The journal blog: a traditional form mediated by the Internet
Blogs are a little more personal, and the etiquette is less defined: if a [bulletin] board is like a party, is a blog like your living room? A booth at a street fair? I think it’s like a front porch: it feels like a part of your house; you put furniture on it, plants. But it’s right there on the street and the only thing stopping someone from walking away with your hanging ferns is social convention. The sense of it being private and owned, well, that’s illusory. (The Leery Polyp, 1 February 2005)
When is a diary not a diary? Perhaps when it’s a blog. As we have seen, early bloggers tried to act as filters of the Internet, directing their readers to interesting information through links. Such links might be to other blogs or to different types of websites. The blogger sometimes offered commentary on the links and there was usually the possibility for the reader to make comments on the blogger’s latest posting, but the focus of these early blogs was very much on their links. Such link blogs required a certain technical ability with computer programming, so it is not surprising that many of these early blogs were built around IT themes. Then in 1999 came the introduction of easy-to-use, cheap or free blogging software such as Blogger and the concomitant explosion of the blogosphere. Now it was possible for anyone to blog, despite their limited IT knowledge.
With the expansion of the blogosphere, link blogs were no longer the only type of blog available. In a report on blogging demographics for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Lenhart and Fox (2006) stated that the most popular content for a blog was the writer’s life and experiences, with 37 per cent of their sampled blogs focusing on these subjects. Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 reported that 45 per cent of respondents blogged primarily about ‘personal musings’ – with this figure rising to 53 per cent for the 72 per cent of respondents defined by Technorati as ‘hobbyist’ bloggers (as opposed to professionals and would-be professionals who expected to make money from their blogging).
The newer style of ‘journal’ or diary blogs was characterised more by the frequently updated text in the blog than by links to other parts of the Internet and was more likely to be focused on the blogger rather than external links. Indeed, Herring et al. (2004a) sampled 203 US journal blogs and discovered that only 31.8 per cent contained any links at all. Their research also suggested that journal blogging appeared to be particularly attractive to women and teenagers. Van Doorn et al. (2007) also made this link and suggested that in the journal blog we are confronted with an intersection between the traditionally feminine act of diarywriting and the traditionally masculine environment of ICT.
Blogs sit on the cusp of the public and private spheres in a unique way, with bloggers writing for both themselves and their audience. A blog is neither a completely private diary nor a polished and edited piece of writing aimed purely at a specific readership. Mortensen and Walker (2002) suggest that, just as Habermas conceived of the salon as existing on the borderline of the private and the public, situated in private homes but part of the public sphere, so do blogs. In his 2005 study of London bloggers, Reed made comparisons with street graffiti – the text left for strangers to read – or even just the act of standing on the street and shouting, exposing oneself through text to people you don’t know. With their links to other parts of the Internet, blogs are anchored in the public sphere, and yet they are also safe spaces within which bloggers have total editorial control. It is therefore possible to compare blogs with other means of communication that appear to straddle both the public and the private sphere, such as letters to magazines or newspapers; the writings of some newspaper columnists; personal webpages and published diaries and letters.
The diary genre
Both the mainstream media and academic research frequently use the descriptions ‘online diary’ or ‘journaling’ to describe blogging. Such terms can be helpful to convey to readers who may never have seen a blog something of the quality of the genre. There is much that is familiar about a blog for a diary user – the chronological structure and the focus on personal experiences and opinions, particularly if the blog is a so-called ‘journal’ type blog. And it is not just commentators who associate blogging with diaries. As we have already noted, many blogging services such as Diaryland or LiveJournal make the connection too. But is a blog only an online diary, or does blogging offer its users more (communication with others; publicity) or less (lack of privacy; negative criticism) than a diary? In actual fact, there is a separate online diary tradition whose proponents can feel just as uncomfortable about being associated with blogging as bloggers can be when labelled ‘diarists’. boyd (2005) expressed the frustrations of many bloggers when she described the use of such terms as misleading and problematic because, although they are not fundamentally wrong, they do not convey the full picture.
So how far are bloggers motivated to write their blogs because they see them as at least similar to the traditional diary? A Canadian living in London spent a good amount of time in her blog trying to work out precisely why she blogged, particularly because she is a television presenter and so as a public figure has issues about a possible invasion of her privacy. In one post, she described how she used to keep a diary from the age of 12, but stopped writing it ten years later when it was read by someone she thought she could trust. So, if she had privacy issues about others reading her diary, why did she write a publicly accessible blog that could be read by family, friends and strangers all over the world? The answer is that, unlike her diary, her blog was designed to be read by others.
