Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

interviewee

I had an interesting conversation last night over IM with a friend of Kat’s at Stanford. He’s a PhD student doing research on blogs and bloggers, and he interviewed me about my own blog and blogging habits. (Incidentally, the class he’s doing this research for sounds fascinating.) The conversation brought some interesting issues that I hadn’t considered before, or not in serious depth:

• I already know that I tend to toe a delicate line whenever I write about anything personal or work-related. I don’t think I’d realized just how involved those inner negotiations were, though, until I tried to explain them.
• My monitoring of my site stats has had the effect of making me hyperraware of who’s reading my blog regularly, and that definitely affects what I write and how I write about it. I also feel a little self-conscious about that knowledge, as if I’m “spying” on my visitors.
• While my Web site is an online representation of myself, in writing about friends and family, I’m also, in some ways, representing them and, thus, believe I have a certain responsibility to be careful about what I write. (I hadn’t thought about it that way before, until I was asked about it.)
• I don’t “write for Google” — that is, writing in the hopes of bringing in a larger audience. Writing for my existing small “audience” is quite enough.

It’s also an interesting thing to be interviewed over instant messenger. I find it easier to express myself in writing rather than speaking, so folks are bound to get better responses from me over e-mail and instant messaging than if they’d talked to me in person or over the phone. With e-mail, I get more time to better craft my responses, but with instant messenger there’s the opportunity for a better “flow” of conversation.

It feels rather strange to be interviewed at all — to be an object of study, rather than the observer. I realize that blogging is still a relatively recent phenomenon and its impact on self-expression and interpersonal relationships is still being sussed out. But to me, what I do online is such a basic part of my everyday routine, it all seems rather mundane. Answering questions about it is a disorienting, self-conscious exercise, and even as I try to be as honest as possible, I start to wonder how my responses compare to those of the other interviewees and where I fit in on the spectrum of “normality.” I wonder how knowing that I’m being “studied” affects my subsequent posting (or non-posting).