Who are you?

Carrying on my blogging quest to become a better and more consistent blogger (as quests go granted not a crusade), I am going to spend this post looking at the first question taken from Kerawalla's 2009 paper on blogging, which I am using to help understand/work out blogging and how it fits or might fit with me.

The question is:
a) Negotiating the public-private nature of blogs: do you write your blog mainly for yourself or for others to read? How do you feel about making your thoughts and life events publicly available to [whomever]?

For me this question has two parts, one, who is the blog for, two, how does this audience affect the way you write/feel about sharing these writings?

So who do I write for? In the case of this blog, its inception was due to H800 requirements, the audience would therefore mainly be fellow students on this course. But am I writing for my own benefit to get thoughts out of my head and down on paper as a cathartic/thinking activity, or am I doing it for others? If this blog is going to be for others to read, then there has to be a benefit to those people, the amount of information available to us means we have to be selective, we have to read and follow only that which we can afford to. Therefore for my blog to be for others I have to offer them something, humour, insight, shared experience, empathy or knowledge (or sex if I really want an audience?!).
The point of writing this post is exploring the question, and to decide who this blog is for, when I started typing I believed my blog was for others to read, and it wasn’t for 'me', but within the last few lines I have realised that actually typing my thoughts down (for whoever to read) has actually given me insight into why I might write a blog, and therefore this has been useful for 'me'.

So the answer to part one of the question; I am writing for others to read, and hopefully to find some use from, but also for myself as a means of thinking and exploring my own ideas and thoughts. In many ways I think a blog is a means of individuals feeling that they are important, have a place and voice, and people are interested in them. With over 7 billion people on the planet this cannot really easily transfer to the internet in blog form as surely there isn't an audience for everyone? I would count myself one of the many who don’t have much to add, and should therefore be silent, but for the purposes of this activity I will add to the noise. And maybe in amongst the chaff will be something of use to someone somewhere.

The second part of the question deals with the act of sharing and emotion. For this I have a simpler answer, for those who show an interest and wish to find out more then I am happy to make this information available.

In terms of thoughts and life events- this blog is mainly focused on H800 type 'stuff' so it is unlikely deeply personal or 'life event' topics will come up in my discussions. However, I am always very careful with what I post online in terms of opening myself up- once something is online it stays online, and while I would like to assume people have good intent, the internet is full of a lot of badness- so I would always try to take a conservative/cautious approach to sharing anything. 

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