The Psychology of the Blog: Public or Private?
A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006a) report concludes thatthe most popular topic among bloggers is “me.” Speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity all provide the base for blogging. Yet the blur between private (“me”) andpublic (everyone who is—hopefully—reading about me and writing to me and linking to me) are truly the most interesting psychological features of blogging. Millerand Shepherd (2004) point out that blogs invite “the peculiar intersection of thepublic and private,” in a way that can often be contradictory (par. 1). According tothe authors, the genre of blogs appeared in “the cultural moment . . . that has shiftedthe boundary between the public and the private and the relationship between mediated and unmediated experience” (par. 16). Badger (2004) makes the same point,stressing that although “the first person narrative [of Weblogs] . . . can make usfeel that we are partaking in a one-on-one exchange” (par. 5), blogging also promotes a high level of self-exposure to the audience often large and largely unknownto the author. The cornerstones of Internet communication—speed, reach, anonymity,and interactivity—promote and facilitate such a dichotomous character of blogs. Miller and Shepherd observe that on Weblogs “people are sharing unprecedentedamounts of personal information with total strangers, potentially millions of them,”concluding that “the technology of the internet makes it easier than ever for anyoneto be either a voyeur or an exhibitionist—or both” (par. 16).
The character of blogs as simultaneously private and public enables the formationof both individual and group identities. Through extensive narratives and oftenhighly personal descriptions of day-to-day activities, and through the use of images,a blogger reveals and creates—intentionally or not—his or her unique online identity. Through the use of blogroll, links, and comment features, and through development of communal norms (see Wei, 2004), the blogger reveals and creates his or hergroup identity. In the same manner, a specific blog community often emerges. For example, The Julie/Julia blog, which was one of the most popular blogs with morethan 7,000 hits per day, depicted both the daily activities of the author, Julie Powell,and experiences of the Julie/Julia blog readership, enabling thus formation of a blog community (see Blanchard, 2004).
Being at the same time private and public, individual and collective, Weblogs invoke the notion of a contradictory genre and activity, with “you,” “me” and everyonein between being brought into a single, semiprivate or semipublic space and experi-ence. However, this notion of contradiction can be understood as stemming from ten-dency to perceive blogs as objects rather than events. When perceived as writtenobjects, Weblogs do give the impression of ambiguity. Who is the author of this writ-ten object, one might ask. Is it the blogger, the audience, or both? Why would a per-son want to create a private written object, day after day, and then offer it for publicscrutiny? Finally, why would the audience want to scrutinize, day after day, a privatewritten object of an unknown person? Seen in this way, blogs invoke, almost automatically, the ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism. When observed as communicative events, though, Weblogs give a different impression.
To understand more fully this feature of blogs as communicative events, let us recallthat blogs are commonly interpreted as online diaries. Regardless of its content, a blog is always a record, a (reverse) chronological trace of one’s activities, experiences,and/or thoughts. Blogs, therefore, enable temporal structuring of a person’s activities,experiences, and/or thoughts, which is the function of traditional diaries. As Harris(1995) pointed out, “The diary is not just an adventitious by-product of writing, but ahighly significant application of it,” the one that “produces evidence that is not memory-dependent” (p. 43). Diaries, thus, enable integration of one’s past and presentexperiences, which is the need deeply rooted in human psychology. Weblogs havethe same role. Even when the blogger’s online identity is fake—as in the case of aKansas housewife posting as a fictional cancer patient Kaycee Nicole, and/or in thecase of a Serbian blogger posting as the ex and late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic—the blog integrates a person’s (fictional or real) experiences in a chronological narrative. That is what blogging is about. Unlike personal Web presentations,structured around “the essence of me,” blogs are structured around “the process ofme.” Unlike chatting, pointed toward “hear me out at this moment,” blogging ispointed toward “hear me out throughout time.” Blogging, thus, is a twofold communicative event. On one hand, it is the event of “writing oneself” through continuous recording of past and present experiences, just as in the case of traditional diaries.Harris also notes that “the diary [as event] tends to be overlooked by theorists who assume that communication is essentially a process of linking two or more individuals. Indeed,” as Harris concludes, “the notion of a single individual being both a sender and receiver of the same message is sometimes regarded as problematic or paradoxical” (p. 38). On the other hand, blogging is the event of “rewriting oneself”through interaction with the audience. Unlike writing a traditional diary, blogging isa process of linking two or more individuals.
This is why blogs are both private and public. This is why blogs cannot be either private or public. And this is why blogs are online diaries, that is, both a technology and a genre of computer-mediated communication. Just as other social phenomena that have gone digital, the phenomenon of writing oneself through chronological narratives incorporates both an old human need—the need for temporal structuring andintegrating of past and present experiences—and a new way of doing that—relying onspeed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity of Internet communication. “The fact is that once again, as in the past, the introduction of new technologies has extended theboundaries of writing. What lags behind is our conceptualization of the change”(Harris, 1995, p. 41).
