-year-old twins, she is blogging, working, or reading.

Therese Örnberg is a doctoral student within the research profile �ICT and the Humanities� at Umeå University (Therese's Research Blog). Her field is English linguistics and the topic of her thesis is to do with online communication and emerging communication patterns. She also works at HUMlab, where she among other things coordinates a network for ICT and language education in Sweden (ITAS). Therese grew up in Lapland, in a small village.

The blog as an immersive space: Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004
As technology has developed, blogging, which began as a purely textual, space bound medium is now taking on new dimensions.  With the ever increasing use of still images, embedded video, and sound files, and through the use of portable devices such as cellular phones, and pda�s which allows for mobile, live posting; the blog is becoming a more immersive environment, creating a deeper sense of presence. The question of presence, in relation to the notion of defined space, arose during our work with the experimental event blog, Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004, where a team of bloggers and blogger-technicians from Umeå University embarked on a journey to the north of Sweden to cover a Sámi cultural festival.  The blog received much international attention (The Guardian Unlimited Online, Smart Mobs, etc.) and through the use of various social enhancers, the Jokkmokk blog became a meeting place for festival participants, international onlookers, and bloggers alike.  In a two-part presentation, we will attempt to prove that the methods employed in the Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004 project created a sense of both presence and space.  This will be done through the combination of theories of presence and linguistic theory on conceptual blending and mental spaces, with practical examples from the project, as well as other blogs that show similar qualities.
The Jokkmokk blog allowed its readers/contributors to enter �a psychological state in which the individual perceives himself or herself as existing within an environment� (Blascovich).  In this paper, we will attempt to prove that issues of both presence and cognitive blending are essential to the understanding of this shared, dispersive space.

last update: Friday, July 23, 2004 at 10:32:06 AM-----------------------
Copyright 2004