Blogging Behind Bars

How Prison Blogs Revived Prison Literature in the United States

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Leipzig (Institut für Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: Blogs have become a fast growing and influential medium of high cultural and social importance. Different kinds of texts are spread throughout the internet and become accessible for all cultural and ethnic groups. Since most blogs feature a comment section discussion about meaning becomes possible. As a result, readers are able to communicate directly with the author and discuss the content with him or her as well as among each other. One social group in particular that is getting more and more involved with this new medium are inmates in the United States. As they begin to explore and use blogging for expressing thoughts and ideas, it becomes increasingly evident that this is clearly not an invention of the digital age but rather a literary tradition that is revived and continued by blogging inmates. In my thesis, I will show how these prison blogs have revived prison literature by 'techno-social' means (Raffl, Hofkirchner, Fuchs, Schafranek The Web as Techno-Social System: The Emergence of Web 3.0) that allow a direct exchange between reader and author. I will also show how certain themes of prison literature are taken up by prison blogs and, at the same time, transferred or adapted to this digital medium by doing close readings and literary analyses. In the end, I will have substantiated my claim by pointing out parallels in themes and approaches as well as mechanisms of influence and social interaction that all together made for a cross-media revival of prison literature.