Adami 2008 Blog LifeWriting

Adami, E. (2008) Blogs: Life Writing on the Net, in A. Righetti (ed.
) The Protean Forms of Life Writing:

Auto/Biography in English, 1680-2000. Napoli, Liguori, 251-270.
ELISABETTA ADAMI
Blogs: Life Writing on the Net

1. INTRODUCTION
Weblog or, in its clipped form, blog has by now entered everyday language and is shared
knowledge. Indeed, hearing or reading of someones blog either on TV or in newspapers, is
definitely not unusual. A blog can roughly be defined as a Web page constantly updated by
someone who daily (or periodically) expresses his/her own opinions. The definition surprisingly
finds its immediate visual parallel in the image of a person keeping his/her journal, paper and pen
being replaced by p.c. screen and keyboard. Significantly, when blog was declared word of the year
in 2004 by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, its definition read as: a Web site that contains an
online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer
1
.
At present, many studies have focussed on the effects that some famous blogs happen to
have in terms of public resonance, especially in the fields of politics, public affairs, and showbiz,
thus leading to interpret the blog as a powerful democratic alternative to mainstream media,
although its collocation in the field of journalism seems to represent only one side of the Weblog
coin. Empirical evidence shows the impressively wide use of this form of electronic writing as a
means of self-expression, as a new form of life writing, where intimate day-to-day feelings and
opinions are vented in online journals.
A full account of the ongoing changes and development trends of diary writing cannot
ignore the fact that this genre, among many others, is currently facing the widespread use of the
electronic medium: just as any discourse on contemporary letter-writing necessarily entails
reflections on the email phenomenon, similarly, dealing with 21
st
-century journal writing inevitably
means considering the Weblog as one of its possible distinctive and peculiar instantiations.
Bearing all this in mind, in my paper I will first outline and contextualize the distinctive
features of Weblogs, with special reference to the multi-modal type of communication employed
and then, in the wake of the well-established tradition of linguistic theories on genre analysis, I will
discuss a possible genre categorization of Weblogs, so as to identify their textual/structural
similarities with and differences from diaries and journals.
draft version of the paper published in:
Adami, E. (2008) Blogs: Life Writing on the Net, in A. Righetti (ed.) The Protean Forms of Life Writing:
Auto/Biography in English, 1680-2000. Napoli, Liguori, 251-270
A. Righetti (ed.), 2008, The Protean Forms of Life Writing: Auto/Biography in English, 1680-2000. Napoli, Liguori,
251-270.
252
2. WEBLOG CHRONOLOGY / GENEALOGY
A Weblog is a frequently updated Website where entries are listed in reverse chronological order. It
is the latest form of Internet communication to achieve popularity and, although frequently
associated with grassroots journalism, it has nevertheless a variety of uses which virtually
encompasses each and every domain: politics, business, art, travel, showbiz, leisure and
entertainment, media, technology, and, last but not least, life writing and self-confession.
Actually the origin of Weblogs is deeply connected with self writing. Its history in the Web
can be traced up to the online diary, a type of Internet communication which dates back to 1994
when the first bloggers or better, diarists, journalists, journalers, escribitionists, as they called
themselves at that time started their diaries online and kept writing them for years.
In 1997 the blend Web(-)log was coined, then, in 1999 it was split into the phrase we
blog and eventually clipped into blog. Since then the lexeme has worked both as a noun and a
verb and has given rise to many derivations and neologisms
2
.
Blogging soon gained popularity. Though reliable data are not available yet, the extent of
its current spread can be judged by some figures: in August 2006, Technocrati
3
(an Internet search
engine for blogs) tracked 50 million Weblogs, with over 75 thousand new Weblogs created every
day and 1.6 million posts per day. Finally, Technocrati estimates that the blogosphere
4
is
doubling about every 6 months.
As far as languages are concerned, since April 2006 Weblogs in English have lost their
supremacy, ranking second (31%), after J apanese (37%), but now they are back at the top of the list
with 39%. The use of blog is definitely international, with International English threatened by
J apanese and Chinese.
Of course, as regards any quantitative analysis of Web phenomena, such figures are subject
to controversy as they neither distinguish between constantly updated and dead blogs nor do they
isolate authentic blogs from spam ones
5
. However overestimated as they might be, these
figures are nonetheless helpful to give an overall idea of the extent of the blog phenomenon.
Nowadays it is a massive form of Internet communication and its huge growth suggests that it is not
destined to be ephemeral.

