Blogging: On the Outside Looking In
At one of the HICSS sessions today a paper was presented analyzing personal blogs. The research question was whether personal bloggers brought the same expectations and norms of reciprocity and attention to the strong ties in their blog network (family, friends) that people typically do in face-to-face communication. So the research team took a random sample of 1000 personal blogs hosted at blogspot.com and did a content analysis and a short survey and found that, indeed, bloggers had the same expectations of their family and friends online as off… they tended to share intimate information and expect similar intimacies in return. Further, men and women both shared equally about all the topic areas (don’t remember them all, but a few were: relationships, sex, family) except health, where women tended to share significantly less than men. Political discussions tended to occur so infrequently as to be statistically insignificant.
So far, so good. Like a lot of quantitative research that lags behind practices, it wasn’t news but confirmation of what many of us already intuited to be true.
Then the speaker made a strange statement that caused me (and pretty much only me– most of the folks here know a fair amount about blogs and blogging but do not themselves blog) to just about jump out of my chair in agitation. He said (quoting as exactly as I can recall):
I don’t really know why anyone would maintain a personal blog for any amount of time… the more you share about yourself, the more limited you are in what you can do.
For clarification he said:
For instance, if I wanted to come off as a literate professional but then blogged all kinds of personal details, I wouldn’t look professional.
And, yes, he did use the phrase “come off as”…
This phrase, and the general agreement with which it was received, illustrates the huge gulf between blogger and non-blogging observer. And I think it represents a difference in mind-set that explains a fair amount of blogging (and other blog-like) activity. On the one hand is the traditional culture of scarcity, of defaulting to not sharing information, of selective disclosure and executive privilege. On the other are those who recognize the value that returns from sharing, the value of network effects, of participation and the presence that emerges from them.
Of course we all share traits from both “sides”– these aren’t absolutes. Still, I can’t help but think that the limits that come from sharing and participating in social networks are essentially limits on deceptive practices. It foregrounds a fundamental issue of character that remains a deep concern of educational practice because it is a significant part of learning and becoming who we want to be: authenticity. Perhaps the researcher should be more concerned with what he actually is and less with how he “comes off.” Perhaps we need to be more concerned with the things we really do and say, with the person we each– in all our beautiful conflicting, contradictory constituent bits– are… rather than who we could, by holding back, pretend to be.
January 9th, 2008 at 3:59 am
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January 9th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Authenticity, something not necessarily valued in the research community. It’s true, if your success hinges on your ability to shift, chameleon like, to suit your environment such that you cannot risk depth, complexity or authenticity, then you shouldn’t keep a blog. It’s akin to the quote, (Parker? West?) “Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you.” True, completely, and even practical; just not necessarily wise.
January 9th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Funny you should say that. My first pass referred to wisdom and wise practice, but then I decided a) I’m no one to talk about wisdom and b) blogging might be a wise practice, but being wise is a whole complex set of which I know very little!
January 9th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
None are wise. Some seek wisdom more ardently than others, that’s all. And I’m not naming names.
Meanwhile, d’you recall a ways back, maybe 2005, a flap over some ISPs having to hand server logs over to “the Man” and in the wake that flap said ISPs deciding they didn’t really need to keep such logs in the first place? Not-logging was wise in the sense of protecting customer privacy, and there’s a practical/pragmatic corollary in what your sociologist speaker was saying, as with the Mae West quote.
Still, one’s personal life runs by different criteria. To thine own self and all that rot. I keep oblios as skanky as it is on the principle that skeletons in the closet rot and mildew and stink up the whole house, but on the porch they bleach white in the sun and look like some kind of avant-garde wind chime. And if I’m gonna lose a gig or affiliation or whatever over what’s in my head I’d rather know sooner than later.
But that’s not the proper attitude for capital-S “Success”, now is it? Like I was ever in line to be a Trump or Gates or Bush. Feh.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
But handing over private logs is a different case– the parallel to what is being discussed here would be handing over contents of a blog that are already public… because I am talking not about securing information destined to be private, but the decision point before that which defaults to making it private.
I guess I just have a harder and harder time understanding how hiding things about oneself to create a persona is anything other than deception and ultimately the kind of thing that make one soul-sick and bereft…
January 10th, 2008 at 7:54 am
“…soul-sick and bereft…” There’s the meat of the unshared assumptions, the gorge that divides the world views. How can one be soul-sick and bereft if they attain capital-S “Success”? Only a foolish artist would put authenticity or other such nonsense ahead of finances. And any poker player will tell you the ability to bluff, i.e., to deceive, is vital. Greed is good, and efficiency is the only morality, and efficiency itself is to measured only those utiles which serve as legal tender. Feh again.
Economists and certain other sociologists make a mistake similar to some behaviorists. Where Skinner said, “All we can study scientifically is that which is empirically observable,” others took him to mean, “All that exists is that which can be empirically observed.” Likewise, economists and sociologists are all but forced to look at cash flow because it is the easiest to quantify of our value exchanges. But some stop there, acting and writing as if that is all there is. Sad.
Thank God for the occasional poet to remind us better.