With blogging I can write a ‘diary’ with the intention of others reading it which a) satisfies my love and need to write b) in some way documents a bit of my life c) helps me reach a lot of people and d) is a bit of fun. (Gia’s blog, 9 July 2002)
This description shows a classic mixture of motives for blogging and clearly demonstrates how, in the mind of a blogger, an online blog can differ from an offline, traditional, diary.
Researchers in the area of diary-writing (see McNeill, 2005; O’Sullivan, 2005; Serfaty, 2004) tell us that the origins of diary-keeping date to the early modern period in the West, with two significant factors being the spread of literacy and the impact of the Protestant Reformation. Not only were more people able to read, but silent reading became the norm, rather than reading aloud, which was more usual in the Middle Ages. It is suggested that silent reading helped the reader to meditate more clearly and in their own time on what he or she was reading and to form their own judgements. In the early modern period, both the Protestant and Catholic churches encouraged their congregations to read and meditate on the Bible and other devotional materials and to keep written accounts of their spiritual progress. Thus diary-keeping was very much seen as a spiritual and religious exercise. With the arrival of the Age of Science and the expansion of the theories and practices of accountancy and bookkeeping and also the growing popularity of the yearly almanac, diary-keeping also encompassed the more secular world, noting important events, natural occurrences and domestic affairs, although a bookkeeping methodology could also be extended to include the enumeration and analysis of sins and good deeds committed throughout a writer’s day. The philosophers of the Enlightenment reinforced the secularisation of the diary genre, encouraging the further exploration of one’s internal debates and deliberations through journaling.
By the nineteenth century, diaries had evolved into what O’Sullivan (2005: 60) calls ‘sites of self-exploration, self-expression and self-construction’. The persona of the diarist was now the focus of the diary and the exploration of his or her character the main motivation for keeping a diary, although such introspection was frequently still of a confessional nature. Diary-keeping flourished with the sharp increase in literacy during the nineteenth century and the growth of the middle classes, particularly among middle-class women edged out of the public sphere and confined to the home with little to do but to write about ‘what they knew’ – in other words, their own lives and character. Girls, in particular, were encouraged to use diary-keeping as a means of self-discipline, and while a 100 per cent literacy rate was close to achievement in the UK by the beginning of the twentieth century, diary-keeping was still very much an upper- and middle-class occupation, and particularly associated with women and girls. This makes such diaries and personal reminiscences particularly helpful for those interested in researching what Jalland (1986) has called ‘the history of the inarticulate’ – conventional, middle-class women of the Victorian period. The last forty years have seen a tremendous growth in research in the areas of women’s history and feminist criticism of English literature, and good use has been made of the products of women writers – both those products intended for a public readership, such as novels and women’s magazine articles, and those intended for a more private readership, such as diaries and letters. Showalter (1989) has described a shift in feminist criticism during this period from what she calls a ‘critique’ of primarily male literary texts to ‘gynocritics’, or a study of women’s writing, and a discussion of the androcentric critical strategies that have pushed women’s writing to the fringes of the literary canon. Spender (1980) has argued that nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers who wrote for a public audience posed a potential threat to the status quo, with its distinctions between the male/public sphere and female/private – or domestic – sphere. She suggests that the status quo was re-imposed by the dominant (male) group by creating a distinction between male and female writing. More recently, Lopez (2009) has suggested that there are many similarities between female bloggers and earlier female diarists in the way in which they have been treated by the academy, with academic research mainly focusing on male proponents of such autobiographical writing. Recent research on women bloggers (e.g. Pedersen and Macafee, 2006; van Doorn et al., 2007) is helping to counteract such an imbalance.
