I find my blog has been an excellent self-motivation tool and has helped my depression a lot. I have suffered little since starting it. As a freelance illustrator, living in a rural part of Britain, it is all too easy to slide into loneliness and the kind of mental ‘bad habits’ which can lead to bouts of depression. Since having my blog, and working hard to promote it, I have gradually found myself being the kind of person I would like to be. My visitors (especially US city ones) enjoy that I live in the Cotswolds, bake my own bread, grow veg, am a ‘proper’ (i.e. earn my living from and am published) children’s illustrator living in an old cottage, and now I find that I have to keep up with the persona that they see me as on my blog – I feel as if I have a regular ‘audience’ and so instead of not doing things because I can’t be bothered, I do them, and this makes me feel better about myself. It doesn’t matter whether I blog it or not, as I am often writing blog posts in my head that never get posted – it is just a useful mental ‘trick’ to stop me sliding into the kind of unhappy low-self esteem kind of depression I used to be prone to. (Female respondent, 2007)

I have never known what blogging is about, except that it forms a way of exorcising the self-commentary in my head! It’s a little to do with exercising some kind of wordcraft, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. It’s a lot to do with taking my negativity and spinning it positive, but for my own benefit. To demonstrate to myself that there’s another way of looking at things (or something more amusing to distract me from whatever’s getting me down). So, a way of looking at things or a way of looking away from things … in any event, it’s more internal than external. (Female respondent, 2007)

As it gets closer to my son’s birthday, I realize that I’ve never really blogged much about that, and I think it would be therapeutic. I still harbour guilt about the whole situation, so maybe writing about it would be a good thing. (Scooby Snax, 27 April 2003)

Letting other people know your thoughts and dreams and reading their responses can be encouraging and inspiring. Over the years my blogging buddies have become a sort of online counselling group – whenever things get bad, or good, they’re there, to cheer you on or to offer consolation. It can keep you going when times get tough and encourage you to carry on writing. Spilling your soul is sometimes therapeutic anyway! (Female respondent, 2007)

I do try to keep my blog as impersonal as I can – if I have problems in my personal life, I keep them to myself, as I don’t see my blog as being a confessional, (although as stated, I do use it as a motivational tool). I keep a ‘feel good’ factor going, where possible, as I see myself as ‘selling’ my lifestyle, with an aim to publicising my work – I am not fond of blogs that constantly go on about the blogger’s personal problems and intimate experiences, so I try to remain detached in that sense.

I think it helped to talk it out here, especially that nostalgia post, and other stuff I didn’t post about why I quit the game. I don’t really like using addiction terminology for it, but that’s what fits – so, it’s still one day at a time, but today’s been good. (Maewyn’s Musings, 29 September 2004)

Why diet now? I’ve never had a support system like this before: I can share this stuff (stuff that I haven’t shared with anybody except my therapist) at least in part because, although you kind of know me, you don’t REALLY know me: so in a way you’re safe. (Rites of Passage, 22 July 2004)

The internet’s anonymity strikes me as rather like a confessional booth – because people reading this don’t know who you are, you can be completely and totally honest with them. You can really be *you*. (Diary of a Malcontent, 14 January 2004)

I can only hope my blog friends understand both why I am doing this, and how much it means to me to continue. This is my therapy. Just like you wouldn’t want a therapist blabbing your sessions to the world at large, you understand that I similarly wouldn’t want my corrupted privacy to be exploited. (Diary of a Malcontent, 14 January 2004)

Getting people’s opinions is a great way of helping you work through any difficult times. Sometimes the words of a stranger are easier to take on board than those of a close friend, as you don’t always want the biased opinions of those who know you. You want the cold, hard truth. That’s how you learn. That’s how you move forward.

The problem is, I need to do OTHER stuff rather than working on my blog. Like bathing, and eating, and maybe feeding the animals. Oh, work would be good too. Help. I am addicted. (Atypical Female, 6 October 2003)

One of the reasons I love my blog is that I can talk about how crazy and anal I am, and I don’t have to see heads nodding in agreement. Even though I know you’re doing that, and don’t try to tell me you’re not. I don’t have to shut my eyes to go into denial, I can just close the browser window. (Atypical Female, 25 May 2004)

