After reading the Nardi and Herring papers on blogging, I talked to three “bloggers” in order to evaluate their analyses and the typologies they outlined. All of the interviewees are friends of mine in their late twenties and early thirties who maintain or have maintained blogs. I have changed their names to protect their privacy.

Ann is a graphic designer who started blogging on DiaryLand at the behest of a blogger friend. Brian is a software engineer who maintains a Movable Type blog on a server he maintains himself. Gundo is a scientist who kept a blog during the summer of 2002 while he was living in Tokyo. He updated it by uploading manually created HTML to a server run by a friend.

Gundo was motivated by a desire to keep a daily journal of his time in Japan to entertain and inform his friends. He also turned to blogging as a way to alleviate boredom and loneliness while alone in his apartment in Japan. Given the plethora of “stranger in a strange land” blogs maintained by foreigners living there, creating this kind of blog as travelogue seems to be a common reaction to the culture shock induced by moving to Japan. Yet Gundo’s blog distinguishes itself not only by the fact that it was maintained by hand, but also because Gundo wrote it not in his own voice but, in his words, as “a drunk horny 13-year-old.” His posts are long and byzantine, heavily illustrated and well-plotted. Much of the content is fictional, and no attempt was made to distinguish truth from fiction (or even to use recognizable grammar). As Gundo explains it, he was more interested in entertaining than informing. Gundo’s blog has to be seen to be understood, so I asked him for permission to link to it from this report.

Brian initially started blogging to document his work on homegrown software projects, so that he could record his thoughts about them as he worked on them. This is a clear example of the “blog as muse,” a space in which to pursue thoughts. However, recently he has used his blog more for photographic documentation, a move precipitated by his desire to “memorialize” San Francisco before he moved away. As it turns out, he later learned that he would not be leaving San Francisco after all, but he continues to use his blog primarily for “documenting what I see and hear.” His posts are terse, often consisting of just a single photo with a one-sentence caption. Like Gundo, he has friends and acquaintances in mind when he blogs: “I think of it like showing a guest a photo album.” As he has changed the way he uses his blog, he has also started blogging more often: where he used to blog once or twice a month he now blogs nearly daily.

Ann’s blog began as a lark. She admits that at first she was “making fun of the whole idea of it being a secret diary.” At that time she was blogging multiple times a day. But now she blogs a few times a week for personal satisfaction: “[Blogging] makes me boil down what I am thinking into a handful of words, so it’s a word game for me, how to express what I mean in the most efficient number of words, and it is also about rhythm, the order of the words, the way they may feel when spoken, they way they look with different punctuation (hahaha! vs ha! ha! ha!). All that is fun for me.” While I consider this to be another form of “thinking by writing,” it is important to note how it differs from the activity which Nardi observed of scholars who use their blogs to hone written arguments. Ann, as a designer, is concerned with the form and presentation of her blog at least as much as the content. This suggests that bloggers are more than just writers, and that “writerly craft” is not the only skill that bloggers are interested in advancing. The fact that so many software developers enjoy hand-coding their own blogging software and seem more interested in the mechanics of blogging and syndication than the content of their blogs adds further support to this hypothesis.

All of these blogs are of the “personal journal” type as defined by Herring. Yet each of the three blogs differ significantly in form and intent, which suggests a problem with Herring’s definitions. I found Nardi’s five motivations (documentation, commentary, catharsis, muse, community) more useful for making distinctions, but even these are perhaps not rich enough to describe the various motivations people have for blogging. Although all three of these bloggers fall into just two of Nardi’s categories, I feel that this sample accurately reflects the phenomenon at large. As Herring discovered, the vast majority of blogs are personal. Although blogging for journalism and scholarship gets a lot of press attention as pundits proclaim a new era of participation in the public sphere, the truth is that most people are interested in their own lives. The situation is similar to the one Patricia Zimmermann writes about: when reel film cameras first became cheap enough for amateurs to use, pundits thought that it would usher in a new era of democratic media production, as people made documentaries about the ills of their communities and the like. Instead people filmed their kids’ birthday parties.

The desire to document and present one’s life to oneself and others that drove home video seems to be driving blogging as well. Both Ann and Gundo mentioned that blogging one’s experiences makes them seem important and “larger than life.” This may have something to do with the public nature of blogs All the people I talked to were aware of this, and tried to maintain some control over the visibility of their blogs. Ann uses passwords to “keep certain people out.” Gundo was careful not to use his real name on his blog in order to stymie people googling his name. Brian pointed out that “I’m not linked anywhere so someone pretty much has to type in [the URL] into their location bar to end up here.” These precautions reflect an understanding that a blog is a presentation of one’s self to the world.

In my last post, I complained about the one-dimensionality of Nerve profiles and the limitations they place on constructing an online identity. Blogs offer a much richer way to present oneself to the world than profiles on personals sites or social networking sites. Taking an information theoretical approach to analyzing the two forms shows why. Bloggers are creating ongoing narratives, not just answering questions. The possible forms these narratives can take are far more numerous than the possible answers to questions, making blogs a much richer source of information. Gree seems to be the only one of the social networking sites to have understood this, and their blog-supplemented profiles present a far more nuanced way to represent oneself than anything U.S. sites offer.

Yet the homogenization of blogging software may tend to counteract this. Blogging software, while it makes the task of blogging easier, constrains the freedom to choose the format of one’s blog. Blogs that look and feel the same communicate very little about the blogger beyond their content. This is why Gundo’s blog is the most interesting of the three I surveyed: by choosing not to use blogging software (motivated by a desire to do things “the wrong way”), he was able to create a freeform, stream-of-consciousness tour de force that utilized a variety of media. Of course, there is no denying that the affordances of blogging software have a lot to do with the growth of the blogging phenomenon. Brian noted that he was “frustrated editing big HTML documents” and finds MovableType much easier to use. He likes that blogging software “establishes a chronology” which he can reference later.

In some ways a lot of the features of blogging tools seem besides the point for the purposes for which these bloggers use them. There was little emphasis on hyperlinking, trackbacking, or comments on any of the blogs I surveyed. In Gundo’s case, he chose the blog format not because of its hypertextuality but because he thought it would be “less intrusive” than emailing his friends with news, echoing the comments made by the bloggers Nardi surveyed. This suggests that the focus on syndication and collaboration by some self-proclaimed “blogging visionaries” may be misplaced.

I feel like the blogging phenomenon is in general a positive development, though not for the reasons most people cite. I don’t think that the majority of people will be motivated to participate more in government or create new works of literature. But those shouldn’t be the standards by which we measure the worth of blogging. I am grateful for the blogs my friends created because they allowed me glimpses of their inner lives (orchestrated though they may be). This gives me a fuller understanding of who they are and how they want to be seen. Multiplied over millions of bloggers, I believe these glimpses of understanding strengthen not just “the blogosphere” but the social ties on which successful societies depend. This is more subtle than throwing Trent Lott out of office or making newspapers obsolete, but in the long run I think it is more important.