Blogging and Confessional Culture

Level: High School

Objectives:
Examine and discuss how blogging allows teens to feel like they are part of a community, while still maintaining their individualism

Activity Materials List:

• Copies of the article, “My So-Called Blog,” by Emily Nussbaum of The New York Times, at www.nytimes.com
• Internet access for online research

Activity:

“J’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public—announcing a band practice, for instance—he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.”

The above excerpt from Emily Nussbaum’s article, “My So-Called Blog,” poignantly illustrates the re-examination of public and private information, brought to us by the latest craze in confessional culture, blogging. Blogs, or web logs, are online journals. According to Perseus Development, there will be over 10 million blogs up and running by the end of 2004. And about half will belong to teens, ages 13-19. You may be wondering, why spend so much time posting for the unknown?

Have students read Nussbaum’s article, available at www.nytimes.com. For group discussion, ask:

• How does the author describe the average blogger? How does she describe J at the beginning of the article?
• What kind of things do teenagers put on their blogs?
• Who are bloggers writing for?
• The author says bloggers sacrifice their privacy. What do they get in return?
• How has blogging affected J’s life, offline?

To extend the activity, you may wish to have students find and read excerpts from a teen’s blog online. What kinds of things do the bloggers talk about?