WHY DO PEOPLE BLOG ? |
Most bloggers are acutely aware of audience, even in flagrantly confessional blogs, calibrating what they will and will not reveal. Many bloggers explained that they have a kind of personal code of ethics that dictates what goes into their blogs, such as never criticizing friends or expressing political opinions that are openly inflammatory. Not that bloggers eschew controversy—quite the opposite—but they typically express themselves in light of their audience. For example, in our study, one blogger of liberal political opinions sometimes wrote posts she knew would irritate her Republican uncle. But she employed language just tactful enough to keep lines of communication open.
Blogging, then, provides scope for an enormous variety of expression within a rather simple and restricted format. In the next section we investigate the reasons people blog.
We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author's life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive, and can come into play simultaneously.
Many informants blogged to record activities and event in their lives. Blogs were used by many of our informants as a record to inform and update family, friends, and colleagues via text and/or pictures of the author's activities and whereabouts. Other bloggers used their blogs to document their lives as a personal diary seen only by the author and possibly a few friends. Depending on the audience and content, a blog could be a diary/journal, a photo album, or a travelogue. A single blog could be used in one or more of these ways.
As in the age-old tradition of diary keeping and journaling, blogging as personal record-keeping stems from the impetus to make note of the events in one’s life. Some of these events may seem ordinary to an outside reader, such as things that happened to the author at work or in school. However, the author believed these events held enough importance to record them.
A Blogger was aware that he had a potential audience that stretched beyond himself since his blogs were on the Internet. He circumvented the problem by posting some of his entries as “private,” so they were truly records for himself only. But if privacy is desired, why write on the most global medium in human history? Informants who said they were writing for very small audiences explained that they preferred the Internet to paper because typing was faster than writing by hand, and the archive of their posts would be accessible from anywhere. While some were concerned about the longevity of online archives, paper journals were also seen as subject to loss or destruction. Some bloggers made backup copies of their posts on CDs. The ability to access blogs from any Internet connection anywhere was a powerful attraction for many informants.