Adami, Elisabetta - Blogs: Life Writing on the Net
253
3. BLOGS AND SELF WRITING
Browsing the great variety of Weblogs available, it is immediately clear that the ones often cited on
TV and in newspapers as well as the most visited ones may not be representative of the blog
category taken as a whole. In terms of measure parameters, the distance between popularity and
quantity is well-known to both Websurfers and researchers.
However, to prove by data what is intuitively a fact is the very problem of any research on
Weblogs: how to estimate the proportion of the different uses of blogs when a quantitative analysis
on the Web is not at present possible?
Yet, an empirical study carried out by a group of scholars of Indiana University in 2004,
gave convincing evidence of a massive personal use of blogs. Although the corpus analysed was
very small (only 203 blogs), it was nevertheless randomly selected and it purposely excluded blogs
published on explicitly journal-oriented Web-portals such as LiveJournal.com and Diaryland.com.
Surprisingly, over 70% of the Weblogs in the corpus shared a common purpose: to express the
authors subjective, often intimate perspective on matters of interest to him or her. Most blogs
show that the matters of interest concern the authors and their daily lives
6
. J udging from this
quotation, all conditions of the autobiographical pact
7
seem to be represented. Thus, despite
popularity ranking (that is, the readers perspective), it can be argued that blogs are used as a form
of self-writing.
Right from its beginning a blog is explicitly defined in relation to diary writing. The blogger
once called him/herself a diarist or journaler, the blog started as an online diary, many blog-
hosting Web-portals identify themselves with diaries (LiveJournal.com; GreatestJournal.com;
DiaryLand; OpenDiary etc.), and, by browsing among blogs, it is not uncommon to find the term
(my) diary or (my) personal journal in the short description given by the author. The Weblog
community thus clearly connects its activity with online diary writing.
Furthermore, the formal similarity of a blog entry to a diary one is striking: first comes the
date, then the text. However, the structural similarity, mainly related to the day-to-day form of
writing, is counterbalanced by the violation of the law of journals, secrecy
8
; the fact that by being
online blogs are public and can be read in real time immediately clashes with the privacy of writing
to ones own self
9
. While diaries are monological or, better, a feigned dialogical communication
of the author with him/herself
10
blogs are interactive; blog readers can add comments to each
entry, possibly generating a response by the blog author in his/her next entry. This peculiar feature
of blogs can find a parallel with letter rather than diary writing.
251-270.
254
Therefore, in order to map out the space of personal Weblogs in the world of self-writing, a
more detailed genre analysis is definitely needed.

4. GENRE AND SUBGENRE: DIARIES AND BLOGS

4.1. Theoretical Premises
The theoretical premises of my paper rest on the critical discourse on life and diary writing
11
and on
linguistic theories on genre analysis
12
.
Following:

1) Lejeunes conditions of the autobiographical pact
13
, I will consider personal blogs all
blogs whose author, narrator and narrated subject coincide and are identifiable by the proper name
they share (pseudonyms included);

2) Biber
14
, I will assume that a genre is mostly defined by systematic non-linguistic criteria,
such as the social context, the speakers intentions, and the functions with which the text is
associated in a given culture and society;

3) Lee
15
, who has adapted the findings by Steen
16
and Paltridge
17
to the text classification of
the British National Corpus, I will assume that the genre of a text is defined by a combination of the
following features: medium, domain, author, audience, content, form, function, type, language,
setting, and audience level
18
.

4.2. Principles of Analysis and Corpus Explored
Owing to the general characteristics of the Web and the specificity of blogs, a quantitative approach
cannot be easily applied to the genre analysis of Weblogs.
255
Basically, no software technology can at present exactly quantify any Web
phenomenology, that is why the selection of a representative and significant corpus is very
problematic
19
. Furthermore, although strongly requested by researchers, any attempt at tracking the
Web is not easily accepted by a Web community particularly elusive on the issue of statistically
controlling the Net, as it is afraid of losing freedom and spontaneous virtual life.
More specifically, there is no automatic way of isolating personal blogs from all other blogs.
Although each blogger usually ascribes his/her own blog to one or more given domains by tagging
it, there is no external check on this extremely subjective tagging
20
. Furthermore, domain taxonomy
on Websites has neither shared nor transparent parameters and thus it is not univocal. Hence, any
scientific attempt at tracking blogs would be jeopardized by the high subjectivity that underlies both
Weblog domain categorization and indexing.
Therefore, rather then making deductions from a large corpus of data and write down
generalizations, it is more convenient to proceed by comparison and exemplification. In the
following section, each distinctive feature defining a genre will be examined in relation to the blog
as a form of communication and compared to that of the diary, supporting the argumentation
through distinctive blogs.

4.3. Blogs and Diaries Compared by Genre-Defining Criteria
The criteria listed by Steen
21
and subsequently adapted by Lee
22
to the genre classification of the
British National Corpus (par. 4.1), will be supplemented here by that of the addressee, distinct from
the audience, for the two might be different especially as regards self writing
23
. On the other hand,
two of Lees criteria will not be considered here, as they are redundant or irrelevant in this context.
These are the setting (or activity type), which evidently is blogging for blogs and diary writing
for diaries and the audience level which, for instance, was used by Lee to tell public lectures
from university lectures.

