The voice of a blog

I've been thinking about voice and blogs a bit recently. First, I've been pondering the idea of a blog's "voice" establishing the personality, or the temperament or in some way identifying the author.  I do wonder about this though, as a blog's voice is often a circumscribed one. A conversation with a friend agonizing over a post yesterday brought this to mind--there are often things in a blog that are specifically not said, or are alluded to cryptically or are stated in such a way that only certain people will understand. Looking back at some of my own posts, I can see these veins of obliqueness running through posts. On a blog, you don't get the immediate feedback of a conversation (nor the cooling off period of a letter), so you can't modify your statements on the fly to adapt to the situation. A blog is much more like making a speech and then hearing the crowd shout in the silence after you've finished. And this impacts how expressive a person is on their blog, particularly if a blogger has privacy concerns or worries about the nature of their audience.

In an article called "Blogging as a Social Activity, or Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?" by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano and Michelle Gumbrecht, the authors quote a blogger who says she found her "voice" by blogging--that the desire/necessity of keeping an audience involved, and thus posting regularly, helped her to become more sure of her textual expressions. Voice here is a combination of the expression of personality and the bravery to express ideas or thoughts--voice as a combination of who you are and what you think.

Another point that Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht make is that blogging is very much like a monologue, or even better, a radio show. The author determines the playlist, but the audience can still call in with requests. The phenomenon of "All Request" days on blogs, where bloggers write posts based on requests via email or in comments from readers, echos the all-request radio show model.

As someone who has had both a radio show (college radio) and a blog, I can say that the metaphor resonates. I remember the first time a caller actually called into my badly slotted show (10am to noon--a bad time slot for the college market) and asked for the name of the song I had just played. A listener! It was the first confirmation that I was sending something that I created (a playlist of songs with a certain mood and deliberate organization and transitions) out into the world through a broadcast medium and that it was actually being received. The first comment on a post I had written had a similar effect. "Someone is actually reading this thing!" The first comment from someone I had never met and had no connection to was another revelation. "People I don't even know are reading this too. Wow."