No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Writing to (Re)New Orleans: The Post-Hurricane Katrina Blogosphere and Its Ability to Inspire Recovery
Abstract
Nearly every website or software application these days features a feed to subscribe to, a network to join, or a social timeline to track—all of which do their part to influence public opinion, promote products, and bring people closer together. Being a blogger since 2003 exposed me to these user-generated trends, but never did I expect my blog space, or any others, to play such an important role in my emotional well-being; not until Hurricane Katrina hit. Sharing my story as a transplanted New Orleanian watching the disaster unfold from afar in a public forum quickly linked me to other local voices, and soon I discovered a burgeoning “Big Easy” blogosphere.
This dissertation thus illustrates how online communications have the ability to evolve into cathartic and socially responsible exchanges during and after times of disaster. Relying on qualitative research methods, I first discuss existing kinds of texts (news reports, comments on news sites, print publications, oral histories, etc.) to offer a picture of how Hurricane Katrina appeared and was treated by various traditional media. I then shift focus to digital spaces, featuring profiles of various New Orleans bloggers that I compiled through a series of interviews and analysis of their perpetual posting of blog entries, photos, videos, and status updates. I conclude their writing is a shared social experience with the Internet offering multiple platforms across which they can resist the debilitating effects of trauma and present their audiences with a deeper, truer understanding of what life is like in post-Katrina New Orleans.
... With this article I examine how local "place bloggers" (Pignetti, 2010) created community in the months and years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. I focus on the role of their blogging and the stories they communicated across their blogs in this process. ...
... Social dramas do not just sprout up immediately, they require time to be constructed and communicated if they are to inform a collective discourse and become a tool of community formation. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the broader Gulf South, a number of unacquainted individuals, some living in New Orleans, some still living in their evacuated towns and cities, turned to blogs as a way for sharing and getting news (Joyce, 2015;Pignetti, 2010). Over time, many of these individuals found each other, interacted through their blogs, met up in the physical world and developed trusting social ties and relations of various strengths and longevities. ...
... Yet, the social drama that Katrina Bloggers narrated did not only involve those they wrote about. As bloggers, they were writing themselves into the unfolding story of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans (Pignetti, 2010;Robinson, 2009). As Dangerblond noted, "we knew that lies were getting out and we all were real serious about trying to stop the history of what happened here from becoming a myth rather than what really happened." ...
Research on social media, networks and collective action currently lacks a strong cultural component, often focusing on network formation and characteristics from afar. At the same time, research in cultural sociology often takes social media for granted, removed from analytical or theoretical attention. We know little about the perspectives of users or the shared meanings, emotions, and codes that inform social media practices and discourses. Addressing this gap requires examining how users imagine, understand and use social media in ways that foment culturally-meaningful social networks and it would “thickly describe” the discourse that they create and share across these networks. This article uses social drama theory to understand the creation of community and collective action among a group of citizen bloggers in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Informed by their shared grievances and motives, users created a collective social drama across their blogs. This social drama was an important resource with which users developed trusting social ties, voluntary relationships, a sense of community and offline collective actions. These developments were realized in part due to the cultural affordances of the blog platform, the ability to easily, efficiently and effectively communicate and consume richly meaningful and emotive texts unhindered by data limits or media modalities. The cultural affordances of blogs were such that people were able to communicate their shared grievances in the form of social drama, over an extended period of time, and develop meaningful, emotive connections with each other through social media.
... From 2010 to 2013 I conducted open-ended, semistructured interviews with twenty-seven "place bloggers," people who were actively involved in the local blogosphere that arose after Hurricane Katrina and who wrote about New Orleans (Pignetti 2010). Over this same time period, I attended a number of events these bloggers organized and took part in, including a book launch, panels, and an annual conference they organized called "Rising Tide." ...
Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutions), ignores the content of news, and takes place during relatively settled times. This article seeks to remedy these gaps by examining how citizens used blogs to make and share news during a natural disaster and its aftermath. It draws on a case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and examines the perspective of blog users to understand how they built trust in each other and in their shared realities of the recovery and rebuilding periods. It draws on cultural sociology to illustrate how civil and anticivil cultural codes, embodied in culturally specific referents, were drawn upon to construct news messages and messengers, and by extension, trust in each other and a grounded ontological understanding of reality. It argues that the cultural affordances of the blog platform were helpful in users’ ability to build both forms of trust. It concludes with implications for emerging crises of climate change, global pandemics and the mass migration these produce.