251-270.
256
MEDIUM
Whereas the medium of traditional diaries is material, i.e. the written paper, the medium of personal
blogs is virtual, i.e. electronic and online. This generates some of the main differences between the
two forms of self writing:

- The Web allows an online, immediate reading of a blog entry as soon as it is posted,
whereas diaries are supposed to have one day-to-day reader only (the writer) and are
read later on as a whole (usually after the writers death) when they are edited and
published by others, often decades later, possibly owing to questions of copyright and
subject matter that might involve libel action;

- a blog is a more ephemeral
24
written form than diary, the permanence of the Web-
archive depending on the storage capacity of each portal or server or on how long the
writer wants to keep it recorded
25
;

- the electronic medium allows text revisions before posting the entry, while hand-
writing on paper does not, so that while the bloggers second thoughts cannot be
tracked, any possible revision is visible and permanent in diaries by form of crossed
words, insertions etc. (unless the diarist rewrites the whole diary before publication).

- the electronic medium provides multimediality and hypertextuality and blog entries
frequently associate text and photos. Animations, videos, and audio files are
sometimes included, and they often contain hyperlinks to other Webpages too.
Interestingly enough, this feature can be considered as the technological development
of the typical patchwork structure of teenagers (or young adults) journals, made up of
random notes, personal photos and pictures of pop stars assembled together.

DOMAIN

Blog domains are virtually infinite. Here we consider personal blogs only, thus their domain is self-
and life writing, as is the case with traditional diaries, but other blog domains can easily find their
257
counterpart in time-honoured diary practices. Thus, travel blogs, for example, detail the bloggers
report of journeys often including route maps and personal photos of the travelling experience
much in the same way as travelogs do, so that perhaps we could call them travel(b)logs
26
.

AUTHOR
Bloggers usually define themselves in their blogs, by providing a short self-description in the
profile section of the blog homepage. The author of a blog is generally one and writes under his/her
proper name or, not infrequently, under a pseudonym
27
.
Herring et al.
28
report that blog writers are predominantly young. 40% of them are teenagers
and, among adults, most declare they are in their early twenties. They are mainly students and
while bloggers of both genders and all ages create personal journals, females and teens create them
somewhat more than do males and adults
29
. These features are definitely compatible with those of
diary writers, generally considered to be mainly teens and females
30
.
It must be admitted that the electronic medium easily allows forgeries and disguises, since a
bloggers identity cannot be ascertained by facts outside the virtual world, by comparing his/her
self-description to the individual in flesh and blood. And yet the possibility of a virtual author
different from the actual one does not distance the blog from the diary: a fictitious author would
only make blogs akin to fictional diaries. In both cases, except when they are written by celebrities,
the ultimate decision on the difference between non-fictional and fictional depends on the reader.
Browsing blogs, one often makes the acquaintance of bloggers who introduce themselves as
professional writers, particularly novelists. Actually, apart for some well-known authors
31
, who
however seldom blog about personal matters, they are frequently aspiring writers, i.e. unpublished
ones, talking/blogging about their daily lives as authors.
In many cases, blog titles immediately refer to this particular activity by the blogger;
consider, for instance, the blog The Writing life Reflections of a working writer, which is
authored by Charles Deemer, a retired playwright and screenwriter, active novelist, librettist,
screenwriting professor at Portland State University, and editor of Oregon Literary Review
32
, or
the blog Writer's Blog. Inspiration, perspiration and sometimes frustration. Thoughts, experiences
and musings of a writer., whose author blogs under the pseudonym Easywriter
33
. This list is
virtually infinite; here only just a couple of examples more are worth mentioning: the blog Black
Coffee-Red Pen A home for writers: with no cream or sugar added, written by Miss J ava, whose
description reads as:
251-270.
258

I am a stay at home mom of 3, one of which has autism. Writing is a journey which I have found to
be one of the most difficult, and rewarding experiences in my life currently, second of course to being
a mom
34
,

and the Weblog Life in the Midst of Writing, authored by Michelle Gregory a 40-something
country girl trapped in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona whose personal story is described as follows:

Somewhere in the middle of 2005 I rediscovered my desire to write and have been working on a
novel for self-publication for almost a year. Now the challenge is to fit the writing into my life as a
wife, mom, homeschooler, homemaker and friend of God.
35
.

As can be judged by their blog titles, all these would-be writers often devote their blogs to their
writing life. Some of them detail the extremely troubled process of writing a chapter of their book,
others tell about the various joys and afflictions that they meet when facing editors and publishers.
Others they might be many indeed, but the estimate of their numbers is not easy may even
publish their books online, waiting for better times, and for a publisher to discover them. Although
this is not within the scope of my paper, it would be interesting for literary critics to keep an eye on
these blogs and bloggers, to download and read the drafts of their fictions, and see whether the
online medium can eventually help possibly gifted writers come to the fore.

