I’d like to discuss a phenomenon that I have witnessed – in fact, one I have been party to for many years without realising – as it has now come home to bite me on the butt.
I had noticed, being a long time reader of JBS’s blog, that whilst he blogged his heart out, and as I read everything that happened in his life, I felt no need to contact him myself. I knew everything he wanted to tell the world, so what was there to talk about? I thought I knew what was going on with him. But what I failed to realise was that Jase had no idea what was going on in with me and that my lack of reciprocal communication meant he, to a certain degree, discounted me because he thought I wasn’t interested.
The same thing happened to Brads when he started to blog. In fact he wrote a rather explosive blog some months into his trip to try to get a rise out of his unresponsive audience – he thought no-one was reading, but in fact, we were – we had just failed to communicate the fact to him.
Now I am experiencing the same kind of isolating communication – and no, this is not a request for those of you who read this blog to communicate with me, but an observation of a curious gap in the awareness and behaviour between the blogging and non-blogging community.
Which brings us to the central question I guess: What is the purpose of a blog? Communication, by definition, is imparting information, so a blog is definitely a form of communication. Anyone and everyone can tell the world what they think of anything out there. But it is not specifically designed as a form of interaction. It does not pose questions to be answered nor is it directed towards a specific person. However, the way that a blog is written is very informal, and usually quite personal, and for a lot of us, we are using this medium to inform our friends in far off places what is happening in the world of us.
I believe that, because this kind of personal communication would usually take the form of a conversation, when you read a friends’ blog, your mind does an exceptional feat of mental acrobatics, believes that you have had a conversation with your friend and so assumes that they know what is going on in your world too. But of course they don’t.
So everyone who writes a blog to inform their friends of their daily activities is disappointed when they get no interaction. But then the writing of a blog is not actually a request for response, so why are we surprised by a lack of reciprocity?
In the wider blogging community it is accepted that you ‘comment’ on other peoples blogs, which provides the interaction side of the equation, but not all of us have been inducted into this behavioural pattern. There is actually a ‘comments’ section built into every blog. But blogging hasn’t been around long enough for a behavioural pattern dealing with it to have permeated into the general community. The only person who actually comments on my blog is Jase – who has a blog so knows the protocol.
Now, I have heard from a few of you very regularly, but this is generally because I’ve also sent out emails, in addition to the blog. My emails, directed even as they are to a group and not an individual, elicit the craved response which the blog does not.
Jase now knows how to deal with this phenomenon – he sends out emails of his blog, catching both the personal and impersonal sides to the coin of blogging. And now with the explosion in popularity of syndicated web feeds (RSS and Atom being a couple) and of dedicated feed readers, it will become even easier to keep up with the latest news about everyone.
It was only in his first period away that I lost contact with Jase, and I did realise that I hadn’t contacted him after a while, so I know my friends won’t loose touch with me completely, but still…
I find it interesting, how we as humans continually develop expectations of events in our lives without thoroughly considering the rationality of such a desire. A blog is not really a forum for interaction and yet I expected it to be. My wish for responses from by blog has been pretty well dashed, but I really didn’t think it through did I? Until the world blogs, I shall keep up my emails. I know you guys will respond to them!
Humans really are such strange creatures.
2 comments:
Interesting take on it there - speaking personally, my view of blogging is as follows:
- primarily for me it's a diary. You'll always have memories of events, but it's often helpful to get a tangible record of the minutiae of an event as it is happening or soon after. Though I set it up for personal benefit, I really enjoy the fact that my friends, family, and random strangers read it.
- secondarily, one thing I've always struggled a bit with is travel emails from friends. They're always really long, and encompass weeks of activity, and I've always felt that with emails you should respond. But what gets me is that they're group mailouts, which I feel a bit less inclined to respond to. My rationale was that if I had a way of making regular posts about what I was up to, then anyone who was interested could pop in & read about it, without having to trawl through a massive slab of text-only travelogue.
- my mail subscription idea was based on complaints from friends who couldn't access the site from work and wanted to keep up with what I was up to, and who weren't up with technologies like RSS. My subscription system doesn't actually give me any indication as to how many people are reading the emails that are being sent out, cos I'm sure there's plenty of people who just delete them as soon as they come in, but that's fine too.
- I have a stats system which gives me some idea of who's reading (or at least how many), so were I to not be feeling the love I guess I could look at that. However (happily, I guess) I've had times where I've either not blogged in a while, or the site's been offline, and have had email complaints from my regular readership demanding to know where their favourite procrastination source has gone.
- blog commenting is a useful thing I think, because it adds a level of interactivity and allows your readership to be involved should they so choose. However the web is passive by nature and so hence out of 30 story views you might get one comment - that's the way it goes! The great shortfall of it as far as I see it is that it then becomes difficult to carry on a comment-based conversation, as the commentor would need to check back periodically to see if there's been any responses to their comment (although again, with RSS feeds of comment streams this becomes easier to monitor).
- it's also worth considering the sort of posts you're putting up in terms of the sort of response you expect. There's been a few posts I've put up asking for people to contribute (one photo captioning contest springs to mind) which managed to draw out 6 or 7 contributions. Or a post like this one where you're talking about a belief or theory, I think, is more likely to get a response. However in my experience (and therefore, in my opinion only) the lesser-commented posts seem to be the travelogue type posts, where it's just the blogger narrating what they did most recently.
- a blog *can* be a forum for interaction, but as far as I can gather it's an imperfect one, but then that's why we have forum software for that sort of thing. A heavily commented blog is one I read by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/ - it's fascinating, because it has a huge readership, he actively solicits comments from his audience (often finishing a post with the word "Go."), and yet he never seems to respond in the comments - he sometimes refers to comments if he writes a further post on the topic, and quite often there's reference to comments by other commenters, but as it stands Scott doesn't get involved in a conversation with any commenter in particular (unless he's emailing them outside the blog environment, so it probably doesn't really count).
So in any case, to respond to your question of "What is the purpose of a blog?", I think the separation to be made is that a "blog" is a tool or category of web application - the same as a wiki, a CMS, an online shop, etc - and maybe what you need to ascertain is what is the purpose of *your* blog? If you'd like comments, then the best idea is to write posts that incite participation. Scott's blog (above) is clearly designed with starting arguments in mind. My friend Lynn has a blog where she's writing up book reviews (http://linkyloulists.blogspot.com/) and it allows people to respond & contribute if they like, or it's just a neat publishing format. Some blogs are clearly set up to monitor happenings at an event... another thing to remember is that you can always have multiple blogs for multiple purposes - a mate of mine had this one for a while (http://waxingcynical.blogspot.com/) to get out his frustrations or just call people f-wits, without upsetting anyone reading his personal/family blog. As I said, I mainly write for myself, so I'm not too concerned about mixing genres or offending my mum (who I know reads it whenever she gets around to logging on to her PC). Having a clear goal in mind and sticking to it I think helps immensely with making yourself comfortable with blogging and makes it feel less transient, and if you're clear on what you're going to blog about then it will probably make it easier for you to write posts as well.
And also grow your audience - I found that putting my URL in my email signature was a useful way of passively telling people that I had a website. But the more readers, the more chance of commentary!
Finally, I think it shows in your writing if you take the attitude that you're "shouting into the void"... I guess I've always assumed that I'm writing for either my own amusement, or for that of a few close friends, and think that the tone follows accordingly. That could be complete bollocks, of course, but I believe that I can tell when people have written blog posts with a "I'm writing this but I know nobody's really interested in what I think" slant.
By the way, I'm enjoying your writing :)
AND it looks like you're having a more prolific blogging month than me... will have to redress the balance!
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