Why Do People Read Blogs?
A group at the University of California-Irvine decided to work on this rather intriguing question, approaching it from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers.
No doubt, blogging as a social phenomenon is significant, but studying it becomes a challenge because of the rather abstract nature of the blog itself, making it difficult to define it, hence the resort to HCI.
The idea of the study was rather simple - perform observations of actual users as they are interfacing with their computers, where the observations took the forms of usage surveys, overseen reading sessions, individual discussions, and a single group discussion.
Borrowing a page from McLuhan, the researchers argued that this could be as important as having information about the blogs themselves, stating, “the reality and meaning of a blog exists neither solely in the blog itself nor solely in the reader, but rather in the reader’s active interpretation of, and interaction with, the blog.” Read the arstechnica synopsis here, or download the complete report from here.
Filed under: Digital culture