ADDRESSEE
Usually referred in the text by the pronoun you, the addressee of a blog is the reading public and
thus coincides with its audience:

(1) Friday, 13 October 2006
On to more important things
Did you know about this? Because I only just now found out.
36

However, in some cases addressee and audience are not the same person(s). For instance, in the
following excerpt from a blog entry you refers to a heart-breaking lover, clearly not the reading
public. Here the blogger selects her own addressee from an indistinct audience, not knowing though
whether he/she will ever read the post that becomes a virtual message in a bottle:

259
(2) I dont care how much you will whine to me about me not caring about you. The truth is, after you have
abandoned me and disposed of me, I have taken it entirely upon myself to forget about you. You cant expect
me to remember you whenever you want to be remembered. It doesnt work that way. I am not a string puppet
and I wont do what you want me to do. In fact, every time you tell me to do something, I like doing the exact
opposite just because you are one of the most ridiculous people I have ever met. And if by any chance, you
feel like remembering me, I want to tell you dont. We are not worth our time.
37

Often blog entries produce no deictic reference to an addressee as if the blogger were virtually
writing to him/herself:

(3) I dont know how kids can be so annoying. Usually no one gets on my nerves, but TODAY.. Today is
different. Tomorrow will be a day full of me avoiding people. Srsly, I dont know why people feel like
bothering me when Im as quiet as I can be. xD
38

On the other hand, in traditional diaries it is not unusual to find references to an undetermined
you, either the diary itself, the authors self or a fictive friend / ideal reader
39
. Moreover, the
epistolary form of diaries is a well established genre
40
. Finally it is worth restating that the
addressee of a diary is not the reading public which is bound to make the reading experience long
after its writers death.

AUDIENCE
A blogger can give a public or restricted access to his/her blog. Consequently, the blog audience can
be general or select. A private blog finds its counterpart in the well-known practice of teen-diarists
who let intimate friends read their journals, and, as Gusdorf argues
41
, give privileged access to and
share their most intimate secrets.
Nonetheless, the audience is undoubtedly the most decisive criterion for distancing a blog
from a diary:

1) whether general or restricted, the audience of a blog reads the entries in real time, on the
very moment they are posted. Since the time of writing and the time of reading are almost
simultaneous, unlike traditional diary readers, blog readers daily attend the bloggers description of
his/her experiences and share with the writer the same uncertainty about what will happen next to
the blogger;
251-270.
260
2) the fact that blog readers can add comments to each posted entry encourages a dialogue
between reader and blogger. This dialogical possibility is not envisaged in traditional diaries,
unless, to repeat, we consider a special kind of journal, the teenagers, resembling a blogs also in its
patchwork structure. The school diary, which is often customized by students with drawings,
photos, and the recording of both personal feelings and famous citations, is also often shown to
friends and class-mates, who, in turn, add personal comments and the like and transform it into a
shared diary;

3) a diarist might well hope for it, but never knows for sure whether his/her diary will be
published and read by others (as a rule, after his/her death). Conversely, bloggers are well aware
that their writing is public and meant to create a wide readership. They frequently demand readers
to stay tuned and keep visiting. Eventually, blogs that are not visited for quite a long time are
often given up by the blogger. The one that follows is an exemplary final clause of a blog entry
inviting readers to visit again:

(4) So do come again. Perchance someday I will have something useful to say; something that resonates,intrigues
or just amuses you. But maybe thats a little grandiose for a blog. Maybe
42

Finally, the audience criterion implies a question that can hardly be answered without extensive
research on the readership of personal blogs. By quickly browsing posted comments, however, the
impression is that many blog readers, at least the ones who comment, are bloggers themselves
43
,
bloggers thus read each other as diarists often do
44
.

FORM
The textual form of a blog is standard: it consists of a series of entries written down in reversed
chronological order. Thus the blogs visual perspective is the writers, not the readers. Indeed, the
reader of a diary starts reading from the first page, while the blog writer, as much as the blog reader,
opens it at the very page where the latest entry has been written.
Many personal blogs carry additional information at each entry, such as the bloggers mood
of the day, often expressed with the so-called emoticons (Fig. 1). As a matter of fact, iconicity is
extensively exploited in blogs. As in all computer-mediated forms of communication, it is generally
used in order to support the lack of paralinguistic forms of expression in writing, and since it is
quickly spreading, it would be no surprise if contemporary teenagers diary writing showed traces
of it.
The comment section of a blog entry is not to be found in diaries. In blogs it has usually the
form of a hyperlink indicating the number of posted comments whose content can be read by
clicking the appropriate link (for an example, see the comment section of Fig. 1 below).