The blogging personality

The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness (Costa and McCrae, 1992, quoted in Guadagno et al., 2008). Guadagno et al. (2008) suggest that people who are high in openness to new experiences and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. In particular, they suggest, women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers compared to those who are low in neuroticism, but they found no perceptible difference for men. It may not be particularly shocking to learn that people who are interested in new experiences have been attracted to blogging in the last ten years since the whole blogging phenomenon is of a very recent origin, but the association of blogging with neuroticism may be more of a surprise, particularly if one associates blogging with the very opinionated political or news blogs that have tended to dominate media coverage of the blogosphere. Individuals who are high in neuroticism tend to be emotionally unstable, anxious, insecure, nervous and emotionally reactive. Such individuals may be attracted to blogging because they are lonely and see it as a possible way through which to form social connections with others. Those who are high in openness to new experiences tend to be imaginative and curious, prefer variety and are independent and artistic. Guadagno et al. suggest that openness to new experiences predicts maintaining a blog, and that such bloggers are likely to write about the details of their personal lives.

The work of Baker and Moore (2008) on the way in which distress motivates some people to start blogging also agrees with the above findings. In their study of a group of MySpace users, they found that those who intended to start blogging scored highly on psychological distress, self-blame and venting, and lower on social integration and satisfaction with the number of their online and face-to-face friends. They agree that studies of handwritten diary-keeping have shown that such activity can lead to significant improvements in the author’s mental well-being, but point out that blogging offers the author the extra facility of peer commentary. This means that the blogger becomes open to social support and may be able to discuss subjects that they have previously been unable to communicate face to face.

Thus one of the motivating factors for people to continue to blog is the therapeutic aspects of blogging. Bloggers find that writing about a particular problem or worry that they have, even if they eventually decide not to post the final result, can be a helpful action to undertake. The idea of using writing to explore your soul or psyche is of course the same motivation behind much diary-keeping and thus this motivation can be directly linked to the journaling motivations mentioned in a previous chapter. While some use their blog to communicate about their feelings to their friends and family, others are more drawn to the anonymity offered by the Internet and the feeling that they are sharing their emotions with complete strangers, who might be able to offer objective advice, are usually supportive, and who do not know them from Adam and therefore will not be bringing difficult issues up at awkward times in real life. However, this therapeutic aspect of blogging appears to be, for most bloggers, an additional benefit of blogging that they discover once they have started and a reason to continue rather than the initial motivator to start a blog.

Letting it all out

The above quote comes from a highly rated infertility blog written by a woman who only identified herself as Getupgrrl. She preferred to keep her anonymity (and that of her partner) throughout the years in which she wrote a brave and deeply felt blog about her experiences of infertility and miscarriage. This anonymity also enabled her to write with painful honesty about some very emotive issues and to defend her right – and that of other women – to undergo IVF and other infertility treatment, sometimes in trenchant tones.

Venting has been established for some time as a useful and cathartic component of journal writing and has been theorised to be a major benefit of blogging (Baker and Moore, 2008). As we have seen in a previous chapter, the idea of ‘letting off steam’ or venting was popular among the survey respondents, but more in relation to their own lives than public affairs. While they might not go as far as describing their activities as ‘channelling their hate’, many bloggers would agree that one of the main motivations for posting can be the need to vent rage, blow off steam about a topic that annoys or upsets them, or to just say ‘whatever the hell I want’. At these times, their focus can be very much on their own needs rather than any perceived needs of their readers:

Schiano et al. (2004) list the need to vent and let off steam as the first of their five main motivations for journal blogging. They comment that bloggers are surprisingly unconcerned about their privacy when undertaking these functions. Gregg (2009) has argued that it is almost a defining characteristic of academics’ blogs, and particularly those of early career academics, that they offer a safe space to share the disappointments of university life. Changes in academia such as the move away from permanent tenured positions and the growth of casualisation mean that academic life is not the ivory tower it was once perceived to be and her sample of young academics used their blogs to mourn this loss and to support each other in their feelings of having been short-changed. Reed (2005) noted that, for his London bloggers, ranting was a crucial part of blogging-as-therapy and that their ranting entries tended to be longer than their other posts. He described such posts as providing an outlet for everyday frustrations – frequently related to work – which agrees with some of the responses to our surveys:

Others used their blog to vent their emotions about experiences and events in their personal lives:

Positive feedback from readers

As we have already seen from the comparison with traditional diaries, one of the major ways in which blogs differ from diaries is that there is an expectation that the blog will be read (and possibly commented on) by others. Miura and Yamashita (2007) suggest that communication with readers who gave the blogger positive feedback was a major factor in encouraging blog authors to continue to write. They found that positive feedback from readers, for example in the form of sympathy, support or encouragement, could offer strong emotional and social support for a blogger, particularly one writing a journal-type blog, and motivate them to continue blogging. In particular, they suggest that the satisfaction of being accepted by others gives additional significance to blog writing beyond the mere act of personal diary-writing. Here, they were building on the work of researchers such as Kawaura et al. (1998), who investigated the psychological and social process of online diary-writing behaviour and suggested that, while online diarists continued to write their diaries because they enjoyed the self-disclosure afforded by these documents, they also continued because they enjoyed expressing themselves to others, and always envisioned the presence of readers when they wrote. In his study of London bloggers, Reed agreed that it was the knowledge that they had visitors – and his bloggers preferred the term visitors to that of readers – that kept the group posting regularly. Gregg’s (2009) disillusioned academics found support online that helped them to develop strategies to cope with changes in their workplace.

This presence of readers is an essential factor in most bloggers’ motivations for blogging. Whether they are writing for family and friends or prefer to see their readers as total strangers, the majority of bloggers are aware that they are engaged in active communication with others. What does differ across blogs, however, is who these others are perceived to be – or wanted to be.

Keeping in touch with friends

The majority of the research that has been focused on the Internet over the past decade has suggested that Internet use functions to support and strengthen social relationships and that people are increasingly using Internet-based technology to fulfil social and interpersonal needs, for example through their use of e-mail or social networking sites. For example, it is suggested that e-mail use has a beneficial effect on personal relationships and that women in particular use e-mail to communicate with family and friends and to thus maintain social ties (Boneva and Kraut, 2002). One of the questions that researchers have asked about bloggers’ friendship links is whether these links reflect close offline relationships. In other words, does blogging facilitate the formation of new relationships or is it more often used to cement those bonds with family and friends that already exist?

Nardi et al. (2004a) found that many people started blogging at the urging of their friends, who were already bloggers and wanted company that they already knew in the blogosphere. Trammell et al.’s (2006) investigation of the Polish blogosphere also suggested that social interaction with real-life family and friends was an important motivation for blogging. As has been mentioned in a previous chapter, this group of Polish bloggers were very focused on personal subjects and their posts on such subjects were often vague, focused on emotions rather than on a coherent account of the event that triggered such emotions. There was little attempt at offering full explanations to their readers, but such explanations might not have been necessary if they were assuming that their readers were real-life friends and thus in fact already knowledgeable about the blogger’s situation.

Many of the bloggers we surveyed also used their blogs to communicate with associates from their offline life, particularly family members living apart. For example, a woman respondent explained how she used her blog to keep in contact with friends and family: ‘I can let others know what I’ve been up to without having to e-mail each person individually or send a round-robin e-mail.’ Another stated: ‘If my grown sons who live across the United States from us want to know what is going on in our lives they can read it if they wish or not.’

One of the questions in the surveys investigated how far respondents’ blogging was involved with their offline lives by asking: ‘Has your blogging interacted with real life in any of these ways?’

As can be seen in Tables 4.1 and 4.2, nearly half of all respondents in both surveys admitted that their blogging did interact with people they already knew in real life. In addition, a substantial minority (14 respondents in 2006, 27 respondents in 2007) agreed that they used blogging as a way of sending messages to known others, either real-life friends or e-friends. What is interesting is the number of respondents who had turned an online relationship into an offline one, and we will look at this further in the section on privacy. In comparison, a similar number of respondents (15 in 2006 and 27 in 2007) stated that they blogged mainly for their own records. When asked why in that case she made her blog publicly accessible, one female respondent stated ‘I guess initially you don’t think of it as public because you don’t really expect people to view your blog’ while another claimed ‘Because it just makes it a bit less pointless if there’s more than just me reading it.’

Finding new friends

The Internet can be a tool to help people establish new friendships as close online relationships develop into offline ones as well. In comparison to the studies mentioned earlier, Ali-Hasan and Adamic (2007) investigated blog communities in the Middle East and concluded that few of the blogging interactions they studied reflected close offline relationships. The bloggers they studied reported that few of the comments they received on their blogs came from people they knew offline and they themselves made few or no comments on the blogs of people they knew in real life. There was a very small overlap between commenting interaction and offline interaction and this group of bloggers seemed relatively uninterested in the idea of maintaining existing relationships with friends and family through blogging. Instead they used their blogging to establish new relationships.

