Gay and Lesbian Blogs in China: Rhetoric of Reversed Silence in Cyberspace (Report‪)‬

Introduction Pool (1983) argued, "[t]he technologies used for self-expression, human intercourse, and recording of knowledge are in unprecedented flux" (p. 226). In his vision, Pool (1983) foresaw the emergence of broadband and digital networks that can be used to serve the public. Among many new developments in network technologies and applications, blogs have been attracting increasing attention among Internet users and researchers recently (Kumar, Novak, Raghavan, & Tomkins, 2004; Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004; Rainie, 2005). Blog, a term coined in 1997 by merging "web" and "log", are often defined as "periodically updated journals, providing online commentary with minimal or no external editing" (Drezner & Farrell, 2004, p.32). Wright (2006) described a blog as "[a] website comprising blog posts, or content written by the blogger, which are typically organized into categories and sorted in reverse chronological order" (p. 7). The functions of blogs usually include a variety of topics ranging from political analyses, personal diaries, posts on computer advice, money, romance, and other topics (Drezner & Farrell, 2004). In China, there was an estimated 94 million Internet users (Zhu & Wang, 2005). Registered blog accounts in China have reached 33.36 million, doubling from the 16 millions in 2004 (Myrick, 2005).