I read an article today about teenagers and blogs. In the short article some figures are presented on the differences between the blogging by youths and adults. Only one out of 14 adults is writing blogs, while there is one out of five youths writing. Even more interesting these figures become for the reading of blogs. Furthermore is one out of four adults reading blogs online, but almost four out of ten youths are reading blogs. That is in itself interesting, yet not surprising as youths seems to be more adaptable to new techniques, which another article partly addresses.
There are however another result presented in the article that is more interesting considering there has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere and then especially questions like What is a blog? How should we blog? The nature of impact by blogging has been discussed a lot, and especially the movement of open source journalism have emphasized the political effect of blogging. It however seems like the youths mainly use the blogging to keep in touch with each other and communicate, which might not be that surprising. Even if the social effect is not the dominating part of blogging it surely is a major part of it.
That makes me wonder if it is not so that the majority of the blogs really are “social blogs”, primarily used in the sense of online diaries, and not for the purpose of ‘marketing’ political ideas, at least not directly. Maybe the blogs are more beginning to take the form of small social communities, bond together by the people that reads and discuss blogs. Thus it seems and partly based on the article mentioned, that the blogs are not part of the new corporate blogging sphere nor part of the open source journalism such as Instapundit. That raises a provocative question without any answer from me…
Is the blogosphere really the major ‘threath’ to the Big Media that everybody says it is?