Fig. 1. A blog entry opening with the mood section and closing with the hyperlink to posted comments.
45

While the textual form is standard and is virtually what gives a blog its distinctive features, its
graphic layout varies. Interestingly enough, instances can be found that clearly represent on the
screen the form of a diary written on paper (Fig. 2).

261
251-270.

Fig. 2. A blog imitating the graphic layout of a journal.
46

CONTENT
The content (i.e. topics and themes) of blog entries spans over the whole range of self writing, from
the detailed report of daily activities and events, to the rambling expression of existential problems,
up to the painful confession of a love affair. As in diary writing, all kinds of feelings and musings
are expressed, but unlike diaries blogs are reader-oriented and entries usually carry a title
summarizing their topic (Me a blogger??...No wayyyyyyy in example 5 that follows).
Not unlike diaries
47
, blogs resemble meta-reflections on writing and blogging. This has
given rise to extreme forms of blogs, such as The very silly blog and Really nothing to say
whose very frequent posts are respectively Im blogging this at and Really nothing to say at
(dots being replaced by the posting time). The bloggers awareness of blog as a well-
established genre is witnessed by blog titles like Everyone else has a blog this is the antiblog
48
.
The following passage is taken from a post entirely devoted to metareflections on blogging and blog
writing. This is the very first post of this blog: like diaries, blogs very often start by telling about the
reasons why their author has decided to blog:

262
263
(5) Sunday, October 15, 2006
Me a blogger??...No wayyyyyyy
For monthhhhssss I have been arguing with my inner voice [its fun to hear it sometimes], whether or not I
should joing the blogging world..
I did try to blog but when the sheer pressure of writing comes to you, your writing skills take a back seat and
suddenly your mind decides to wander of to another world, where English and writing is not the priority and
definitely do not go hand in hand..
In other words I didnt wanna be with the mere mortals who blog their life story publicly on the net and where
others get a kick in life by reading them[i must share a secret, i am one of them :)]
49

FUNCTION
As in diary writing
50
the functions of personal blogging can be virtually as numerous as bloggers
are. Arguably, the diarys main function of exploring ones own inner self loses its supremacy in
blogs, in favour of a need for communication and affirmation of ones individual existence by
giving it a kind of public evidence and foregrounding its relevance. Asked about the reason why she
decided to blog instead of keeping a journal, the blogger in (6) writes down several causes under the
heading How I Benefit from Blogging. Here, self-reflection exercise ranks only fourth:

(6) My friend Anita asked me the other day why I choose to have a public blog rather than simply keeping a
private journal. I thought about it for a while, and I arrived at an explanation of why I like my blog and why I
choose to keep it public.
1. An audience, however small, obliges me to write regularly. []
2. A public blog is a nice way to keep the people I care about up to date. []
3. It is a dynamic portfolio. If/when I am someday looking for work I will point to the blog as a partial
explanation of what Ive been doing here. I feel that it is a nice way to mark certain ideas as my own. []
4. The public blog serves as an excellent self-reflection exercise. I enjoy looking back on how my thoughts
have shifted over the past eight months since I started writing. Im also looking forward [] My blog is
pretty safe; for the most part I can write what I like, and in the process I learn my voice and style. Id like to
approach my thesis with the same exploratory, meditative mentality, so the blog seems like a natural tool.
Perhaps someday Ill develop books, stories, or articles in the same way.
51

Sometimes the stated functions of a blog are strikingly similar to those specific of diaries. In (7), for
example, before revealing her eating disorders, the blogger lists what her blog will be about; here
terms like anonymous, put out into space, my own version, cathartic confession and free
therapy perfectly match the main functions of traditional diaries:

(7) Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Why Blog?
Blogging. I never found much purpose to blogging about my everyday life, like many people do these days.
Strange that I still feel compelled to read about my friends who do blog about everyday stuff though, so I
suppose many people do have the same curiosity about the lives and mental ramblings of others.
251-270.
264
Thats not what this blog will be though. There are struggles in my life that many of my close friends know
about, but others they do not. Well, one big other no one knows really, I guess, which is why this blog will be
anonymous and not published to my friends. Just put out into space as my own version of cathartic confession
and free therapy, since I cant afford the real thing.
52

DISCOURSE TYPE
Though further investigation needs to be carried out on a larger corpus in order to figure out which
discourse types are most likely to appear, all rhetorical categories of "narrative," "argumentation,"
"description," and "exposition" seem to be present in blog entries, as well as in diaries
53
. More
specifically, as with diaries, the argumentative pattern of a blog admits of contradictions: what is
argued in one entry may be contradicted in the next, entries being written on the spur of the
moment. Again, the narrative pattern of blogs is both intra- and inter-entry as in diaries, and cannot
be planned, the very end of the story being unknown to its author.

