News > September 18, 2003

By Scott Hurff

News Editor

Xanga. Blogspot. Blogger.

Ask most random people what these words mean, and you’d get nothing but blank stares and odd looks.

Ask any of the millions of bloggers, though, who spend hours of their lives pouring their guts out into online journals, and you might just understand why they’re so popular.

Blogs, short for web logs, are online journals that allow any user — regardless of location — to release their emotions and life happenings.

According to Ananda Mitra, associate professor and director of graduate studies of communication, cyberspace allows members of society to have a voice in the public sphere.

Mitra has studied blogs and their role in today’s society and culture of technology. He wrote “From Cyber Space to Cybernetic Space: Rethinking the Relationship between Real and Virtual Spaces” in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, which studied the relationship between the Internet and those who partake of it.

Mitra argues that it is not the onset of blogs that changes the desire of people to communicate, but that the Web opens up a whole new range of possibilities for communication.

“Human beings have a desire to be connected with other people. There are barriers to those connections which could be barriers of space, prejudice, etc. that stop people from being connected,” he said. “Once you get in cyberspace, you can distance yourself from your real person and it automatically opens a space where you can have a voice.”

Sophomore Danielle VanSice posts in her blog about once a week. She equates her writing to that of a real journal that “doubles as a communication tool to keep in touch with your friends you don’t talk to that often.”

VanSice began noticing that many of her friends from other universities began writing in online journals, and she saw that she could find out about their lives without having to ask them directly.

“It’s a way to not only pour out your soul, but it’s a way to keep people updated on your life without talking to them face-to-face,” she said. “You don’t have to keep in constant contact with your friends — you can just tell them to read your journal.”

Mitra believes that people put their lives on the Web for the primary purpose to be read and recognized by others. He refers to the common practice of placing hit counters on blog pages.

“I think that what the technology has done has given us the opportunity to reach out and touch someone in a very different way than the telephone does,” he said.

“Now we can say ‘I’m going to put my life on the Web because I want someone to read about it.’ A blog without a hit counter is a blog that is not seeking that recognition. A blog with that hit counter is saying ‘how many times did people come out and touch me?’” he said.

Sophomore Sophie Chung writes in the blog Xanga to relieve stress.

“When I write in Xanga, I’m not thinking about the people who will read it and either laugh at it or get angry, I just do it because I need to dump the weight on my shoulders somewhere,” she said.

Blogs, maintained by everyday individuals, serve as an emotional outlet for those who write in them. Also, they serve a voyeuristic element by allowing anyone who so chooses to look into someone’s life.

“Blogs are an outlet — a place where I can say what I want with the possibility of others looking at it.  It’s the whole notion of voice,” Mitra said.

“It is indeed a voyeuristic element — being allowed to look into someone’s life,” he said. “The popularity surge isn’t much different that than of the Web cam, which was originally used in a pornographic setting. Except in this case, it’s text.”

Sophomore Tracy Burnett is careful to point out that despite the broadcasting nature of blogs, she doesn’t post revealing entries.

“The thing about Xanga is that naturally you don’t fill your entries up with stuff that you would put in a real journal or diary,” she said. “It’s mostly for creative release and entertainment.”

Burnett says that she updates her entries sporadically, “usually everytime something funny happens, the night before a big paper is due — it’s an excellent procrastination tool — and very rarely when there is something serious and heavy on your mind and you just want to vent.”

VanSice writes about once a week.

“I find myself doing it a lot more when I have tumultuous stuff going on,” she said. “Along with having the world see your entries, you can make the entries private if you want. Sometimes it’s easier to type things out than write it, since it’s faster to type. If you know that people would read parts of it, then you can make that entry private.”

Despite the increased ability for individuals to communicate emotions freely, a new problem of trust arises. 

Individuals, with the ability to take on whatever persona they choose, can lie without other online users catching on.

The question of trust became especially relevant when an individual known as “Salam Pax” began posting an online journal of his supposed life in Baghdad during the second Gulf War.

“Salam Pax” — a pseudonym — began posting blogs in Sept. 2002. In his musings, “Pax” wrote in English on a variety of topics, from his CD collection to his criticisms of the regime led by former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Attracting a large readership, once the war began, his postings became a valuable source of insight from an individual living in Baghdad.

The postings of “Pax” are now being published in a book entitled Salam Pax: The Baghdad Blog. Many critics have referred to it as the modern day version of Anne Frank’s Diary.

Once again, however, the question of trust arises.

“It really makes the question of trust very problematic — how do I know that this is indeed a person sitting in Baghdad? It is fundamentally problematic in dealing with cyber space,” Mitra said.

Mitra’s research also examined the interaction between real space and cyber space, noting that the creation of virtual spaces is now opening up a number of new connections between virtual and real spaces.

“Indeed, the emerging relationship between the real and virtual space is precisely at the point of opening up such relations that are creating new sites and spaces that can have their own intrinsic power because of the unique set of connections that are being established between the real and the virtual,” Mitra wrote in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

Mitra likens this illustration to the e-business boom and the onset of “virtual institutions” that replace brick-and-mortar establishments, which “might have no real existence at all.”

Noting that this is similar to the creation of virtual communities online that comprise “blogrings,” Mitra suggests that these virtual “nations” are being created to “find the points of commonality that real life spatial disruption might have disconnected.”

He also writes that the “good life” of today isn’t just existing in the real or the virtual worlds, but it is now actually the integration of the two.

“One seamlessly feeds into the other, transforming both, and creating the cybernetic space,” Mitra said.