| Abstract: |
Weblog has been of immense help to virtually all the people around the world. With the help of this social medium, people can connect to each other, create and share ideas with ease. In so doing, the people and the social media form a seemingly unseen threadlike‘network of actors’ through the interconnectivity of humans and nonhumans also called actants. It is in view of this that this study explores Actor Network Theory (ANT) developed by BrunorLantour, Michel Callon and John Law to understand its applications in blogging and social media contents sharing during the first two weeks that the Malaysian flight MH370 went missing. Using quantitative content analysis, the researcher analysed three Nigerian popular weblogs;gistmania.com, lindaikeji.blogspot.co.uk, and bellanaija.com. These blogsites were selected purposively to know how they applied the tenets of ANT in relaying and sharing the news of the missing flight on their pages, and how commenters helped in completing the cycle of connectivity through their comments and replies. The findings show a huge interconnectivity of commenters from different parts of the world. There is however a low response rate from the bloggers. All the bloggers relied heavily on links from other sources, which shows an overlapping relationship and connectivity between them. |
