Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2008

Thesis Director

Terri Fredrick

Thesis Committee Member

Daiva Markelis

Thesis Committee Member

Melanie Mills

Abstract

My thesis analyzes the ways in which blogs are changing the accumulation and exchange of knowledge both within and outside of the blogosphere. To this end, I closely examine the features and activities of the blog site Daily Kos and use these observations to extend the orality-vs.-literacy theories of Walter Ong and the media theories (particularly that of de- and retribalization) of Marshall McLuhan. My application of ideas presented by these rhetoricians, together with more recent Internet research that has addressed blog analysis in terms of knowledge-formation and intellectual authority, helps bring greater clarity to a dynamic and complex phenomenon: the impact of political filter blogs' rhetorical and communicative structures upon media and, by extension, upon American society. I achieve this by demonstrating that the continued existence of Daily Kos depends upon the interplay of literate and oral factors as much within individual conversations as within the unified tribal entity. Ultimately, my evaluation of Daily Kos suggests that high-participation media-blogs and their offshoots-are shifting independent judgment and group consciousness into a new balance.

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