An Inside Outsider’s Take on Blogging

Thanks to a serendipitous meeting with an old college friend after five years, in early January I was introduced to an activity called “blogging.”

Since my vocabulary is fairly comprehensive, when I first heard the word, I thought maybe the speaker meant something else and I would simply write it off as a mis-stated word, or some kind of freak verbal incident. But then the word appeared again, and again, and again. It was time to ask.

Was blogging another one of those obscure activities beyond the reach of an insular elitist? No. Blogging is short for Web logging -- an emerging style of personal diary entry published on the Web. Basically, a blog is a personal journal, but public. Sort of. It is public in the sense that it’s available for viewing on the Web. But many “bloggers,” as they are called, decline to tell many of their friends that they even publish these ruminations. These blogs are public to a quasi-anonymous audience but private to some of the people these bloggers actually know best in real life.

This occurred to me as odd. I have a Web site. My friends know about it. My friends are constantly pestered to view the site so I can see a rise in the number of hits. Any views by visitors I don't know are essentially unintended.

This means that the words on my Web site are carefully selected and neatly packaged. I won’t publish something for public view unless it is consistent with the image I want to present. But blogs frequently are the opposite: anything and everything goes. It’s precisely not about careful presentation—it’s about airing whatever thoughts occur to the blogger on that particular day, serious or frivolous, or both, simultaneously.

More interestingly, and perhaps what makes blogging tick, is that readers have the chance to respond to the primary author’s comments. The primary author’s ruminations appear on the top level page, but the reader can click to read responses and enter into a discussion in bulletin board format.

For this reason, after some thought, it occurred to me that blogging isn’t as foreign as it first seemed. After all, I have been participating in Internet newsgroups since, oh, 1991 or so. I also started and directed an Internet company’s online newsgroup community system, in which topic-specific forums were created so customers could build relationships around areas of common interests, such as food or business.

But there’s a key distinction between an online newsgroup and an online blog. Newsgroup content springs collectively from a number of disparate authors; no one member runs the show. Of course you will always have unusually vocal or prolific contributors, but their dominance is simply a function of their efforts, not of the fundamental structure of the community. Blogging is different. There is one primary author, period. Readers’ comments are unconditionally subsidiary to the primary author’s blogging entries. The primary author grasps almost, if not quite all, of the mindshare.

Incentives

Having been brainwashed by law and economics scholars over the last two years, my first reaction is always to look at the incentive dynamics created by any phenomenon. It turns out that blogging sets up an incentive I find somewhat problematic—or at minimum, makes it something I would not want to do.

Because blogging grants the primary author unconditional power to set an agenda, and permits unfettered written performance, in the case of personal journal-type entries, blogging sets up an incentive to create and overanalyze issues.

For someone who is already excessively analytical, blogging would make a bad situation much worse. If you’re in the routine of publishing introspective comments every day, and know that your audience is looking for and expecting such commentary, run-of-the-mill daily affairs magically become major hubs of analysis. A dinner precipitates three paragraphs.

To be sure, analysis is useful, and important. But in our daily interpersonal interactions, the need for analysis is balanced by checks in the system. Not every phone call can last two hours. People are busy. With every conversation, participants gauge how much time exists for discussion, and make editorial decisions about what needs to be said, when.

No such checks exist in the world of blogging. A blog invites unfettered commentary without interruption. Nobody is there to say they have to go now—and if anything, verbose ruminations are encouraged.

I believe these ruminations ultimately do the primary author a dis-service. I’m all for analysis. But sometimes it’s good to stop and let the world go by. I would argue that a number of bloggers get so caught up in the very practice of blogging that they prevent themselves from enjoying any one day too much. This is a controversial argument. Loyal bloggers insist that their ruminations help them sort out issues. I would never seek to convince them otherwise, but I often wonder how paths would change if a compulsive blogger simply took a vacation for awhile.

Disclosure

In addition to brainwashing by law and economics scholars, I have also experienced thorough immersion in securities law—which is, of course, all about disclosure. Not surprisingly, then, the other issue I spotted right away with blogging is the consequences of unfettered disclosure.

I am a professional spin doctor. With any piece of information, I am always thinking about who should know what, when and why. Information is positioned differently for different people. Some people know some things others don’t. This isn’t manipulation; this is reality. We all have different dynamics with different people, and information should be customized for particular audiences. The way I describe to one friend what happened over a weekend will be different than the way I describe it to another friend.

As I mentioned above, blogging is more or less directed toward a quasi-anonymous audience, or individual communities of other bloggers. But when these online and offline relationships coincide, the fragile dynamic of information flow is abruptly disturbed.

What happens when bloggers do things with people in real life, especially those who don’t blog but nonetheless know the blog exists? What happens is that the outsider starts reading about him or herself on a Web site. Social engagements become akin to those anxious meetings with journalists—you’re never sure what exactly will be on or off the record.

In my view, in the context of most private social interactions, people don’t want to feel like they are being written about later. It makes them feel as if they are on a TV show. In any social relationship, while there is certainly no need for a confidentiality agreement, I think communication is encouraged by the knowledge that the events of the day will not be later packaged as a “performance.” In short, blogging twists this information flow dynamic, and when disclosure occurs, things become weird.

Neither of these arguments is to suggest any personal flaws in individual bloggers themselves. The bloggers I know are not only worthy of trust that they make good decisions for themselves, but are also among the smartest people I know. And, as always, there are exceptions--some individual blogs are quite engaging. I have attempted to locate two theoretical problems, not problems with bloggers as people.

That said, blogging has been hailed by some journalists and academics as the next great democratic wave of commentary, and I think this celebration is unjustified. There are real tensions between personal blogging entries and the natural conditions of social interaction. The stage of the personal blogger may not be quite as unencumbered as it may seem, at least not without a substantial social cost.