Blogosphere
▶Matthew Hindman, Th e Myth of Digital Democracy
(Princeton University Press, 2009); Graeme Turner,
Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic Turn
(Sage, 2010).
Body language See communication,
non-verbal; gesture; interpersonal
communication; non-verbal behaviour:
repertoire; proxemics; touch. See also
topic guide under interpersonal commu-
nication.
Body of European Regulators in Electronic
Communications (BEREC) Association of
twenty-seven regulators of the European Union,
formed in 2009; held its inaugural meeting in
January 2010. Th e body succeeds the European
Regulators Group (ERG), its aim to coordinate
regulation between EU member states and
improve consistency of implementation of the
Unions’ regulatory framework. See ofcom.
Boomerang effect Term used by Gail and
Michele Myers in The Dynamics of Human
Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985) to describe
a situation in which a message falls within your
latitude of rejection, that is the known views on
any given issue which you do not accept. It has
the eff ect of then shrinking or narrowing your
latitude of acceptance: positions on that issue
which might have been acceptable or tolerated
before will now be rejected. Th e authors argue
that messages which threaten your attitudes and
views may produce this eff ect. See latitudes
of acceptance and rejection.
Boomerang response Eff ect of a mass media
message which, in terms of audience reaction,
proves to be the opposite of that which was
intended.
B-Picture In the 1940s and 1950s it was
cinema practice to put on two fi lms, the main
feature – the A-Picture – and a cheaply and
quickly made supporting fi lm – the B-Picture.
Th e equivalent of the ‘fl ip-side’ of a popular
record, the B-Picture, or B-movie, was
invariably Budget and almost invariably Bad.
Time, however, lends enchantment and fi lm
enthusiasts often have a soft spot for a ‘genre’
the like of which just is not made any more.
Examples are Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy
(1949), Nathan Juran’s Attack of the 50 Foot
Woman (1958) and Roger Corman’s Little Shop
of Horrors (1960), which the director claimed
to have made in two days.
Brand A brand enables a company to diff erentiate
its products from those of its competitors – even
though there is often, arguably, little actual diff er-
ence between them. Tony Yeshin in Advertising
(Thomson Learning, 2006) comments that ‘aculture and the “blogosphere”’ (see blogo-
sphere).
Inevitably blogging has excited the attention
of authorities anxious to curtail, if not censor
altogether, bloggers’ freedom of expression. In
China, for example, the information industry
ministry ordered that by the end of June 2005 all
owners of blogs or bulletin boards would have
to be registered or shut down. Pursuit of blog-
gers by those in authority remains a hazardous
undertaking, considering that some 80,000
new weblogs are created every day worldwide,
though many of these are shortlived.
In her introduction to Blogging (Polity Press,
2010), Jill Walker Rettberg refers to blogs as
‘part of the history of communication and
literacy’ and deems them ‘emblematic of a shift
from uni-directional mass media to participa-
tory media, where viewers and readers become
creators of media’. See agenda-setting; echo
chamber effect; journalism: citizen jour-
nalism; networking: social networking;
network neutrality; power law phenom-
enon; project of self; public sphere;
yaros’ ‘pick’ model for multimedia news,
2009.
Blogosphere Term reflecting the exponential
growth in internet blogging in the twenty-fi rst
century. New technology has made it possible
for any computer user to set up his or her own
blog and broadcast it to either a few readers or
subscribers, a hundred of them, or a million or
more. Th e blogosphere resembles a fi rmament of
countless stars, being created, surviving a while,
then becoming eclipsed by lack of time, energy
or commitment.
In March 2007 Technorati, a search engine
tracking the blogosphere, reported over 70
million weblogs – 120,000 new ones a day – and
daily postings of 1.4 million. Blogs make incur-
sions on the public sphere, long the commu-
nicative monopoly of traditional mass media,
by news feeds, comment, analysis, protest and
propaganda, often political or cultural in orenta-
tion though more characteristically focusing on
the personal and the interactive.
The blogosphere in recent years has acquired
galactic structures as a result of the growth of
networking providers such as facebook, myspace,
twitter and youtube, all facilitating contribu-
tion and exchange; between them commanding
the attention of the public which previously was
the preserve of newspapers, radio and TV. See
agenda-setting; demotic turn; journal-
ism: citizen journalism; net neutrality;
networking: social networking.