‘My blog is me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)

Much anthropological critical reflection has centred on the act of text production. In particular, anthropologists have become concerned to understand the strategic status of their own texts and to seek to impose new constraints on their writing. In this paper, I want to explore further the kind of knowledge anthropologists can have of text. However, my focus is not on the dynamics of language and composition, but rather on the consequences of reception. This emphasis derives from my ethnography of UK webloggers (online journal keepers), a group of text producers for whom publication is automatic, the beginning rather than the endpoint of any claim to knowing. Their concern is with the practical mediatory role of weblogs, which includes exploring the kinds of persons these digital texts can become and the kinds of relations they can be shown to contain.