Endings
Here’s my script for the presentation I will be giving at this year’s Computers and Writing conference in Davis, CA. I’ll attach a slide show with audio to this sooner than later. The “*” are basically my reminders for different slides.
Endings: Case Study Responses From Ex-Bloggers, Part of the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” Project
*My presentation today is part of a larger, ongoing project called *“Blogs as Writerly Spaces.” I’d like to say that this project is forthcoming as a book, but to be honest, I’m not sure if that is going to happen or even if a book is the ideal form to present this research. In the mean-time, I’ve created a blog/web site to host the work I have done so far, including this presentation, a couple of other presentations I have given related to this project, and some of the survey data I have collected.
*In the nutshell, “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” examines how blogs function as virtual spaces that encourage writing, publishing, reading, and interacting among writers and readers. *So far, I am imagining sections on the technology of blogging (I gave a presentation on this at C&W last year); rhetorical situation and blogging (more or less my topic at C&W in Detroit); identity; community; teaching; and, my topic today, endings.
My research has been based on my own experiences blogging, my reading of other research and literature about blogging, and a survey I conducted from January 2008 to May 2009. *In this survey, I extended an invitation to participate in an email case study interview on blogging. *Around 20 people agreed to participate in that aspect of the study, which is still on-going (albeit on-going rather slowly).
*Now, there have been many surprises along the way with my survey and research on this project, but perhaps nothing has been more surprising, perplexing, and downright frustrating than my efforts at getting to the question of why it is that people stop blogging. And the data out there suggests that the vast majority of bloggers do indeed give up. *In their 2008 “state of the blogosphere” report, Technorati.com said that of the 133 million blogs that site has indexed since 2002, only 7.4 million of them had a new post in the last 120 days. In other words, just over 5% of the blogs that Technorati began tracking in 2002 were still active six years later when they conducted this study.
Granted, it’s impossible to prove definitively why anyone does not do something, and when it comes to blogging, it’s probably true the reasons most people quit blogging are mundane*— boredom, nothing to say, they never really intended to blog much in the first place, etc. But given the sheer number of former bloggers, it seemed worthwhile to me to try to attempt a more sophisticated answer to the question of why people stopped blogging, and I assumed it wouldn’t be that difficult to find some former bloggers willing to participate in my anonymous survey and email case study interviews.
Wow, was I wrong about that. I contacted dozens of people who had what appeared to me to have abandoned blogs, encouraging them to participate in my study. *Of the 102 people who took my survey, only four said they had ended blogging, and of these four, at least one appears to have filled that portion of the survey out by mistake.
Frustrated, I decided to take a different tact on my research methodology. Instead of my quasi-random approach, I contacted directly people I knew— fellow academic-types— who had ended blogging. Even with this direct appeal, getting data was problematic. I approached one colleague who I know had not updated their blog in about a year, and when I asked this person if they would be interested in participating in my case study, they were surprised and somewhat indignant; they asked “what makes you think I’ve given up keeping a blog?” After an academic I vaguely knew announced that they were giving up blogging, I invited them to participate in my study. In response, this person wrote back “Ordinarily I would say yes, Steve. But this particular case I have to keep mum.”
*So, if there’s one thing I can say about bloggers who stop blogging based on my own research it is that, generally speaking, these people don’t want to talk about it. I mean really REALLY don’t want to talk about it.
*In any event, I present all of this prelude to make it clear that I am well-aware of the fact that what *I am about to tell you as to why people end blogging needs to be viewed cautiously and skeptically.
*Having said that, I was able to find four volunteers willing to participate in an email case study interview, and I do think these interviews, still in progress, have yielded some interesting results, especially in relation to the rest of my survey and other surveys and studies of blogging practices.
*Let me tell you a little about the case study subjects who participated in this part of my project:
* “Tom” is a faculty member at a large midwestern tier 1 research university who teaches and does research about the connections between computers and writing. He briefly kept a blog about collecting and brainstorming ideas having to do with information technology, and while that is the subject of our email interviews, he currently keeps a different blog which I’ll touch on in a moment.
