Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Reaction to Kendall

The article by Lori Kendall titled “Shout into the wind, and it shouts back,” talks about Kendall’s two year participant observation research. Kendall became a member of LiveJournal and began to post entries while keeping up with other people’s LiveJournals. She then gathered a group of people who were once or still was an active member of LiveJournal. Kendall’s interviewees were between their 20’s and 30’s, while the majority of LiveJournal members are usually in their teens.

An interesting topic she interviewed people about was how these people use LiveJournal or what they use it for. There were some interviewees that firmly believed that you should not post every little detail of your daily life because it is simply too ‘boring’ for the readers, or that they should create “cut tags,” which enables the user to create a hyperlink to the part of their entry that is too long, or unnecessary for the readers to read about. Then there were those who believed that LiveJournal was just like their diary they would write on paper by hand, and that it should not conflict with the fact that there is in fact an audience who is reading about your daily events.

All the different feelings towards blogging for the public and for your own privacy make sense if you look at it from one point of view, or another. To me, I think you have the freedom to write about anything you want, especially on your personal blog. Blogs can be used in many different ways. Some blogs are used to inform others about certain topics, news, information, such as the NY Mets blog, which I have been observing for the past week. Other blogs can solely be for one’s personal use, as in someone’s diary where he/she records thoughts and events from the individual’s day to day life. The whole issue of minimal filtering from Barlow’s Blogging America can be brought up again. It relates to this issue of whether or not bloggers should think about what they’re writing before they actually post it up for the public to read. If the blog is supposed to be informative then yes, I agree that there should be somewhat of a filtering and the author should think twice about what they are writing. However, personal blogs should not have any sort of “conduct” or limit someone from writing what the want.

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