alterity

April 9, 2005

Adam Reed: "My blog is me"

Reed, A. (forthcoming). 'My blog is me': texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology). Ethnos.

Meta-notes:

Reed is an anthropologist studying British "journal bloggers" who participate in a directory of British bloggers. He has studied them extensively and has one of the best understandings of blogging that i've seen. His essay reveals many of the complicated issues in blogging, including "my blog is me" / "I am not my blog" and how celebrity culture plays into blogging.

Notes:

Reed is inspired by the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell who offers a way for substituting objects for people so that the analysis can look like anthropology and be useful for anthropologists. His work is focused on art-objects and he offers for kinds of "subjects" that the analyst can use: 'index' (the object itself), 'artist', 'recipient', and 'prototype.' "Gell is interested in the way artefacts can organise sets of relations and gain significance as a consequence of the agency assigned to them" (2).

Reed argues that an anthropological analysis of texts (including blogging) should begin with Gell's premise. "As Gell argues with art-objects, I suggest that one might best start by considering the ways in which texts appear to extend the agency of persons" (2). Reed argues, along the lines of Annelise Riles, that blogging is a culture explicitly "centered on substituting texts for persons" (3). They are concerned with the relations amongst bloggers.

The blogs that Reed encounters are of the typical "journal" style, centered around narratives of the authors' life. "Those webloggers I eventually met treated their texts as straightforward indexes of self. Unlike novelists, who, I was told, only let bits of themselves appear in their stories, journal bloggers put themselves forward unreservedly. For them, there is no issue of representation; they commonly assert that 'my blog is me'" (3). The constant updating is part of what gives blogging life; everything is meant to be a work in progress. Blogs are meant to be 'of the moment'. Blogging is not an act of composition, but a brain dump of what the bloggers is thinking right now (3).

The process is cathartic because you can get out what you are thinking at the moment. You can let it go, release it from your brain, rant and vent (4-5). All of the energy spent releasing negativity helps the blogger cope with the everyday by exorcising the negative aspects of the day.

There is a tension between "my blog is me" and "I am not my weblog" which explicitly references the fact that the blog does not represent the individual in entirety (5).

Journal bloggers know that people are reading what they write; this motivates them to keep writing. Reed prefers to use the term 'recipient' (from Gell) rather than 'reader' because bloggers have problems with this concept because it's different than being 'read.' Bloggers that he speaks with talk about 'visitors' instead of 'readers' (6). Visitors have easy access, don't have to pay, can leave notes and otherwise move about cyberspace.

"Just like a private diary, a weblog is composed so a subject can view himself or herself in mediated form, exteriorised as text. Although it is known that other people visit the site, the blogger insists that he or she is the main recipient; the popular refrain among journal bloggers is 'I blog for me'" (6). A lot of what bloggers talk about is looking back and remembering. Reading backwards is a process of getting access to historical feelings. That said, no blogger wants to be the only visitor to their blog. "Repeatedly, journal bloggers told me that part of the pleasure of weblogging lay in the sensation of exposing oneself, through the text, to people one doesn't know (letting them 'gawp' at your life)" (7).

"Knowing that anonymous people were visiting the weblog made the act of posting entries seem more significant; journal bloggers felt they had licence to express themselves fully to others, but without the fear of being judged or the risk of damaging personal relations. However, most journal bloggers soon learn that strangers are not the only visitors to the text. At some point, they discover that some of their recipients are people they know—family, work colleagues and friends" (7). It's fine when friends at a distance read it - it's a way of keeping in touch... but when people you know and see regularly access it, it often obstructs self-expression. When one of Reed's subject's boyfriend found it, he needed to go back and edit to protect himself; his posting rules also changed. Many of his subjects talk about self-censoring. Journal bloggers often complain about how this changes the initial purpose of blogging for self.

Developments in blogging like having directories and posting about blogging have made it more of a community but also changed the tenor of posting. With commenting, there ended up being a network of 'me' instead of a single narrative (9). Bloggers are concerned about the self-referential turn in blogging.

There are a handful of famous bloggers ("A-list") who appear on most others' blogs in the form of posts, links, blog rolls. "The extent of their fame (these persons/texts seem to be indexed everywhere) can be a source of envy and irritation, but also of admiration" (10). Many want to have their name appear in the same way, to make themselves the focus of others. One concern about celebrity culture is that it makes people focus on how they might attract more recipients. People post frequently to appear on the recently updated list, to try to attract attention. While people talk about blogging for themselves, they pay a lot of attention to hit counts. The "A-List" complain about the celebrity culture, citing that their fame is unsolicited and not always welcome; they talk about feeling coerced by the attention and of feeling too much pressure (11).

This has been complicated by the fact that many of these bloggers meet offline. One of the problems with the offline meeting is that people have these odd mediated relationships ahead of time. "It wasn’t that we didn’t know each other, it was that we did" (11). The blogmeets strengthen the relationships and motivation to keep blogging. "For them, these offline gatherings demonstrate that texts can improve the relations between persons, but also that persons can improve the relations between texts... Even more than before, reading the digital text feels like visiting a person you know" (12).

Category: blogging

Posted by zephoria at April 9, 2005 6:56 PM

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