I am not a very avid reader. I shy away from reading long articles. However, more recently, I have found myself reading blogs. For some reason, the amount of attention I give to a blog entry is not well correlated with the size of the entry. Moreover, blogs are infectious; once I have read the most recent entry, I need to know what the person was thinking some months earlier. Why are blogs so involving?
I have also seen the popularity of blogs increase over the last few years. Amazon has a whole team devoted to analyzing what blogs are succeeding and how much traffic certain blogs are bringing to the website. Until this class, I’d never really questioned why this was happening. Why are blogs attracting so much attention, when they comprise of nothing more than just long pages of text?
Honesty in a blog is perhaps the best answer I could get. True real life accounts and feelings are much more compelling than made-up stories. They have a higher chance of resonating with people who are interested in the topic being discussed. When people write blogs, they don’t just give out information. They start building a sketch of their own individual self and how that self relates to the topic that they are discussing. As you follow more and more articles from that individual, you build a better picture of the kind of person who is writing that blog. Coherence between that person’s beliefs and his writings starts developing. This coherence is hard to get established if people are not honest about what they are writing. The success of blogs lies in the fact that people have been successful at creating aspects of the personalities on the internet. The truthfulness of these personalities creates strong niches which in turn reinforces the honesty. These strong niches are what businesses target to sell their products or services. So in some sense, internet has managed to productize honesty in the form of blogs.
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3 comments:
Hey Gaurav,
I'd agree. It seems like blogs tap into the same appeal as reality shows -- it gives readers an inside (voyeuristic?) view into people's lives, whether professional, political, or personal. And there's quite a range within this world..
On the seedier end (IMHO..), there's the tell-all, reveal-all personal blogs that have a People magazine / soap opera / messy memoir kind of appeal. Then there's the blog that offers the intimate view of an exclusive preserve: the view of someone working at a cool company, on a cool technology, or even, someone working on the frontlines or in the trenches (i.e. customer service, waitstaffing, minimum wage jobs, etc.) Then there are the writerly blogs for both the accomplished as well as frustrated writers out there who suddenly have a easily accessible, free channel to reach audiences. And finally, there are the journalists many of whom use blogs to enhance or extend their reach (take Nicolas Kristof of the NYT's championing the victims in Darfur.)
Anyway, blogs seem to run the spectrum. But as you point out Gaurav, honesty, seems to be the baseline and the draw.
Its intriguing to imagine how Stalin's repression or Mao's Communist Revolution or Cultural Revolution would have played out if the Internet and blogs had been around. Its intriguing too to imagine how the Internet and blogs will influence these countries and others in the future... :)
My two cents...
Great point Lisa. Level of openness in a society is one of the many characteristics of a culture. Given that blogs directly deal with this aspect, it would be interesting to know how the different cultures evolve over time just because of blogs.
I would like to take this point a little bit further though. A society within itself is divided into classes: educated and non-educated, tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy. Arguably, blogs widen this gap because people who are tech-savvy get more involved within themselves because of this. Just an observation... not sure what implications it'll have for a country like India, where this divide is already huge.
Great point in turn Gaurav!
A quick peek at Technorati's top 100 blogs, shows that of the top ten blogs, more than HALF are tech-centric. So what's popular on the Internet and on blogs, even after all these years, is still very muched skewed -- and hardly representative of our broader society and culture.
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