Thesis title: 'As if nobody's reading'?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK
Supervisor names: Robin Mansell and Nick Couldry
Year of completion: 2009
After finishing my master's and PhD here, I spent a year and a half as a lecturer at the University of Leicester's Department of Media and Communication, and have now joined the University of Bedfordshire as a senior lecturer in the Division of Journalism and Communication. My thesis research was into personal weblogging in the UK, focusing on the understandings bloggers had of their practices, the meanings they ascribed to those practices and the technical and social contexts in which these meanings were constructed. I am extending this research to encompass other social media like Facebook and Twitter and will be producing a book to be published by Palgrave entitled Sharing Our Lives Online Risks and Exposure in Social Media in 2013. I am also interested in the political economy of new media technologies more generally, and in the ways in which new technologies, journalistic practices and democratic governance interrelate. I am currently researching how the nature of authorship and publishing may be changing as a result of the growth of the ebook and of book printing on demand.
Publications
Brake, D. R. (2012). Who Do They Think They're Talking To? Framings of the Audience by Social Media Users. International Journal of Communication, 6. Retrieved from
Livingstone, S., & Brake, D. R. (2010). On the rapid rise of social networking sites: New findings and policy implications. Children and Society, 24(1), 75-83. doi: 10.1111/j.1099-0860.2009.00243.x
Brake, D. R. (2008) "Shaping the 'me' in MySpace: the Framing of Profiles on a Social Network Site" in Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media (Knut Lundby ed) Peter Lang, New York. pp. 285-300
Alvi, I., et al (2007) "Meeting Their Potential: the role of education and technology in overcoming disadvantage and disaffection in young people" BECTA, Coventry, UK.
Brake, D. (2007) "Personal Webloggers and Their Audiences: Who Do They Think They Are Talking To?" in Personal Media: Life between Screens (in Norwegian), (Lders, M., L. Pritz and T. Rasmussen eds) Gyldendal, Oslo, pp. 141-163
Brake, D. (2007) "Personal Publishing" in The International Encyclopedia of Communication, (Donsbach, W. ed)
Contributor to Livingstone, S. M. and A. M. Hargrave (2006) Harm and Offence in Media Content: A Review of the Evidence, Intellect, Bristol (and to the second edition, 2009)
Brake, D. (2006) "Chat Rooms", "Bulletin Boards", "Electronic Games Effects" in Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media, (Arnett, J. J. ed) Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA
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