Writing Quality Varies With Audience Size

As a new blogger, I am usually the last one to pick up interesting posts like Richard McManus' essay about the fractal blogosphere.  While I have a few minor quibbles (e.g., why call it "fractal," why number the levels when ranking is unnecessary) the concept is quite interesting. 

I've thought a great deal about broadcasting v narrowcasting--it seems to me that broadcast rhetoric loses power in the same way that a broadbeam flashlight is less incisive than a laser.  Witness the 2004 election, in which bigoted anti-gay fearmongering Republican appeals, targeted to a narrow audience with extreme religious views, accomplished more politically than the more tolerant, more mainstream appeals of the Democrats. 

I suspect this observation is quite ho-hum, but what does one do as a teacher/scholar with it?  Because if we really believe that the study of rhetoric is important because it can help people build community, overcome oppression, solve problems, make the world better, etc., the relative weakness of broadcast rhetoric seems a hindrance: someone tailoring language to a few will always get more intense responses than someone trying to persuade (and not offend) many. 

On a more personal level, I've discovered how easy it is to get seduced by technology into obsessing over blog stats.  I started writing this blog for specific reasons:

1. to get into the habit of daily writing and reflection (it seemed less daunting to write in a short blog format than to sit down to a word processor every morning)  Audience: 1
2. to record information about my girls--they are growing so fast!  I'm not sure how I will preserve this info for the future (and if you have ideas, please send them to me!), but already I've written far more using this technology than I ever wrote in the paper & ink journals I was keeping before.  Plus, I find that I attend even more to the wonderful things they do because I'm always looking for something bloggable.  Audience: 2-4 (just me, David, & eventually, girls)
3. to communicate information about my family to far-flung relatives and friends (many of whom are often online). Audience: 4-15 ish

None of these purposes requires a large audience, and normally I don't have a large audience.  I would write in this blog if no one read it (at least, I think I would.)  But those few times my stats go up, it's hard to not feel more "successful" as a blogger.  Even when they go up because of people searching the net for "sentence diagrams" or "Florida voting regulations" and not because people really want to read what I have to say.

I wonder how McManus' observation that writing quality varies by audience quantity can be useful for writing teachers.  One common complaint about assigned writing is that it requires students to write to everybody/nobody, thereby muffling the writer's voice and making the piece less effective.  Yet school writing often has the smallest audience possible: a teacher who may not care as much about what the writing communicates as whether the writer avoids grammatical error.  So the relationship between quality/quantity isn't simple.  Also, McManus didn't outline the qualities of writing unique to each level.  What might they be? 

Do people in less-individualistic cultures feel the same temptation to equate high pageview stats with success?

What would other, non-quantity indicators of a successful weblog look like?  Linking stats are interesting but share the same drawbacks as the pageview stats.  Maybe frequency of return visits (i.e., not the number of return visitors, but the frequency with which return visitors check the site)?  Number of comments? Frequency of posting, or variety of topics?  Is a personal blog more successful if it never attracts a large audience?  Perhaps it's only possible to create individual measures, such as how well the blog posts support the blog purposes.

Comments

[Dylan]

Chuck and I talked about this a while back on his blog. I think the audience aspect of the blogging experience helps give a blog its character. If you go back and read the first few weeks of my blog, it doesn't have the cohesion (I don't think I spelled that right, but I don't have the energy to spell check it. How sad is that?) that my posting now has. Once I began to aquire a regular audience, I found my writing changed a bit to suit the audience. And that is the beauty of the blog for me. It isn't so much that I desire a huge audience, but rather the sort of instant feedback that having an audience gives me. It helps me hone my writing and, while I certainly write what I want to write about, it helps me learn what I write about that is interesting to others.

[Jarrett]

Dylan's right. I started out with intentions/pretenses similar to yours ... "I just need a forum/motivation to write every day" etc ...

But I know I wouldn't do it if nobody were reading. I could do that in my word processor. And I didn't, much.

So welcome to the hall of mirrors. It the only place that any of us can see ourselves anymore.

Peace, Jarrett

[Beth]

But neither of you has kids, right?