LANGUAGE
The language of a blog, i.e. its linguistic traits in terms of register and style, is also varied. Along
with more discursive-style blogs, many instances can be found of spontaneous, fragmentary,
allusive and note-style blogs, as illustrated in (8), all of which are compatible with the wide range of
diary styles
54
.

(8) Aug. 15th, 2006 @ 06:26 pm (no subject)
Today got worse. Handling it well, all things considered.

Aug. 15
th
, 2006 @ 01:08 pm (no subject)
So far, today has sucked. Not nearly as bad as jolas, though.
Slept crappily and kept waking up all morning and starting at the clock
55
It is of course arguable that, subject to revision and expressly public as it is, a blogs text tends to be
much more controlled by the author than a diarys. This does not prevent spontaneous, fragmentary
or allusive style in blogs, but, when present, these features may be simply the expression of an
authors intention rather than the result of haste and free from the control under which the diarists
equivalent style is produced. It is not infrequent, though, to find misspellings in blogs that seem to
be the product of haste and immediacy (like offcial instead of official
56
), together with non-
265
standard and shortened spelling practices that imitate non-standard colloquial varieties of English,
as in the following specimen:

(9) Saturday, October 14, 2006
yoz ~
hey guys ! ! ! emm this is my first post of my blog, hopefully u guys can understand my standard
english lor.. haha.. yupp, start to blog because i saw a lot of my frens are actually bloggin now man
and looks very fun huh.. so ill give it e try lor, hopefully by bloggin can help to improve on my
language.. WOO HOO ! !
57

5. TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS
From the observations and reflections put forward above, it is apparent that blogs can be clearly
associated with diary writing. The main difference between blogs and journals resides in the
substantially public form of the former as opposed to the intended private form of the latter. The
gap between the two is particularly rooted in the different medium employed. Actually, the Net is in
itself much more relational than the traditional cahier/journal (especially when the latter is
provided with a padlock).
It can be thus assumed that a Weblog shares the features of a diary as far as they do not
clash with those the blog equally shares with its kinship computer-mediated communication forms.
Furthermore, the medium makes blogs an oxymoronic coupling of public writing and/on private
matters. In blogs public and private do not seem to clash since the medium the anonymous Net,
the screen, and the virtual somehow protect the writer who feels confident in expressing the
most private matters in public. This way blogs can virtually exploit the characteristics of diaries,
such as the quest of the self, day-to-day jotting down notes, feelings, ideas etc., give them a public
form, and share them with a wider readership.
Critics
58
agree on the heterogeneity of diary forms and content, and a genre definition is far
from clear-cut. It is indeed a non-institutionalized genre. Every person writing his/her own journal
has no strict norms or conventions to comply with except to write linstant. Ultimately, the diarist
is only bound to a date
59
. However, the question is to what extent this heterogeneity allows blogs to
be part of it, and whether the diary genre category can be stretched so far as to include an overtly
public form of writing which, in turn, explicitly refers to it.
Interestingly enough, literary studies on personal journals that give some clues that may
enable a positive answer to these questions are both the latest and the earliest ones.
251-270.
266
Very recently, in 2005, after investigating the first French online diaries, Lejeune
60
prefers
to qualify journals as personal rather than intime and defines them in broad terms as: a series of
dated traces or, alternatively, a rcit of traced dates
61
, avoiding on purpose any reference to
secrecy.
In 1965, in his milestone work Le journal intime, Girard
62
outlines three main steps in the
constitution and structure of the diary as a genre. Clearly, these steps lead diary writing towards
publicity:

- starting in the late seventeenth century and through the 1850s private diaries are kept
secret, not meant for the reading public, and published only long after their authors
death. At that time it can be argued that the author was sincerely writing to
him/herself;

- from the late nineteenth century up to 1910 there is a flourishing of this genre, when
many diaries are published and even more are written. Diarists are aware of and begin
reading each others diaries. This marks the birth of what Girard defines the foyer des
intimistes
63
. Especially for diaries written by literary writers, it is now unlikely that
authors write them under the seal of secrecy any longer. Some may not dream of it, but
the possible publication of their diaries is for sure well present in the diarists minds;

- twentieth century diaries, toujours (Girards study is dated 1963) are characterized
by their further public exposure. Famous writers begin to publish large fragments of
their diaries while still living. Eventually, what Girard calls larrire-pense
64
that
is the suspicion that the diarist cannot help thinking of future readers when writing for
him/herself has become manifest.

