The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

Users and uses of private blogs 45
many bloggers write first and foremost with a local audience of friends and family
in mind. Gumbrecht observes that bloggers “selectively filter their audience
by tailoring their posts to them” (2004, p. 2) and cites several examples in
which bloggers refer to events in a deliberately vague fashion, in order to assure
that their friends will understand the message via their contextual knowledge
while outsiders will not. This narrowing of audience scope as a consciously
employed strategy is a significant indicator of audience design on the part of
the blogger. The tendency of ego bloggers to communicate with a small and
sometimes clearly defined readership that excludes strangers shows that blogs
are not generally conceptualized similarly to organizationally-mandated broadcast
media such as television, radio or newspapers, which address the general
public. While there is clearly an understanding of the openness and accessibility
of blogs, the (very plausible) reasoning appears to be that blogs as a pull-type
STF must be consciously sought out – they cannot be found by accident 13 –
and that therefore there must be some relationship between the blogger and his
audience.
In particular, being able to relate social information regarding their whereabouts,
activities and state (physical and emotional) was frequently mentioned
by bloggers as a significant advantage of their blog:
As a format of frequent postings in reverse chronological order, blogs
were a natural for use as travelogues and schedules to inform an
audience of the authors’ whereabouts—where they’d been, where
they were, and where they were going. Many in our study posted
pictures from trips and family outings. They would also report on
where they were headed, especially if they knew family and friends
living in that area, in order to get together with them. In this way,
blogs facilitated in-person social connections. (Nardi et al., 2004b,
p. 226)
The advantage over other channels such as email was perceived by bloggers
to be the openness and unobtrusive nature of the medium. Whereas email as a
push-type STF places pressure on the recipient to at least acknowledge or even
react to a message personally addressed to him, no such pressure exists with a
blog (variable, opaque and passive participation). The act of sending an email
message and its reading by the recipient can be compared to an adjacency pair
in spoken discourse, such as the exchange of greetings or reacting to an offer by
accepting or refusing it. Social pressure to react in a certain, predefined way is
associated with these adjacency pairs and failure to react can be interpreted as
deliberate snubbing or carelessness, even when other interpretations are possible
(e.g. the recipient temporarily has no access to email etc). The communicator
is often keenly aware of the pressure he exerts and may not always intend it.
With these considerations in mind, the popularity of email in administrative,
academic and business contexts is plausible: in areas where the sender intends
to place interactional pressure on the recipient, email is ideally suited, whereas
it is not where the sender merely wants to “offer” information to an audience.
Two parameters influence this choice, firstly the basic 1-to-N design of blogs
13 Despite the accessibility of blogs via search, finding a random blog is in fact reasonably
difficult, since lists, selections, search engines etc all appear somewhat biased by popularity
or exposure of the blog. Blogger.com’s next blog button is one of the few exceptions.