Interactive Online Journals and Individualization

For my supplementary reading this week, I read Interactive Online Journals and Individualization, a study published in the UK.

The research article is about the blog phenomenon. According to the article, there is a change among how users participate in blogs.  Blogs evolved from blogs run by individuals who comment on a variety of topics to a large, dispersed audience to blogs that are more like personal online journals targeted to small audiences. Part of the appeal may be due to the combination of interactivity (such as posting comments) with the idea of having your own page.

So the article investigates what this trend means for the relationship between individuals and groups on the Internet. The basic hypothesis is that having your own blog  promotes a more individualistic interaction. The individualization idea is explained as that people no longer define their identity collectively by their community. In stead consumer culture and advertising feeds people a fake sense of belonging to something. The result is this detached, insecure, floating individual.

Prior research already explored how the Internet can contribute to this phenomenon by letting people be anonymous and act out different roles and personas on the Internet. The article compares blogs to online group forums. Such forums actually do the opposite by creating these online communities and really bringing people together. Participants of these forums can define themselves as part of the forum community. They also talked about Peer to Peer file sharing softwares where people have to prove their commitment to the community before participating.

The article basically wanted to see if personal online blogs have the opposite effect of alienation from community and a focus on the individual. To test this, it looked at the LiveJournal blogging platform and the UK Goth youth subculture. This group used forums and groups in the 1990’s to establish a strong sense of belonging and close connections among members. A few years later, their online participation switched to mostly online journals on LiveJournal.

The author of article opened his own blog on LiveJournal and began to interact with the Goth youth users by following their blogs, posting comments and eventually observing more than 50 journals. He did not hide his research intentions and he also conducted a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews with volunteers responding to a request on his blog. There was a topic sheet but it was relatively-free form.

What he found was that individuality did appear more important (there were LiveJournal communities  similar to forums but they were used sparingly) because people treated each other as guests and visitors, respecting individual space, instead of equal members of a community. It was shown that individuals restricted their behavior when conversing in the space of others (like not commenting disagreement or criticism). The individual also has a greater degree of control on their own journal by customizing the appearance and restricting who can access the blog. People were able customize the content based on their individual interests, unlike forums and groups where everything is preset. Actually, the Goth blogs did not conform to Goth topics but a variety of individually picked issues. There was also an ability to pick friends based on characteristics, something one couldn’t do that in forums  where the social network was defined by you but the community.

People did admit that the primary interest in maintaining these blogs is to socialize and the article does acknowledge that people can use these blogs to find clusters of friends and to socialize. But this socialization was still different than the mutual interaction of forums and groups. Comments for example were only a single sentence and did not usually evolve into in-depth conversations. Furthermore, it was shown that LiveJournal was primarily used by people to continue relationships established already outside the platform. So in that way, socializing was a lesser result of the use of these blogs.

The ultimate conclusion was that in its structure Livejournal promotes more individuality than a community. But users still established networks with like-minded people, so the platform was founded flexible enough to allow people to still maintain connections with other people.