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Can blogs empower women?: designing agency-enhancing and community-building interfaces

Published: 05 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The much-touted empowerment potential of blogs is empirically examined in this study through an online survey of female bloggers (N = 340). Our findings indicate that by affording users either a strong sense of community, or a deep sense of agency, or both, blogging is indeed psychologically empowering to those undertaking it. This is part of an ongoing series of investigations into the empowerment potential of Web 2.0 interfaces for marginalized groups in society. Implications for design are discussed.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '08: CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
2035 pages
ISBN:9781605580128
DOI:10.1145/1358628
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. agency
  2. blogging
  3. community
  4. empowerment
  5. psychology of hci
  6. social computing

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View all
  • (2021)Can Interactive Media Attenuate Psychological Reactance to Health Messages? A Study of the Role Played by User Commenting and Audience Metrics in PersuasionHealth Communication10.1080/10410236.2021.188845037:11(1355-1367)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2021
  • (2019)Self-declared Throwaway Accounts on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33592373:CSCW(1-30)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
  • (2017)Women's Safety in Public SpacesProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025532(3340-3351)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
  • (2015)Communicating Art, Virtually! Psychological Effects of Technological Affordances in a Virtual MuseumInternational Journal of Human-Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2015.103391231:6(385-401)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2015
  • (2013) Don't Call Me That: A Techno-Feminist Critique of the Term Mommy Blogger Mass Communication and Society10.1080/15205436.2012.73788816:4(510-532)Online publication date: Jul-2013
  • (2012)Interactivity as self-expressionProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2207676.2207731(395-404)Online publication date: 5-May-2012

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