Addressing the unseen the audience envisioned for adolescent diary weblogs

Addressing the Unseen: The Audience Envisioned for Adolescent Diary Weblogs Lois Ann Scheidt School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) Indiana University USA

What is a blog?
A weblog is a frequently modified website that allows updating with items that are grouped primarily by the time and/or date of posting. Entries usually appear in reverse chronological order. Contents of the weblog may be available publicly or through restricted access. Weblogs may also utilize special software designed for this implementation.

What makes a weblog a diary blog 1 ?
Usually has a single author (Fothergill, 1974).
Usually written in first person (Mcneill, 2003).
Tell an episodic story (Walker, 2003) that may be fragmentary (Hogan, 1991) and is always in process (Culley, 1985).
Open-ended and terminates when writer ceases to make entries (Bunkers, 2001).
1 Also referred to as personal journal blogs (Blood, 2002).

How do diary blogs differ from their paper-based antecedents?
Two time-worn assumptions related to paper diaries fall by the wayside when looking at diary weblogs:
That the diaries are kept only for personal consumption.
That diary keeping is a private and secret effort. (Bunkers, 2001)

How do you define adolescence?
Adolescence is defined as the second decade of life – ages 10-19 (Steinberg, 2002).

Adolescent diary blogs
Two studies by the SLIS BROG project have found that adolescent bloggers account for:
34.3% (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004) and
39.0% (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, & Wright, 2005).
Orlowski (2003) goes further, asserting that a majority of bloggers are teenage girls.

Embedded Audience
Formal audience
Is constructed by discursive practices
Is embedded into the narrative through the author’s choices during production (Anderson, 1996, p. 78).

Langellier’s Audiences for Personal Narrative Performance (1998)
As a witness testifying to the experience.
As a therapist unconditionally supporting emotions.
As a cultural theorist assessing the contestation of meanings, values, and identities in the performance.
As a narrative analyst examining genre, truth or strategy.
A critic appraising the display of performance knowledge and skill.

As a witness testifying to the experience Available: http://16crayons.blogspot.com/

As a therapist unconditionally supporting emotions Available: http:// anonymuse.blogspot.com /

As a cultural theorist assessing the contestation of meanings, values, and identities in the performance Available: http:// coquet.blogspot.com /

As a narrative analyst examining genre, truth or strategy Available: http://home.nc.rr.com/benlaz/

A critic appraising the display of performance knowledge and skill Available: http:// www.arador.org /

Methodology
Content Analysis and Ethnographic Methods
Opportunity sample (N=12)
EatonWeb Portal ( http://portal. eatonweb .com )
Originally a hand coded list of all the weblogs available online (Rhodes, 2002).
Now a JavaScript file that aggregates self-submission and keywording (Rhodes, 2002).
All original text entries on the first page of the blog were coded.

Demographics
Blogger’s sex: 6 each females & males
Ave entries per page = 8.5, range = 4, 21.
Female ave 6.8 ,range 5, 14
Male ave 10.2, range 4, 21. Removing the outlier ave = 8, range 4, 14.
Ave age = 16.9 years, range = 13 – 19.

Country of origin

Posts by Author Sex Posts = 102 of which 89 could be fully coded

Entries by audience type

Audience Type by Sex of Author

Number of categories represented within the blogs

Observations on co-occurrence of audience categories
10 of the 12 have witness posts (83.3% of the blogs).
The 2 that don't have witness posts have the same 3 categories (therapist, cultural theorist, narrative analyst)
3 of the 4 with two categories have the same 2 categories (witness and cultural theorist)
All 3 with a single category are witness only.

Conclusion - Females
Females show a tendency toward:
bifurcated audience focus,
internal in requesting support.
external via cultural assessment.

Conclusions - Males
Males show a tendency toward:
external focus through narrative analysis.
sharing their world by asking us to witness the event and comment on their personal performance.

Future Research
Apply the methodology to a larger dataset.
Establish who the bloggers believe they are writing to through interviews and surveys.

Contact Information for Lois Ann Scheidt
Email: [email_address]
Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.professional-lurker.com
BROG Weblog: http://www.blogninja.com

Addressing the unseen the audience envisioned for adolescent diary weblogs

by Lois Scheidt on May 05, 2010

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