* “Kate” is a faculty member at a regional university in the southeast who teaches in an English department and a Women’s studies program. She describes her mostly ended blog as a space to “keep in touch,” to talk about the region she moved to and to talk about running.
* “Jan” is a faculty member at a large state university in the west who formerly worked and taught at a midwestern university and who teaches composition and rhetoric. While she also briefly kept a blog about her academic work, she co-wrote a blog with:
* “Jill,” who is Jan’s sister and who describes herself as a stay at home mom living on the west coast. Together, they wrote a blog about parenting, living in different parts of the country, and “life in general.”
*All of these folks kept a blog with blogger with minimal or no modifications to the basic template. The length they kept their blogs varied. The blog Tom gave up on had 10 entries spread over 18 months; Jill and Jan’s blog ran many entries for about three years; and, depending on your definition of “ended,” Kate still posts things to her blog every two to four months.
*As I said, this is still a project in progress, but for now, I want to discuss two reasons these bloggers have in common for quitting that I thought were interesting in relation to the rest of my study: the purposes of blogging, *which I see tied to rhetorical situation, *and an acute awareness of identity and audience.
**I’m sure we’re all familiar with this triangle of rhetor, audience, message and how that creates a “rhetorical situation,” *though there is no reason why this couldn’t be some other shape. *Regardless, there is still the matter of an “exigency,” which Lloyd Bitzer defined as “an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be.”
*Bitzer’s theory was that the exigency for a rhetorical situation was always external. This was famously questioned by Richard Vatz who argued that exigency is always internal. And of course, there have been lots of other commentaries and critiques on this and every other aspect of rhetorical situations that I’ll gloss over for now.
Back in 2007, when I gave a presentation discussing the blog EMUTalk.org, which came about as the result of a faculty strike at EMU, *I spoke about what I experienced first hand as an audience-based exigency as a sort of rhetorical feedback loop. The more that I blogged about a topic that a lot of people at EMU wanted to read about, the faculty strike, the higher my blog rose in the Google rankings, the more people came to my blog, and the more I felt compelled and even pressured to write about the faculty strike. And one topic lead to another, which is why EMUTalk.org continues, albeit with fewer hits (this might change since we are about to enter contract negotiations again.)
Bitzer also argues that rhetorical situations most often decay: *“Every rhetorical situation in principle evolves to a propitious moment for the fitting rhetorical response. After this moment, most situations decay; we all have the experience of creating a rhetorical response when it is too late to make it public.”
**It seems to me that in the case of my subjects, there was either a lack of real exigency and audience in the first place, or the rhetorical situation decayed and ended.
**Both Kate and Tom began with what I would describe as somewhat vague and “forced” exigencies for their blogs. Kate said she began blogging to “keep in touch” with old friends and to “write about my running experiences in a new state, motivate myself during a training program by “staying honest” with my readers, and entertain myself/others with observations about my new surroundings.” But ultimately, the technology wasn’t right (she notes that she started her blog before Facebook and her running friends were not blog enthusiasts) and she said *“I don’t need a blog to stay honest in my marathon training; I’m too paranoid about “getting caught” being snarky on my blog to try being “entertaining.”
I’m not sure he would agree with me, but I think Tom’s purposes for starting a blog were *fuzzy at best: “This is my place to collect needful things of a technical nature. You know, those ideas that pop into your head about a cool software feature or a device that you’d like to have.” I think it was this vagueness that accounts for only 10 short entries. In contrast, Tom has since started another blog focused on his training for a marathon and cycling which has well over 150 posts and where he is still actively posting, suggesting to me he found the right exigency and situation.
It’s also clear that Kate and Tom did not experience that exigency feedback loop I mentioned. *Kate was disappointed that there was not “more of a group conversation” on her blog, and when she was contacted by readers, it was usually through a personal email. And in response to my question about a time when he had reaction from his readers, Tom wrote “Uh yeah, no. *Crickets. Always the crickets.”
