What Does it Mean to be a Blogger?

I've been reading the essays in Uses of Blogs, which I recommend to anyone who has a serious interest in the blogging phenomenon. I’m not ready to delve deeply here into any of the essays, but one line in Alexander Halavais’s essay struck a chord for me. In “Scholarly Blogging: Moving toward the Visible College,” Halavais writes: “[S]o varied are the behaviors of bloggers that it is a bit surprising that the same term in used to cover them all.” (p. 117)

Indeed. In the recent dust-up over whether Pluto should be labeled a planet, the “anti-planet” faction argued, as they have for years, that Pluto is just too small to be put in the same rank as Earth, Jupiter, and the rest. But wait a minute – by that logic, is it not downright weird that we use the same term to refer to Earth and Jupiter? In fact, we don’t, exactly – Earth is a “terrestrial planet,” while Jupiter is a “gas giant” or a “Jovian planet.” The term planet itself means “moving star,” and is left over from the days when all we knew about Jupiter and Venus is that they looked just like that – like stars that moved.

And so we have this term, “blogger,” derived from “blog,” in turn derived from “weblog.” (Side thought – if we hadn’t shortened “weblog,” what would we call people who write them? “Weblies?”) It made sense to have one word when it was still possible for one person to read all the weblogs out there, or most of them at least. At that point, blogging was a subculture not terribly different from the zines phenomenon of hand-made, photocopied magazines, where even people writing radically different things had a sense of being part of a special tribe. (Another side thought – what’s happened to zines in the Age of Blogging?)

But like the word “planet”, the word “blog” becomes increasingly inadequate as more “reverse chronologically sequential narratives with a networked audience” come into view. What I’m doing and what Markos Moulitsas is doing really don’t have much to do with each other – and we’re both far removed from most of what goes on over at MySpace. There is no “blogosphere,” and thank God, because I hate that word. Physicists speculate about the possibility of multiple universes, and talk about the “multiverse.” Well, I don’t know if there’s a multiverse out there in space, but we’ve definitely already grown one here on the Internet. What should we call it? The multisphere? All I know is that my historian colleagues of the future are going to go nuts trying to figure this out. Good thing I’ll be retired by then.

(PS – Boy, this post has made the spellchecker nuts – someone needs to inform Microsoft that there’s this word “blog” – wonder if they know?)

Why do we blog?

A quote from the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s "Portrait of the internet’s new storytellers":

When asked whether they blogged for themselves or for their audience, more than half of bloggers (52%) responded that they blog for themselves. About a third (32%) of bloggers blog mostly to entertain or engage their audience, and another 14% volunteered that they blogged for both themselves and their audience equally. (p. 18)

Well, maybe not. Bloggers are diarists. One thing you learn when training as an historian is that diarists are writing for an audience. Oh sure, they’ll tell you it's private, but unless they burn their diary, they mean for someone else to read it. Always be aware of this when reading the diary or letters of some important historical figure – they knew you were going to read it. Do not think for a moment you are getting unfiltered material direct from their brains – it doesn’t work that way. Thomas Jefferson didn’t write his diaries for himself, he wrote them for you.

And bloggers are public diarists, for crying out loud. I think the phrasing of the question probably had an impact here, as the other main option was “to entertain or engage their audience.” A lot of bloggers may not in fact think of it precisely that way, but they do blog so that they will be read, and they write accordingly, putting forward whatever image they want to shape for themselves, obscuring whatever they want to hide.

Indeed, data elsewhere in the report makes that clear. The top two reasons bloggers gave as their motivations for blogging: 1) To express themselves creatively (52%) and 2) To document their personal experiences or share them with others (50%). (p.8) So it’s not so much that Pew got fooled, but they’ve interpreted some of their data a little screwy.

Buried at the bottom of the report is data that indicates some ways bloggers are very different from most Americans: 25% of Americans have college degrees, 37% of bloggers do; 13% of Americans are knowledge-based professionals, 38% of bloggers are; 16%% of Americans are full or part-time students, 38% of bloggers are. (p. 23) This reinforces the idea that class-wise, bloggers skew towards the professional middle class.

Who are the bloggers?

Blogs are a potential goldmine for historians, if they get preserved, if historians learn to take them seriously, if they get preserved, if they can be reasonably catalogued, if they get preserved – well, so much for that dead horse.

Setting aside the preservation issue, the first thing any historian wants to know about any document is who wrote it? The “why” behind the writing is a close second. So, who are the bloggers and why are they writing? Ok, it ain’t new, but I wasn’t blogging when the Pew Internet & American Life Project brought out their most recent survey of bloggers (PDF). Some of it is counterintuitive – bloggers are more racially and ethnically diverse than the larger population of internet users. Indeed, non-whites and English-speaking Hispanics are more likely to be bloggers than white Anglos. There’s a dissertation topic for some sociology grad student to figure out.

Bloggers skew young, with 54% under 30 – not a surprise, but I suspect that will change as the Myspace generation gets older – and they are evenly split on gender lines. There’s not much information in the Pew report about class, though the fact that half of bloggers live in the suburbs hints that they are strongly middle-class, which would match the broader population.

Who are the bloggers? Well, in the U.S., they seem to represent a good snapshot of Americans. For future historians seeking to study U.S. popular history in the early twenty-first century, this is great.

Next up – how Pew got had by its survey respondents.