TMT 1013 Assignment - Pening

The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs

Research on Blogs

The growing body of research on blogs suggests that a hallmark feature of typical blogs is content analogous to traditional diaries. For example, Herring et al. (2004, 2005) examined a random sample of blogs and classified more than 70% as personal journals, in which users posted content generally about their day-to-day lives, often focusing on personal thoughts and feelings. The authors generated their sample by using the random blog selection tool at blo.gs (http://blo.gs), a comprehensive tracking service that updated its index of blogs on an hourly basis and tracked blogs from a variety of popular hosting sites, including blogger.com and weblogs.com. (The random blog selection feature of blo.gs is no longer available.)

Schiano et al. (2004) conducted an ethnographic study of bloggers to explore the use of this technology for personal expression and communication. Their findings suggest that users were aware of their intended audience and expected feedback from their audience through multiple communication channels, including face-to-face (F2F) and via comments on their blog entries. Here a deviation from the traditional concept of a diary—private, secure content—is apparent, in that bloggers capitalize on the interactive nature of the Internet, as evidenced by the expectation of feedback. The affordances of a hypertext medium are incorporated and leveraged to disseminate traditionally personal, private information.

Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht (2004) questioned why people are driven to post content traditionally limited to personal diaries or journals and found evidence supporting an intention to maintain close relationships. In that study, respondents indicated that their audiences were limited to close friends and family and that their conversations were maintained through a variety of communication channels, including instant messaging (IM), email, phone, and F2F. In social network terms, these relationships can be described as strong ties, characterized by social and emotional closeness (Granovetter, 1973, 1982). However, the accuracy of bloggers' perceptions about their audience is questionable, due to the openly accessible nature of blogs—blogs may be read by Internet users other than those the bloggers had in mind (Viégas, 2005).

Use of a variety of communication channels with friends and family is expected, given that communication with strong ties tends to be multimodal (Haythornwaite, 2002). There is also evidence that bloggers tend to present themselves accurately and realistically in their blogs, and they may include personal information about their sexual identity and intimate romantic relationships (Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Lenhart & Fox, 2006).

The results outlined above suggest congruency between content and intended audience, in as much as personal, intimate information about a person is most relevant and interesting to people who know that person, such as his or her close friends and family. One would expect intimate content to be shared in strong tie networks, because people linked by strong ties have a shared history and a partially-shared awareness. Thus, bloggers' strong ties are ideal candidates for highly personal content, although it is surprising that bloggers choose to disclose traditionally private information in a public fashion.

Personality Traits

While content and audience characteristics are important, the antecedent conditions such as individual characteristics that influence the likelihood of engaging in diary-type blogging behavior remain unclear. One of the most widely studied dimensions along which people vary systematically is personality, which can be defined as "the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment" (Allport, 1937, p. 48). The classic dispositional approach to personality involves categorizing people according to the degree to which they demonstrate specific traits. Traits, as opposed to state-based variables, refer to dimensions of thinking, behaving, or feeling that people consistently display across different situations and over time (Ajzen, 1988).

Specifically, bloggers with larger strong tie networks should have multi-modal communication with friends and family, consistent with findings presented by Nardi et al. (2004). These bloggers should hear from their friends and family via F2F interaction and comments posted to their blog about the content available on their blog. This interaction is conceptualized here as a "relationship maintenance" function of blogs.

Previous blog research suggests that the majority of blogs can be conceptualized as extensions of existing phenomena; the personal diary is the offline counterpart to the blog (Herring et al., 2004, 2005). However, blogs afford additional communication opportunities. Due to the intimate nature of blog content, the audience is likely to be a part of bloggers' strong tie networks (Nardi et al., 2004). By the same token, as a channel to maintain strong tie links, blogs likely contain content that allows readers to relate to the authors. Therefore, for the purpose of maintaining relationships via blogs, people face strategic choices in terms of how much of their identity to reveal. If content is completely anonymous and does not relate directly to the author, the blog will not serve to enhance relationships. However, most blog content is publicly available, and revealing identifying information is likely to increase the risk of sacrificing privacy.

See the text up there? We are required to translate it from English to Bahasa Malaysia.

Lol this assignment is nonsense

But anyway is 10% marks, so have to Ganbatte

Zzz..