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University students often struggle with academic writing because of the challenges involved in negotiating the hidden rules and implicit discursive practices in academic writing. An academic literacies approach has emphasized writing as social practice and recognized that the literacy practices of the university are often epistemological. Blogs provide an opportunity for students to immerse themselves in situated, socially interactive writing in academic contexts. This study sought to explore blog writing from an academic literacies perspective. Data were collected from of two cohorts of students (Winter 2010 and 2011 terms) participating in a small university fourth year seminar class. The data consisted of blog postings from the two cohorts, interviews with the instructor, and course evaluations. The blog posts and comments were analysed using an intertextual analytical framework. Findings indicate that students do develop academic literacies through blog writing because of particular features of blogs: the immediate audience, the flexibility of purpose of blogs and the informal style of language.

To explore the potential of conversations with an authentic audience through blogging for enriching in young writers the understanding of the communicative function of writing, specifically language and vocabulary use.

We situate our work in the language acquisition model of language learning, in which learners develop linguistic competence in the process of speaking and using language (Krashen, 1988; Tomasello, 2005). We also believe that language learning benefits from formal instruction (Krashen, 1988). As such, in our work, we likened engaging in blogging to learning a language (here, more broadly conceived as learning to write) through both natural communication (acquisition) and prescription (instruction), and we looked at these forms of learning in our study.

We were interested in the communicative function of language learning (Halliday, 1973; 1975; Penrod, 2005) among young blog writers, because we see language learning as socially constructed through interaction with other speakers of a language (Tomasello, 2005; Vygotsky, 1978).

The readers and commenters in this study supported young writers in their language study by modeling good writing and effective language use in their communication with these writers. Young writers also benefited from direct instruction through interactions with adults beyond classroom teachers, in our case some of the readers and commenters.

Blogging can extend conversations to audiences far beyond the classroom and make writing a more authentic endeavor for young writers. Teachers should take advantage of such a powerful tool in their writing classrooms to support their students’ language study and vocabulary development.

This chapter “Approaching the Public by Social Worlds: Understanding Bloggers’ Taste” places us in a distinct world of the media: the world of the public. The title aims to highlight two aspects that I want to discuss here: practices of online publication and the interest of the social world approach to conceive these practices.

Based on the premise that computers have now become cultural and cognitive artifacts with which and not from which learners interact on a daily basis, this chapter focuses on best practices in preparing and engaging digital natives to become tomorrow’s leaders of a global knowledge economy that is increasingly dependent on electronic modes of communications. Using a study based on online tools in a writing course taught at the University of Victoria (Canada), we take a qualitative interpretative stance to explain the opportunities and challenges of learning and teaching in such environments. We comment on such aspects as the need to properly address learner’s functional skills (or lack off), the various tools that can be used to engage and motivate learners, and the need to go beyond methods based on delivery in order to better focus on the development of multiliteracies, in particular critical literacy and functional literacy. Our argument, grounded in cognitive and sociocultural theories of learning, favors an interdisciplinary approach while focusing on disciplines that are typically housed in the humanities, in particular second language academic programs. Our discussions and conclusions move from these case studies to a more general reflection on the extent to which electronic environments are reshaping higher education.

Purpose – The purpose of our study was to better understand how bloggers organize branded storytelling in fashion and luxury blogs using explicit and implicit self-brand association.

Methodology/approach – We have carried out a Netnography on a sample of 60 fashion and luxury blogs. Data analysis relied on a visual denotational and connotational analysis. We have also conducted hermeneutic interviews of influential fashion bloggers and readers to validate our findings.

Findings – Bloggers differently combine explicit and implicit textual and visual branded stimuli depending on their character types. The most influential blogs combine textual implicitness and visual explicitness, regardless of their character types. Other influential bloggers combine visual and textual elements of the story more or less explicitly depending on the archetypes they have constructed. Bloggers reintermediate the relationship between brands and consumers and serve as a “lens” through which readers may select a brand and decide on purchase. The quality of the relationship between the bloggers and the readers relies on the initial reading contract, the evolving presence of the advertised brands in the blog's content, and the amount of privacy shared by the bloggers with their audience.

Research limitations/implications – Our sample is very limited and includes very influential and professionalized blogs.

Practical implications – Our study should help brand managers in selecting fashion blogs as a new relay for advertisement or sponsored content.

Originality/value of paper – Our study provides a framework to brand managers by highlighting recognizable storytelling patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the concept of meaning and the meaning making process in consumer behavior. While the study of the consumption focuses increasingly on how consumers create meaning in a marketing dominated world, it views this process as relatively unproblematic. This paper challenges that perspective and argues that this process is inherently ambiguous.

This paper is primarily conceptual in nature. It utilizes a post-structural perspective to theoretically examine the concept of meaning and the meaning making process. It then applies this analysis to the consumption and production of popular culture. Three exemplars from the domain of digital fandom are provided to explore the conceptual arguments in the paper.

The paper argues that if the meanings of all texts are fundamentally unstable and that meaning itself is endlessly deferred in the meaning making process, then as the consumer becomes the author of the text, the instability and ambiguity of meaning and the meaning making process transfers equally to the consumption process. Rather than view this as a negative aspect of consumer culture, this paper argues that some consumers relish this ambiguity and the freedom that it gives them to manipulate these products, their textual meanings, and the readers’ identities.

