Blog networking study: presenting oneself through blogging… [link to post] – Posted using Chat Catcher

As for Nancy: she doesn’t use her other Twitter account. She has a more private (content-wise) travel blog, but hardly writes there. I also had an opportunity to ask her about her reactions to discovering how others position her blog (re: Jason’s comment), she said it didn’t have any effect on her writing (well, it was something like “I just ignore it” – have to check the audio).

That’s one of the reasons why I really do not feel like talking about blogging in terms of performance – it assumes too much intentionality…

Now to the specific things:

On unanticipated audience reactions and how they shape the performance of blogging. One of the reasons that I’m a bit concerned about bringing performance/identity management as a frame in this case is that I see blogging as both identity exploration and performance. Also, in a sense, all audience reactions in a case of blogging are somewhat unanticipated and they do shape what happens next. (Just remembered an old blog post on networked identity).

Don’t know for sure in Nancy’s case, will see if I can catch her to ask :)

On personal issues on the weblog. I guess I should extend this part to say a bit more. From what I can see most of the reasons of bringing “personal” issues come from the belief in the importance of personal side at work and partly from learning over time that those things are normal, not scary and might be beneficial in a case of blogging (btw, those things were more explicit in the Microsoft study). A couple of participants have more personal weblogs, but those far from the diary-style personal blogging. As for the SNSes – still have to post the part on making choices between tools, there is a bit there.

But in general, I think both of you touch the issue that I should make more explicit – there seem to be some degree of agreement that getting to know another blogger happens as much “between the lines” as in the text itself, which has implications on how much one can actually “perform” and also on how “personal” a weblog is.

I would love to see you expand a bit on how the audience helps guide that identity; you mention how Nancy’s audience has placed her in a role (as Goffman might say) that she’s not entirely comfortable with. Is this a common occurrence? To what extent do these unanticipated audience reactions alter the performance of blogging?

You do a good job of looking at how bloggers may filter their identities less in blogging than in other types of discourse; as you suggest, I would bring out Goffman’s concept of ‘backstage’ here: by revealing ideas that aren’t yet fully structured, the blogger is letting the reader into a privileged area. Goffman’s ‘masks’ might be good to bring up as well.

I’ve been busy working on my rss tagcloud project (your post on using word clouds to compare two texts helped launch that one–thanks), so this is the first of this series that I’ve read; I’m looking forward to going back and checking out the other ones.