Some bloggers enjoy the idea that they are being read by complete strangers. Reed’s (2005) London bloggers particularly enjoyed the fact that they could not anticipate who their readers would be and he described how their blogs could become a site for encounters. Such meetings were usually conceived of as being with strangers – indeed Reed suggested that the visits of family and friends were not welcomed by many of his bloggers because the visits of such knowledgeable social connections could lead the blogger to self-censorship, thus changing the original purpose of the blog.

For some bloggers, the possibility of making new friends is a very necessary element in their blogging. As we have seen, individuals who are high in neuroticism and nervousness might in fact blog in order to assuage loneliness or in an attempt to reach out and form social connections with others (Guadagno et al., 2008). Baker and Moore’s 2008 study of MySpace users who were intending to blog found that intending bloggers were significantly more dissatisfied with the number of their real-life and online friends and also less satisfied with their current group of friends. They were therefore intending to blog in order to increase the number and improve the quality of their friends. Such dissatisfaction with their social contacts in real life was also found among the survey respondents. Eighteen out of 46 (39 per cent) in 2006 and 32 out of 104 (31 per cent) respondents in 2007 agreed that they sometimes ‘preferred blogging to the company of the people I live with’.

Respondents to the surveys both found new friends and kept in touch with old ones through their blogging. And their definition of friendship included relationships with people they had never met face to face and probably never would. One woman respondent commented: ‘I get satisfaction from the community that I am now part of – who I consider to be friends even if I haven’t met them in person.’ Another commented that she used blogging to ‘meet new people’, although there was no indication that she meant physical meetings.

Finding new friends online can also be easier than finding them in real life. One female respondent commented: ‘I’m also a bit lazy about going out and meeting people, I also like my own company and the comfort of my own home, talking to people through blogs means I can still keep these but make new friends on my own terms.’ Having a relationship ‘on your own terms’ also offers the possibility of staying in control of the friendship and, if necessary, keeping your distance.

As we have seen, sometimes the new online friends can become offline friends through face-to-face meetings. Even if that is not possible (or wanted) blogging contact can spill over into e-mail exchanges or exchanges away from the Internet such as through the telephone. One female respondent in her thirties stated: ‘My best friend is someone I met through a friend’s blog. We live in different countries but are now inseparable through IM, e-mail and phone. That is interaction huh?’ Such a relationship might even embrace the old-fashioned communication channel of the postal service. In the quotation given below, the female respondent who is quoted at the beginning of the chapter explaining how her blogging has helped her depression, explains how her blogging contacts exchange more than just words:

She was not the only respondent who reported receiving presents from her readers. Another female blogger told us: ‘I’ve never met any of my regular blog readers, but we regularly phone and send personal e-mail, too. They have sent gifts (bits of computer when mine breaks down, etc.) and two or three of us have supported each other through periods of unemployment and major life change. It’s fairly surreal.’ Another female respondent listed the mixed haul of ‘goodies’ that she had so far been sent by people who had read her blog: ‘A haul of physical goodies: One book about Tunbridge Wells, a bag of home-grown veggies, a jar of anchovies, a pair of mittens, some maple syrup and pancake mix.’

A sense of responsibility to their readers is another factor that keeps bloggers blogging. Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement ‘I feel an obligation to my readers to communicate regularly’, 42 out of 48 (87.5 per cent) of the respondents to the 2006 survey and 79 out of 107 (74 per cent) respondents to the 2007 survey agreed or strongly agreed. One respondent commented: ‘I think worrying about disappointing other people plays a significant role in this.’

Thus, the formation and nurturing of social relationships can be a strong motivating factor in starting and continuing a blog. Unlike the therapeutic motivation, this wish to blog for friends – whether to keep old ones or to make new ones – can be a motivator to start a blog. Bloggers can be encouraged to start blogging by real-life friends and family and then use their blogs to keep in touch with them online. Such a motivator can be particularly strong if the blogger lives away from friends and family – blogging can be less formal and more spontaneous than writing e-mails or letters updating everyone on events in your life, and again the reader can choose when and even whether to log on and read the latest update, making the blog less intrusive than direct contact. Other bloggers may blog in order to increase their number of friends, looking to the blog-osphere to find like-minded new acquaintances, possibly when they are in short supply nearer to home. Such friendships can develop into offline relationships or, if distance is a problem, into e-mail, telephone or even postal communication. Whether or not the relationship develops offline, bloggers are appreciative of the support and friendship they can receive from their readers. Perhaps this can be best summed up by the description of blogging given by a divorced college lecturer somewhere in North Carolina as ‘A public forum where someone non-judgmental is theoretically listening’ (Diary of a Malcontent, 14 January 2004).