The primary limitation of this paper is that it is conceptual in nature. Future research should empirically examine different cases of meaningless consumption to provide more evidence of this interesting and potentially pervasive aspect of consumer behavior.

There is virtually no research that examines meaningless consumption. The value of the paper is that it challenges a core concept in cultural theories of consumer behavior and extends our understanding of consumption.

As with many professional programmes, nursing students in the United Kingdom spend a significant proportion of their time ‘on placement’ – applying their theoretical learning to the clinical area.While off campus and at a distance from their peers and university staff, however, they must continue to study and complete assessments. This creates enormous complexities for nursing students; issues of retention and success, anxiety and isolation are well documented in the research literature relating to this particularly diverse group. Emerging technologies offer opportunities to increase engagement between nursing students and faculty, thus potentially eliminating many of these difficulties. At Glasgow Caledonian University, a blog was developed to provide new students with remote support and a virtual community while on their first placement. The open access resource offered a link between faculty and students and a forum for peer support among the cohort. Student produced materials, such as ‘talking head’ videos and placement diaries, were posted alongside assessment-specific learning resources developed by staff. The blog was fully interactive and participants were encouraged to comment on and respond to posts in order to increase engagement. A thorough evaluation of the continuing initiative highlighted the success and further potential of the resource but also suggested limitations in terms of interactive engagement and issues of digital literacy among some learners. This chapter will discuss the use of technologies such as blogs in providing remote support to learners, using the student nurse blog as a case study.

Given the increasing use of social media and other digital technologies, critical theorists argue that social life has become increasingly structured by neoliberal market logics. Little research has empirically tested these claims.

This study is the first to examine whether the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary field is accompanied by neoliberal logics. Developing a cultural logics approach to neoliberalism, which allows for the identification of the independent logics of entrepreneurship, market-faith, profit-maximization, efficiency, and individualism, I draw on archival data and interviews with editors and writers to explore the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism.

Editors and writers legitimate some neoliberal logics and reject others. Entrepreneurship and efficiency are strongly legitimated. Profit-maximization is generally rejected. Market-faith and individualism are legitimated differently by editors and writers who occupy different positions within the field, drawing attention to the importance of field position, organizational affiliation, and career exhaustion in the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary world. Many of these findings are surprising given the historically non-economic orientation of the field.

Future research should explore neoliberal logics in other aspects of literary production and in other social domains.

This study provides a novel approach to the study of neoliberal logics as well as their relationship to digital technologies. Such an approach complements recent agendas in economic sociology and contributes to debates about the relationship between new technologies and capitalism.

This chapter provides an overview of what is currently known in the scientific literature about the effects of disclosures of sponsored content on consumers’ responses.

We provide a qualitative literature review of 21 empirical studies.

Awareness of disclosures is rather low, but when consumers are aware of a disclosure, it successfully activates persuasion knowledge and can increase brand memory. The literature shows inconclusive findings with respect to the effects of disclosures on attention paid to sponsored content, critical processing, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions. In addition, the literature shows that modality of the disclosure has no significant effects, but the content of the disclosure, its timing, its duration, receivers’ moods, and their perceptions of the sponsored content or the endorser are important moderators.

More research is needed on differences in effects of disclosures in different media and on disclosures of online sponsored content online (e.g., sponsored tweets and vlogs).

This chapter provides advertisers with insights on how disclosures affect the persuasiveness of sponsored content in several media.

For legislators, explicit guidelines on how to create effective disclosures of sponsored content are provided. For example, to increase persuasion knowledge, disclosures should be portrayed for at least 3 seconds and if logos are used, they should be accompanied by texts explaining the logo.

This overview is a valuable starting point for future academic research in the domain of disclosure effects and provides insights for advertisers and legislators.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how social tagging can be useful in an information web site for cancer patients and their relatives.

Methodology/approach – Three studies have been carried out in order to investigate the research questions. First, we reviewed and analyzed literature about cancer patients’ information needs and seeking behavior, and about social tagging and patient terminology. Second, we analyzed tags applied to blog postings at Blogomkraeft.dk, a blog site at the Danish information web site Cancer.dk. The tags were compared with the formal browsing structure of Cancer.dk. Results from the two studies were used to develop a prototype for social tagging at Cancer.dk. Thus third, we evaluated the prototype in a usability study.

Findings – We found that tags have the potential to describe and provide access to web site content from the users’ perspective and language use. Social tags may be a means to bridge between scientific viewpoints and terminology and everyday problems and vocabulary. Tags at Blogomkraeft.dk are mainly factual, often detailed, and do not cover as many functions as tags in more general bookmarking systems. An important finding is that some tags seemed to add to and supplement the content instead of factually describing the content of a blog posting. The usability test showed that our test persons liked the tagging feature.

Social implications – Tagging features give the public an opportunity to apply their own terms to documents, reflecting their own model of the current topic. Tags may furthermore function as colloquial lead-in terms from users’ search formulations at search engines such as Google to the domain-specific, tailored cancer web site.

Originality/value – Unlike most research on social tagging so far, we investigate tagging in a domain-specific setting, how tags can improve the interaction and communication between layman users and domain experts in an information web site within health care.