In light of the results of this genre analysis of blogs, I would argue that the next stage in the path of
journals towards publicity is the confrontation of diary writing with the World Wide Web, whose
advent has enabled anyone to claim a right to give a public resonance to his/her own life.
Treating personal blogs as the logical instantiation of the well-established trend of diary
writing towards publicity does not imply that nowadays the intimate self is no more written in
padlocked diaries in the secrecy of a room of ones own (to use Virginia Woolfs words). But
267
when the readers wish to peer into the authors privacy and a frenzied search for popularity have
given birth to reality shows, it doesnt look unreasonable to consider blogs as the 21
st
Century
specific form of diary writing. Indeed, a yearning for a public life in a naked society seems now
to be accessible to everyone by simply creating his/her own blog.
This does not seem a very attractive potential that blog bestows on self-writing. It could be
reasonably interpreted as the end-product of La Socit du Spectacle
65
in decline, when the need to
investigate ones privacy or searching ones soul is being transformed into a show, where the
quest for the self is being replaced by the struggle to become someone.
Nonetheless, blogs are the expression of our time in some of its peculiar aspects and, as
contemporary autobiography is being increasingly written by the marginal people, blogs can be duly
considered the published diaries of marginals. Forcibly, in the Showbiz Society, the marginals
are the non-VIPs, ordinary people who will never have a chance to appear on TV. Regardless of
whoever might be interested in reading them, ordinary people have now found in Weblogs a way to
become (self-)published writers and publish their own lives, a privilege till now reserved only to the
happy few and the VIPs.
On the one hand, this image of diarists writing with their public in mind multiplies doubts on
authenticity. On the other hand, online diaries simply unveil the hypocrisy of private journals. Any
piece of writing is and has always been an act of communication, and eventually, the myth of
authenticity is destroyed.
Finally, as demonstrated by J ohn Eakin
66
, identity is relational rather than autonomous as it
defines itself in relation to others and is increasingly understood in relational terms
67
. Eakin here
is concerned with the (auto)biographers delicate task of writing their and/or other peoples lives,
but it is difficult not to consider this definition of relational self
68
perfectly suitable for personal
blogs, which helps me suggest that a blog is a kind of relational diary.
In 2001, in his book titled Cher cran (dear screen), Lejeune asks himself whether in
Internet the self becomes virtual; I would stick to his answer: nest-il pas toujour?. Youre
warmly invited to post comments on the subject.
251-270.
268

1
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2005. http://www.m-w.com (retrieved on 14
th
October 2006). Unless otherwise
stated emphasis is mine.
2
Blogging has given rise to a wide specialized vocabulary, often through blending and clipping. Several glossaries of
blog terms are available on-line (for an example, see http://www.blogossary.com/).
3
The report is available at http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html.
4
Blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network.
5
According to the same report, spam blogs that are not captured by the anti-spam filter of Technocrati survey are
estimated to be 8% of all new blogs tracked each day by Technocrati.
6
S. C. Herring, L. A. Scheidt, S. Bonus, and E. Wright, Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, in
Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004, retrieved on 15
th
J une, 2006
from: http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf.
7
P. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, 1975.
8
A. Girard, Le Journal Intime, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, p. 4.
9
G. Gusdorf, Lignes de vie, vol. I, Les critures du moi, vol. II, Auto-bio-graphie, Odile Jacob, 1991, p. 391.
10
Ibidem., p. 391.
11
See P. Lejeune, 1975, op. cit., Cher cran: journal personnel, ordinateur, internet, Seuil, 2000, Signes de vie. Le
pacte autobiographique 2, Seuil, 2005; P. J . Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, Princeton
University Press, 1992, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Cornell University Press, 1999; A. Girard,
op. cit.; G. Gusdorf, op. cit.; A. Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction, Greenwood
Press, 1993.
12
See D. Biber, A typology of English texts, Linguistics, 27(1), 1989, pp. 3-43; J . Swales, Genre analysis: English in
academic and research settings, Cambridge University Press, 1990; B. Paltridge, Working with genre: A pragmatic
perspective, Journal of Pragmatics, 23, 1995, pp. 393-406; G. Steen, Genres of discourse and the definition of
literature, Discourse Processes, 28, 1999, pp. 109-120; D. Y. W. Lee, Genres, Registers, Text Types, Domains, and
Styles: clarifying the Concepts and navigating a Path through the BNC J ungle, Language Learning & Technology, 3
(5), 2001, pp. 37-72, retrieved on 14
th
October, 2006 from: http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num3/lee/default.html.
13
P. Lejeune, op. cit.
14
D. Biber, op. cit., p. 39.
15
D. Y. W. Lee, op. cit..
16
G. Steen op. cit..
17
B. Paltridge op. cit..
18
These criteria will become immediately clear when approaching the genre analysis of Weblogs (cfr. par. 4.3.).
19
The impossibility of catching each and all communicative events on the Web makes Internet communication more
similar to spoken than written language, at least in its institutionalized forms.
20
The fact that blog-hosting Websites do not intervene in checking the tagging is proved by the huge presence of spam
blogs in all domains.
21
G. Steen, op. cit..
22
D. Y. W. Lee, op. cit..
23
That is the case, for instance, of published epistolary material, whose original addressee is obviously different from
the reading public.
24
Interestingly, ephemeris is the ancient Greek for the Latin semantic calque diarium. The Latin term has then come to
designate a written, thus permanent, account of daily life, a will of fixing what is indeed ephemeral.
269