*Jan and Jill’s blog seems to me to have a clearer exigency and they both mention receiving more feedback and comments, mostly from friends and family. But to me, their experience is an example of a rhetorical situation which naturally decays and ends. Jill describes the blog “as a place to have a “sort-of” conversation about things that made us laugh or cry or were just part of the experience of raising kids or having a job… Just about life in general!” Jan described the blog as being in the “subgenre of ‘moms who write about parenthood.’” *To me, this seems more an example of a specific connection to a kind of rhetorical practice and to a community of bloggers, and as a blog they wrote together and to each other, they also had the advantage of that aspect of community and purpose.
Jan and Jill sustained their blog for three years, though toward the end, the number of posts began to, well, decay, which in itself is a common phenomenon with blogs I’ve observed. Bloggers don’t tend to just stop; rather, the every other day posting habits turn into every other week and then every other month or less, and most often, the subject of the last posts are about the lack of posts in and of themselves.
*Jan said their blog ended because “we became kind of one-note voices,” and also because of some rather interesting audience and identity issues I’ll mention in a moment. *I would guess that another factor was that Jan ended up moving from the Midwest back to the west, which I have to imagine lessened the need for a blog to keep in touch with her sister. Jill also shared some of her sister’s anxieties about identity and potential readers, though she also discussed the need to spend less time online, and, as she mentions rather casually at the end of the blog’s last post that she was pregnant.
Of course, the idea that people give up blogging because they never really had a good reason to blog in the first place or because they felt like they said all they could say on a topic isn’t exactly surprising, and it is just one notch up from an explanation like “because I was bored.” What I did find more interesting is that in response to an interview question about privacy and identity, three out of these four ex-bloggers indicated one of the other reasons they gave up blogging was what *I would call an acute awareness and concern about real or potential readers.
None of these ex-bloggers used any software to track traffic to their sites, and *they all put the estimated number of readers at around 30 or less. *But Kate, Jan, and Jill all cited concern about some very specific potential readers and about how their own identities were being portrayed and perceived. Kate was quite direct when I asked about this: “I mostly quit blogging or feeling comfortable blogging when I realized that *one of my fellow junior colleagues was a total nut and was reading my blog. I didn’t want him sharing his impressions of my blog with other colleagues and I didn’t want other colleagues to visit the site.”
*Jill and Jan’s audience concerns were somewhat more complicated than bad colleagues and/or potential stalkers. *Jill seemed to struggle somewhat with how to portray herself and balance issues of privacy: “We both used a pseudonym but it was a little dicey because all of our friends (the majority of the readers) knew who we were. It sort of gave a false sense of anonymity, which was awkward at times… *it was weird to write with an alias and yet know that the majority of people knew who I was.” Jan responded with something similar: “even though it was pseudononymous, it was really *only semi pseudononymous since some of our friends and family who blog were linked with it. Therefore, while we wanted to use it to talk with each other — and the world — about things like choosing to stay at home as a mom, or balancing work with parental guilt, etc –things we were immersed in at the time –we felt pretty constricted by how our readers would read things.”
In a lot of ways, this is something that I suspect many academic bloggers experience frequently enough, and it was also something *Jan related to me in our email interview discussions. The blog with her sister was actually her second blog; her first was a blog about her teaching and professional life. But that blog “quickly fizzled” because “it was very openly public — ie, people who I worked with every day (colleagues and students) could and might well have read it — I felt as though my so-called writing territory was pretty small: I couldn’t write about particular challenges in my teaching, for example, as I wouldn’t want to hurt/embarrass students. I couldn’t use the blog to think through administrative quandries, because it was all too real to everyone else. In other words: I very much couldn’t vent or wonder or question — because of how public the space was.”
*Let me just wrap up with a few thoughts. First I wouldn’t want to make too many generalizations about why bloggers stop based on these four case study subjects, though I do think these four touch on what strike me as the most likely reasons: *a lack of exigency or purpose, a lack or decay of subject matter, and *a concern about audience. Second, I think the issue of a real or imagined audience is quite striking. Prior to these interviews, it had occurred to me that many people give up blogging or never begin it in the first place because they figured that no one would care about what they wrote. However, it had not occurred to me that many people probably give up blogging or never begin it in the first place because they worried that some group or maybe just someone out there would care about what they wrote too much.