I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Internet self performance, Queries, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.