The online diary
Laurie McNeill (2005) explains that ‘diaries’ began to appear on the Internet a few years before blogs arrived, typically developing out of personal home pages, usually – like the later blogs – the home pages of individuals already associated with Internet technologies. For examples of early online diaries, see the Online Diary History Project (http://www.diaryhistoryproject.com/), which offers some personal recollections of writers who started online journals before January 1998 on how and why they began journaling. Viviane Serfaty (2004) explains that online diaries became widespread in the USA from around 1995 as the number of households connected to the Internet increased and in 1997 Internet providers started offering free space for homepages – which is the same year that blogs began to appear. Daniel Chandler’s work on personal home pages explored how their creators used such pages to construct identity, not just to publish information. He pointed out that the authors of some of these home pages were extraordinarily frank about themselves compared to what they might admit in face-to-face interaction with strangers and suggested that the medium of web pages offered possibilities for the presentation and shaping of self that could not be achieved face-to-face or on paper. He also suggested that home pages enabled their creators to think about their identity. Miller and Mather (1998) suggested that differences could be found between the two sexes, with men’s pages being shorter and more variety in length and self-reference being found in women’s pages. They also suggested that women made more mention of the reader and demonstrated more awareness of those who might be viewing their pages than men (cited in van Doorn et al., 2007: 145).
A certain amount of research into the motivations of those who created personal home pages has been undertaken. Papacharissi (2002) suggested that creators of such pages were motivated by a wish to share information, for entertainment, self-expression and a desire to communicate with friends and family, while Walker (2000) suggested that home page motivations were either intrinsic – to start to contact people on the Internet – or extrinsic – to maintain relationships already formed elsewhere (cited in Menchen-Trevino, 2005). However, investigating the blogosphere in 2004 and the growing popularity of blogs over personal home pages, the team led by Bonnie A. Nardi suggested that bloggers rejected home pages because they conceived of them as ‘static’ and more formal and carefully considered than blogs. They suggested that what drew creators to blogs rather than home pages was their rhythm of short, frequent posts.
Internet diarists did not, and do not, necessarily see themselves as bloggers. In her study of female Chinese-American online diarists, Karlsson found that many of these diarists made a sharp distinction between a blog and online journals. The diarists in her study were all users of ‘Rice Bowl Journals’, a large US-based webring and online journal directory. Many of the diarists featured both a blog and an online journal on their sites and Karlsson found that they used their blog for short, spontaneous notes and the online journal for longer diary-type entries, written with more care. To these writers, length was what separated the online diary from the blog and the diary was more important than the blog, with one interviewee comparing the blog to the background commentary that comes with a DVD – in other words a non-essential but occasionally interesting item. These distinctions between blogs and diaries echoed the early research of Mortensen and Walker (2002) into academics who blog. They suggested that, unlike diaries, blogs are suited to the shorter attention spans of the modern world, and that the spontaneity of writing immediately rather than offering carefully thought out arguments releases academic bloggers from the expectation that their writing has to be perfect and polished. In his study of London-based bloggers in 2005 Reed noted that, to his group of bloggers, both the blog and the ‘I’ that it depicted were seen to be works in progress, with the blog recording precisely how a blogger felt at a particular time and place rather than consciously meditating on events later as might be expected in a more traditional diary. Many in Reed’s group of bloggers admitted to keeping handwritten diaries in the past, but in contrast to such diaries, whose entries were usually delayed, he found that blogs were valued for capturing a person’s impressions almost as they occurred. Bloggers talked to him about the need to quickly ‘vent’ the brain, to expel ‘disposable’ thoughts and feelings or even to ‘brain dump’.
While diary-keeping has been described, for example by O’Sullivan (2005), as the pastime of a privileged few, the blogosphere appears to offer a far wider and more diverse group of writers the opportunity to publish their life stories to a general public (although it should be noted that Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 still reported that the majority of bloggers surveyed were highly educated and affluent). Blogs are just one possibility for online autobiographical representation on offer to the Internet user: webcams, photo albums, involvement with discussion boards, and social networking sites also offer the opportunity to share one’s life and opinions with a mass audience in a way that has not been possible for the average non-celebrity before. However, this is where questions need to be raised about whether bloggers choose to write their diaries online in order to reach an audience or whether the journal-blog genre is chosen for convenience and the aim of the final product is still private and personal for the blogger. In the past, diary-writing was conceived of as a very personal exercise, offering the opportunity to explore one’s character and possibly one’s soul – what are the differences with today’s blogs?
