evolution

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report on its nationwide telephone survey of bloggers today. I was aware of this survey, but the report snuck up on me.

Pew did a survey of bloggers and then did a follow-up survey, which the report says 233 of the original sample (71%). I wonder if 233 bloggers are fully representative of what’s out there on Ted Stevens’s tubes, but I suppose it could provide a healthy cross-section.

What follows are some unfocused thoughts on it as I read it.

54% of bloggers say they haven’t published anything before. I am in that category, and quite frankly, I’m shocked that the percentage isn’t greater, as cheap and easy as blogging is.

I guess I was also a little bit drawn to the fact that among blogging topics, politics finished second to the individual bloggers’ own lives, but I guess that comes from imbibing a steady diet of politics day in and day out. (Blogging experiences of the past days and months are slowly waking me up from that particular fog.)

Another interesting part was the list of reasons people gave for keeping their blogs. The most important was to “express [one]self creatively”, while the least important by far was to make money. I admit that expressing myself was the primary reason to start evolution. It wasn’t always a political blog — look at the archives from about March 2003 and work backward — but I got into it, I suppose, because it’s easy and most people, especially in this polarized age, think about politics to some extent.

Since I am an actual, living, breathing human being, I need something other than politics to keep me going. For me that is the challenge of attempting to entertain you in whatever way I can. I don’t know how successful I’ve been at it, but there you go.

A lot of people (about 30% each) said they started their blogs to influence people’s thinking or as a call to action. I most certainly did not start my own blog because of that, and had I participated in this survey, I would have rated each of these as “no reason at all.” I assume that most of my readers are sane, intelligent adults capable of making logical inferences, and not in need of someone to tell them what to do; I present my own ramblings as food for thought.

The next topic in the report — whether bloggers consider their blogs a form of journalism — seems especially relevant in the light of what I’ve been talking about regarding the role of the media. I don’t consider evolution to be a form of journalism (and I don’t know that I want it to be), as it primarily features my opinion, and I generally don’t consider opinion to be journalism. I do think that a blog can be journalism, to the extent that blog isn’t dependent on it — and many are, utterly.

Another thing that surprised me was that the bloggers in the survey preferred their news to come from sources they perceived were without ideological viewpoints. I’m not saying that’s bad. I simply figured that most bloggers were like most people — they ran for the safety and security provided by one’s own kind. I personally don’t like that way of thinking, so I number among those 24% who actively seek out sources of news that challenge my own political beliefs*, but in those engagements I’ve typically been disappointed. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, because I think it’s important. Incidentally, the percentage of people who said they preferred news sources that reflect their own biases was less (18%) than the percentage who said they sought out opposing views. I think that if the sample size were larger, you’d find that result to be different.

I didn’t find too many other surprises in the report. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, and if you’re interested at all in the blogging world, you should take a look at it for yourself.

*: It’s not clear whether the study means that “news sources” includes blogs. It talks about whether bloggers think blogs are journalism, and then later it seems to separate blogs from “news sources”. I’ve assumed here that “news sources” do include blogs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 22:28 and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.