25
The limited permanence of data on the Web is a well-known problem to researchers. Indeed, the first online diaries
are no more recoverable in Internet. This means a big loss of research possibilities in a historical perspective.
26
Cfr. Travelog (http://travelog.uberblog.com/), a Website introducing itself as a way for you to keep a secure travel
diary and keep in touch with your friends and family wherever you or they are. As an author, you can write entries in
your diary, add photographs, send emails, and read messages from your readers.
27
Cfr. S. C. Herring et al., op. cit., p.5.
28
Ibidem.
29
Ibidem, p. 6.
30
P. Lejeune, 2005, op. cit., p. 96.
31
Publishing authors who have their own blog are William Gibson (http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog), Roger
L. Simon (http://www.rogerlsimon.com/), Neil Gaiman (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/), Linda Lael Miller
(http://www.lindalaelmiller.com/blog/blog.asp), Martha O Connor (http://www.marthaoconnor.blogspot.com), Paul
Rieckhoff (http://www.paulrieckhoff.com/home/index.asp), just to cite a few ones. Some are also hosted by the blog
of Powells book Website, at http://www.powells.com/blog/. Finally, in its blog, Amazon has recently started to
publish posts written by well-known authors (at http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/id/A287J D9GH3ZKFY).
32
http://cdeemer2007.blogspot.com/
33
http://www.writersblog-easywriter.blogspot.com/
34
http://blackcoffee-redpen.blogspot.com/
35
http://michellegregory.blogspot.com/
36
Retrieved on 14th October, 2006 from: http://www.dooce.com/
37
Post dated 17 Aug 2006, 12:08am, retrieved on 2
nd
October, 2006 from: http://www.blurty.com/users/emily182
38
Post dated 28 Sep 2006, 10:41pm, retrieved on 5
th
October, 2006 from: http://retromantique.greatestjournal.com
39
G. Gusdorf, op. cit., p. 154.
40
G. Folena, Le forme del diario, in Quaderni di retorica e poetica, Liviana, 1985, p. 42; G. Gusdorf, op. cit., p. 157;
41
G. Gusdorf, op. cit., p. 397.
42
Post dated 15 Oct. 2006, 9:20pm, retrieved on 15th October, 2006 from:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=65061010&blogID=180509142
43
As an example, on 14
th
October 2006, Brad Fitzpatricks blog latest entry had 39 comments, each of them signed by a
username which linked to the corresponding personal blog of the commentator (the post, together with comments,
was retrieved on 14 October 2006 at http://brad.livejournal.com/2257134.html).
44
A. Girard, op. cit., p. 70.
45
Retrieved on 11
th
October, 2006 from: http://sane-in-chaos18.greatestjournal.com
46
Retrieved on 11
th
October, 2006 from: http://cutiechick822.deadjournal.com
47
48
The very silly blog is available at http://verysilly.blogspot.com/; Really nothing to say is available at
http://reallynothingtosay.blogspot.com/; Everyone else has a blog this is the antiblog is available at
http://everyoneelsehasablog.blogspot.com/.
49
Retrieved on 15
th
October, 2006 from: http://rosemaryjose.blogspot.com
50
A. Girard, op. cit., p. XX.
51
Retrieved on 21st October 2006 at: http://www.brentfitzgerald.com/2006/10/05/how-i-benefit-from-blogging
251-270.
270

52
Retrieved on 14
th
October, 2006 from: http://walking-the-thin-line.blogspot.com
53
A. Hassam, op. cit., pp. 38-39.
54
55
Retrieved on 11
th
September, 2006 from: http://signe.livejournal.com
56
Retrieved on 14
th
October, 2006 from: http://postlemonkey.tblog.com
57
Retrieved on 15
th
October, 2006 from: http://zijie-woohoo.blogspot.com/2006/10/hey-guys.html
58
See A. Hassam, op. cit., pp. 1-26 for a review of the normative attempts at defining the diary genre.
59
A. Girard, op. cit., p. IX.
60
61
The original ed.: une srie de trace dates/un rcit de dates traces (P. Lejeune, 2005, op. cit., p. 80). Interestingly,
he confesses that whilst approaching his study on autobiography he felt the need to immediately define the genre, but
that only long after studying diaries he realized he had given no definition of them yet. He concludes that the
difference between the two genres evidently needed different approaches.
62
A. Girard, op.cit., pp. 57-87.
63
Ibidem., p. 70.
64
Ibidem, p. 143.
65
G. Debord, La Socit du spectacle, Buchet-Chastel, 1967.
66
P. J. Eakin, 1999, op. cit., p. 43.
67
Ibidem, p. 157.
68
Ibidem, p. 43.

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