Many bloggers – and in particular journal bloggers – claim to be writing primarily for themselves. So what do they hope to achieve by their blogging? Certainly there are still links to the type of spiritual investigation undertaken by early diarists. In 2004 a female blogger on LiveJournal tried to understand why she had been posting mainly ‘a lot of religious meandering and mental cud-chewing’, concluding: ‘So I’m writing all this as much to think through things, discover how my mind works and where my priorities lie, my thoughts and feelings, as to read it over again later with new eyes.’ However, she immediately followed these musings with an acknowledgement of her readership:
Unfortunately for you, dear readers, it means I’m writing to myself as the primary audience and you all as the secondary. So it might not be as interesting for someone else to read. And for that, my apologies, but I won’t be changing the behaviour. You’re more than free to skip it. (Maewyn’s Musings, 18 August 2004)
Such a post – directed at a readership she obviously understands is reading her blog yet making it very clear that the blogger wants to use her blog primarily as a diary or spiritual journal – demonstrates the contradictions involved in such blogging.
Bloggers using LiveJournal as their blog provider seem to be particularly prone to considering their blog as a personal diary rather than written with an audience in mind. LiveJournal has several security options, including the most popular ‘friends only’ option, which hides a post from the general public so that only those on the blogger’s friends list can read it, and a ‘private’ option that allows bloggers to restrict their readership even more, making their LiveJournal a purely private diary. It was noticeable in my projects that bloggers using LiveJournal were more likely to state that they had started their blog with the intention of using it as a private diary, although their motivations sometimes changed through time.
I would like to think that I’m writing this solely for my own benefit. Many bloggers say the same thing – that having a live journal [sic] such as this one is somewhat therapeutic in nature and they don’t care who reads it – they’re doing it for their own benefit. I guess I thought when I started this that that would be the reason I wrote too. For my own benefit. But I have to be honest with myself. I’m an exhibitionist at heart. I want you to read me. I want you to care what I have to say. I long for your feedback and comments. (Scooby Snax, 30 October 2003)
Certainly, the blog draws on some of the fundamental characteristics of the diary – entries are posted in a regular, chronological manner and are focused on the blogger’s experiences and opinions. Reed (2005) points out that, just like a paper diary, blogs are structured around ‘I’ narratives and present the life of a sovereign subject who has a continuous identity and a coherent history. Readers make the assumption, unless told otherwise, that the posts draw on the blogger’s own life. Trammell et al.’s (2006) research into the Polish blogosphere suggested that the diary type of blog was the most popular in Poland and that, as blogging tools have become easier to use, blogs have moved from being tools of information management to self-expression and personal subjects. They found that in the Polish blogosphere posts on personal issues were often vague, focused on the emotions that a blogger had experienced rather than detailing the event that triggered them, and that this might cause problems for the reader’s understanding, demonstrating that the blogger was writing more for him or herself than for their reader.
However, the inter-activeness of the blog – offering readers the opportunity to comment, giving statistics of how many readers the blog attracts and from where in the world, allowing readers to click through to other websites that the blogger is discussing – is demonstrably different from the more concrete form of the paper diary. A paper diary is a very static form, presented in chronological order. However, with the use of a blog’s archives and links, the reader can construct their own reading path, moving backwards and forwards around and outside the blog, comparing the opinions and experiences of the contemporary blogger with posts that were made some time ago, as well as moving away from the blog entirely through any links offered either in the current posting or through the blogroll. Lopez (2009) suggests that blogs can be viewed as database narratives with individual entries being able to stand alone and not necessarily or intentionally connecting to other entries thematically or sequentially. Thus, through technology, the blog offers a different and more fluid experience for both its reader and the author than a traditional diary.
So blogs have some of the characteristics of diaries, but can offer both their writers and readers an enhanced and different experience. How far then did the bloggers surveyed in 2006 and 2007 conceive of their blog as a diary? One of the questions in the survey asked the respondents how they regarded blogging, with pre-set choices of: a form of journalism, publication, diary-keeping and creative writing. Respondents could choose one or more of the descriptions and most bloggers reported that they regard their blogging activity as a combination of at least two of the named categories, with diary-keeping and creative writing attracting slightly higher figures in both the surveys.