I think I might still write in the blog b/c I want to record what my kids are doing. I did keep a paper journal for that purpose before I started blogging. But the paper journal seemed too labor-intensive--all that handwriting on those tiny pages--and it was tough to include photos (I spent a fortune on scrapbook supplies but scrapbooking is even more labor intensive than a journal.)

I also used notepad/word to note what my kids were doing, but those documents are now scattered around various hard drives and I'm not sure what I'll do with them. Print them out, I guess, and stick them with the bound journals.

On the other hand, I concede that having an audience is what makes me *want* to write more often. And having an audience, I'm sure, makes a difference in how I write, or at least, how carefully I write.

Plus, even when I was writing via private technologies, I did have an audience in mind. I figured my kids would someday read what I wrote. According to Thomas Mallon (in A Book of One's Own), no one writes more than a grocery list without expecting an audience eventually.

Plus, to not have an audience when you COULD have an audience (blog) would be much more discouraging than not having an audience when it's impossible to have one (paper).

So . . . I guess you both have convinced me. I would need at least a potential audience to continue writing/blogging, and perhaps I would choose a different technology if I had no audience besides myself.

Thanks for helping me to think further about this.

[Dylan]

I don't have kids. I think blogging is the PERFECT technology for keeping track of goings on with the kids as you they are growing up.

By the way, I gotta tell ya, if my mom or dad had been blogging about me as a kid, when I became an adult, I'd be just as interested in what me being in their lives meant to them and their lives as much as just what I was doing.

I used to journal some, but I could never get myself to do it regularly. I had the same journal for 5 years, and it is about 3/4 of the way full. What blogging allowed me to do was to not take myself so seriously. I think I always did write for an audience (as you suggested) even in private mediums. I was always thinking "that day when I become famous, people are going to find this interesting, so I'd better, in fact, be interesting." Now, because I have an immediate audience, It forces me to ACTUALLY be interesting instead of attempting to be uber-interesting.

[Beth]

"By the way, I gotta tell ya, if my mom or dad had been blogging about me as a kid, when I became an adult, I'd be just as interested in what me being in their lives meant to them and their lives as much as just what I was doing."

What an inspiring comment! Thanks, Dylan! I'll be thinking about how I can do more of this.

[madeline]

I have also noticed that with me, as my stats grow (ie, as I gain new, unknown-ish readers, like you), the "responsiblity" factor as author is ramped up considerably.

By ramped up, I mean in frequency AND in quality. My original posts were heinously scattershot; my voice was scizoid.

I believe that as readership grows (and I *learn* my readership through reading their blogs) I have evolved as a blogger to retain those readers.

Also, RE the blog to track your kids: many bloggers keep mulitple blogs to carve out audiences more cleanly. One blog for family/friends/future, one blog for matters of work, one blog for their fantasy football league, etc. My personal take on public/private blogging begins with my 19 Oct 2004 post (it won't let me link here), mostly in the comments.

My point, I think, is that people who, like us, are insanely busy, cannot afford to make such distinctions, but also that such distinctions are ultimately artificial and rhetorical anyway. Not that rhetorical+artficial=bad, but is simply a result of choice and lifestyle.

Like now, I would continue if I could, but a crying toddler at my knees (and an H still enjoying his Sunday morning sleep in--its nearly 11--prevent me from going any further).

I'm getting ready to organize a time-space geographic study on moms who blog. Interested in helping out?

[Dylan]

I agree with Madeline... Once my readership began to grow, I found myself writing for the audience, and not as much for myself. And as the people who read my blog began to become known (I began to understand their personalities) I found myself writing things with them in mind. The audience/ego factor of blogging is not to be underestimated...

Also... I have low self-esteem, so that might explain it...

[Beth]

I really don't think I could keep more than one blog. It's hard enough to justify the time spent doing this one!

However, I do see the value, since apparently a bunch of my relatives refuse to look at my blog to see news about my kids because I have also written pro-Kerry stuff in here. (! So much for families loving you no matter what.)

And I think it would be easier to write more if I had a more narrowly defined subject/audience because while finding ideas for writing is easy, finding appropriate ideas is tough.

From what everyone is saying, it seems there is little difference between "finding a voice" and "finding an audience." True?

[Dylan]

I guess that is one way to say it, Beth. For me I found that it was more like finding an audience helped me find a voice and finding a voice helped me find an audience. They help refine each other...