Assembling Blogs and Bloggers

Chapter 3 looked at the mutually constitutive components of the blog and blogger, and this chapter adds the comments and commenters to this dynamic assemblage. These contributions form the basis of extended parasocial relations that form around the hyperlocal assemblage centred on the personal blog, which is proposed as a dialogical medium. This chapter also critiques the presumption of community, which often hinders analysis and focuses instead on tracing causal relations through blog affordances that enable emergent socialities that stabilise social assemblages, both on the hyperlocal level of the personal blog and with regard to blogger collectives of varying types.