As can be seen from Tables 2.1 and 2.2, many bloggers were uncomfortable with our suggested choices and selected ‘Other’. The other descriptions of blogging suggested included an outlet for creative work; a place to share; personal knowledge management; a specialist newspaper column; a marketing initiative and therapy; and these other definitions of blogging will be addressed later in this book. Interestingly, in the 2007 survey two British women dismissed the idea of a diary, preferring to describe their blog as a ‘journal’ while an American woman preferred the term ‘family record’. Several of the comments, however, suggested that respondents were aware that ‘other’ bloggers – although not necessarily themselves – did see blogging primarily as a form of diary-writing or journaling:
It depends why someone is doing it. I’ve never been a ‘I got up today, fed the cat, read the paper and scratched my bum’ blogger. … Because, what do you write about the next day – ‘I got up, scratched the cat, fed the paper and read my bum’? You tend to find that the bloggers who do that type of blog don’t last too long – they run out of stuff to say. I suppose, with me, it’s a sideways look at life – mine and my family’s life. Everything I write about is basically true, but sometimes I will sex it up a bit… . (Male respondent, 2006)
Others noted that their blog had originally started as a diary, but had changed as they continued to post:
Before my blog was used as an online journal of my daily life, this has now become a minor part of the blog and I am now mainly concentrating on technical issues and issues about blogging itself. This change has taken place as I realised I’d like more people tovisit my site, which wasn’t happening with the diary blog, as I’m trying to make some revenue from it using advertising. Plus I also realised it was quite difficult to find information on certain topics so started blogging about them to fill the gap in the market. (Female respondent, 2006)
Mine started as a personal diary that I didn’t intend others to read. I’m intending to make more use of it when I get time: project journal and some tutorials based on my experiences. (Male respondent, 2007)
In comparison, one female respondent who was very clear in her response that she had started and used her blog to promote her online business still commented:
I really like the record of my life which I’m starting to build up and the blog is forcing me to document/photograph more of it which will be fascinating in later years. (Female respondent, 2007)
This demonstrates that even the most marketing-oriented blog can also be used in a number of more personal ways by its creator – possibly even against their will, as the blog is described above as ‘forcing her’ to act in this way.
Slightly more female respondents to the surveys agreed that blogging had replaced their paper diaries – eight in 2006, in comparison to six men, and 18 (7 Brits and 11 Americans) in 2007 in comparison to eight men (split equally between the two countries). This is not too surprising given the strong cultural connection between women and diary writing – Laurie McNeill (2005) refers to the diary’s offline reputation as a ‘feminine genre of no consequence’. Walker (2005) reflects on Serfaty’s (2004) description of blogs and diaries as simultaneously ‘mirrors and veils’, both associated with the feminine, and points out that when a man is depicted as using a mirror he is likely to be shown doing something practical, such as shaving. Thus, she suggests, blogs kept for practical purposes might be considered more masculine than the more feminine diary blogs. This may also be the reason for some male bloggers’ rejection of the idea of the blog as an online diary, particularly those who wish to see themselves as participating in a new and innovative cultural form. However, van Doorn et al. (2007) suggest that the blog is actually introducing a group of men, who would not think to write a paper diary, to the act of diary-writing online.
The results of the surveys, therefore, suggest that, while bloggers understand the concept of the blog as an online diary, they did not exclusively think of their blogging in these terms, and even those bloggers who had started their blog with the intention of keeping it as a diary had found that their blog had developed away from the original diary form. Such development usually came in response to readers’ comments and feedback and it is such feedback that offers the essential distinction between diaries and blogs. Whether or not an offline diary was written with only the author as reader in mind or whether it was written with an eye to posterity and future publication, it is unlikely that the writer expected comments on his or her daily entries. Yet this is the essence of a blog – feedback from and knowledge of its readers, and such feedback often influences the way in which a blog is written and the thoughts and opinions of its creator.
Thus the concept of the blog as a type of online journal or diary is attractive to some bloggers, particularly women. Female identification with the idea of the blog-as-diary is not unexpected given the feminisation of the genre in the last two centuries. However, men can also be found using the blog as an online journal and it may be that, by combining online communication with the more traditional genre, the blog offers men the opportunity to experience diary-writing without the feminine connotations of a traditional diary. Having noted this trend, however, it must be accepted that there are more female ‘journal’ bloggers than male and women bloggers are more comfortable with conceiving of their blog as a diary or journal than are male bloggers. Thus the diary motivation appears to be predominantly a female one. Why then do such women go online and write their diaries in public? What does the blog offer them that a more traditional paper diary does not? The answer appears to lie in the extra facilities that a blog offers – the opportunity for making connections with a readership, to receive feedback from such readers, and the way in which these readers can navigate around the blog, creating their own journeys through the different postings, links and comments in a way that would be impossible with a traditional diary.