By Glenn Lockhart

The newspaper, radio and TV are known as traditional media. In the language of mass media studies, the Internet is the new or converged media–nowadays it’s pretty much the newspaper, radio and television all together.

The great thing with mass media research is that humans and not technologies take center stage. Us, us, us. How we use a medium, for what reason, to what effect, when and how often, and so forth. However, the Internet truly has transformed interactivity within the mass media. We have so much… examples include live chats, message boards, vlogs, user-generated content (remember pictures and video from the London bombing?), and I feel obligated to mention podcasts. And we all love blogs.

Mass media scholarship has served up a slate of theories, but they all were developed in various stages of the age of the traditional media. With the converged media redefining communication, well, nobody ever said knowledge was ageless. I’m okay with Pluto being a “planetoid,” for example, and… truths change with the times, things fade out of relevance.

As for those theories with application that endure with the Internet, they could provide us with a foundation for introspection into the deaf blogosphere. I’ve cherry-picked a few below. Do share thoughts and observations on how some of them might relate to blogging, blog-reading or commenting behavior, yours or that of others:

• Gatekeeping. Media practitioners decide what information is shared with the public. In theory, this implies organizational bias in the newsroom but is valuable because including all the information there is would overwhelm us. The wrinkle found with blogs? The majority of bloggers have no editors and commenters often have unfettered participation.

It used to be that we’d fax news releases and hope the newspapers would carry it; first, a bewildered 20-year-old intern decides what news releases to keep and what gets junked, then the harried editor decides what actually gets covered and assigns it to a staff reporter strung out on coffee and cigarettes, who then makes a call or a visit and writes the story or simply ransacks the news release for material, then another editor decides where the article goes and has the headline writer slap something. The next day the editor curses under breath if other newspapers make a big deal of something else and decides right then that our news release doesn’t get extended coverage. No second day for us.

Gatekeeping might be dead. Instead of established institutions serving up two or three sides for our consumption, bloggers are giving us 36 sides. Take the Daphne Wright trial, there have been blogs not only discussing the murder charges against her but on whether she is being tried fairly, whether deaf people should ever face the death penalty, and whether she has the language proficiency to understand legalese. We’re being treated to dimensions of the trial the newspapers didn’t provide us with. Or, maybe we’re all gatekeepers?

• Uses and Gratifications. This theory views each of us as active seekers of benefits. We knowingly use deaf blogs in order to gain that certain something… gratifications swim in all directions, to the pleasant, the ordinary and the awful, but these gratifications are always deliberately sought.

Why do we sustain blogs? Some bloggers post on captioning and emerging technologies. Many have opined on “History Through Deaf Eyes” in the days following its PBS airing and on the portrayal of the deaf community in a recent episode of Law and Order (Det. Goren is one cool dude!). The most fascinating blogs I read in recent weeks were on deafblindness, in relation to dating and another in relation to driving. There’s a blog posting updates on state schools for the deaf across the land.

Some seek change: A blogger repeatedly issued challenges to the interim president of Gallaudet University with implorations of “Are you listening to me, Dr. Davila?” although that has stopped and a vlogger recently ripped into the president of the National Association of the Deaf (the video has been taken down). The validity of their posts aside, you have to wonder if they log as they would talk in person. Do any of us? Our use of blogs and vlogs is not accidental, and the gratification we seek is not serendipitous.

Bloggers aren’t the only ones seeking gratification. Readers, of which some post comments, do too. Gratifications make for an endless list: entertainment, intellectual stimulation, issue elucidation, community engagement, awareness, relationship maintenance, conceit, surrogate companionship, venting, control…

In my previous appearance on DeafDC.com I talked about deaf blogs on a grand scale, but at core, emotionally, what motivates each of us–as individuals–to sustain deaf blogs?

• Spiral of Silence. Picture a tornado; up high is the widest circle, which funnels into a dot (.) when it hits the ground. This is a model for the relationship between public dialogue and social acceptance. Found at top aren’t only topics that are safe but earn you points if you chime in; think of the bandwagon. However, at the eye are taboo and ostracism.

Last summer the resurgence of deafhood was at its zenith and, predictably, many blogged on it. That doesn’t cheapen each blog but merely goes to its uncontroversial nature. I also recall that it was a popular topic for an inaugural blog, which testified to its safety… talk about it and get moral support from every single visitor. The widest circle there is in the spiral of silence.

On the other hand, how about Julie Guberman on Gallaudet’s closure? Give her a hand; she came closer than any wizard would to saying “Voldemort,” although she didn’t post it over in Gally Net-L.

In my estimation, the only taboo I can think of is denouncement of ASL. Think of People Sign Language, she got mauled, and fast. What else? Hard of hearing persons who wish they had deaf parents? Deaf persons who wish they were hearing? CODAs who think their parents are grotesquely unfit?

The Spiral of Silence may have been upended since blogs allow for anonymity. We don’t always know who’s blogging or who’s commenting. What issues have been unearthed? What issues are we still mum about?

• Gerbner’s Mean World Index. Actually a byproduct of the Cultivation Theory, this 1980 study found that the more TV we watch, the more violent we believe society to be. The basis is that media representation and reality don’t reconcile. I deafly extrapolate that to suggest in respect to certain issues or events the more exposure we have to deaf blogs, the more negative our perception becomes.

Sen. John McCain, who represents my home state of Arizona, wouldn’t laugh at me as I admit this: I conjure visions of bedlam and scorched earth when thinking of Iraq. Just last week he was quoted in a Washington Post article, “Just as we read about all the negative events in Iraq the American people must be aware of the positive developments under this new plan, and the media has a responsibility to report all aspects of what is taking place.” Still, I envision people sitting curbside at a café then—the café is bombed into rubble and the hounds of hell are there.

Sen. McCain has ties to the most important, most heated deaf blog topic of the year: he served on the Board of Trustees at Gallaudet during the protests. From reading various blogs, don’t you sometimes get the feeling that there’s still a campus lockdown or that the mood remains simmering and nuclear? Just as with the articles on Iraq, these blogs on Gallaudet aren’t necessarily wrong, but their barrage has this ability to distort.

There was this movie named Innerspace with funnyman Martin Short back in the late1980s. The basic storyline was: Man shrinks himself, journeys inside someone else’s body, but the journey ends up also being into himself. I like to think that each time we write, read or comment on a blog, our computer is shrunk to size and takes a journey inside of us. Now, about each blog mentioned here? Communication is more about us than what we talk about.

Gatekeeping. Uses and Gratifications. Spiral of Silence. Gerbner’s Mean World Index.

I’ll stop now. What’s a blog without comments?

Glenn Lockhart guested on DeafDC.com a while back (click here to see his blog “Why We Need Deaf Blogs“) and this is his second blog. He is Deaf, and he is a friendly guy. Really.