One of the bloggers I have interviewed wrote a reflection on the experience a few weeks ago. Because I take samples of bloggers’ articles plus 28 days of comments, I normally don’t come across them until a month after the posting. I like how he called a “dude doing a phd”; a much more comfortable label than academic or theologian, a lot less pressure to start wearing cravats. I was taken particularly by this passage in his post:

Was also interesting thinking about the stage I went through with my blogging where I really cared how many people read my blog, and would fully just make up posts so that my readership wouldn’t go down. Nowadays I couldn’t really be bothered. It was cool seeing my hit counter quadruple in the week after I was on the TV/paper/radio, but nowadays I don’t blog to get readers. If people read my stuff, then sweet, if not, then I’m ok with it.

Funny things blogs.

It reminded me about Cohen’s attack on the criticism that bloggers are narcissistic. In his article A welcome for blogs, he argues that the criticism of narcissism is brought about by a misunderstanding of the relationship between the blogger and his or her audience. For Cohen, as for me, the act of blogging is not just the act of communicating with an audience; there is a process of creating an audience for the utterances and actions in blogging. Just as one chooses one’s clothes in the morning and wonders what would look appropriate for the settings one will find oneself in during the course of the day, a blogger imagines and creates the situation in which his or her article may be read, and manifests it in the posting. The process of creation is supported by the knowledge of an audience that is brought about by the appearance of comments by other people, links made to the blog by other bloggers, etc. Essentially, however, a blogger posts to an audience that is a mixture of known, presumed, and imagined.

Therefore the act of blogging is not merely the projection of a public speech, but the ongoing creation of a blogger, or a blogged identity, for the gaze and interaction of other online identities. it is not the same as the projection of a personality on a TV screen, or at a theatre, where that character/celebrity is an already fashioned item. As Cohen asserts,

blogs appear to be shifting the balance of personality and impersonality in the operation of publics and in the production of public subjects – which is to suggest that blogs are shifting the ground for selfhood tout court. (p. 166)

We do not interact with bloggers as we do with personalities in other media (like radio or TV) where our powers are limited to traditional definitions of “audience”. We can contribute to and change the media content that bloggers provide; we can make ourselves “known” to the blogger. Yet it is also not the same as engaging with another on an IM chat or email list. A blogger’s audience is wider than the list of registered members in a discussion group. We the audience are being created as we the blogger are creating ourselves to engage with it.

If bloggers appear to be narcissistic, if they disturb us for this reason, then is this not a clue that, whatever our opinion of the wine the produce, blogs re-wire the circuits through which we comfortably reflect on ourselves, the ways in which we use intimacy to distinguish self from other, the way in which we care and come to care. (p. 169)