Why blogs endure: A study of recent college graduates and motivations for blog readership

Abstract

This paper reports the results from a mixed methods study of recent college graduates who were asked if and why they used blogs as sources for continued learning purposes. Findings are based on 1,651 online survey responses and 63 follow-up telephone interviews with young graduates from 10 U.S. colleges and universities. Despite the media’s declarations about the impending demise of the blogosphere, almost two-thirds of the respondents (62 percent) had read blogs to fulfill their learning needs during the past 12 months. Blogs were an affordable source of information to these readers, especially for acquiring additional knowledge and closing skill gaps in their personal lives after college. Results from a logistic regression analysis indicated respondents were more likely to have read blogs during the past 12 months if they needed step-by-step instructions for hobbies, do-it-yourself household repairs, or money management and creating a personal budget. Respondents who used blogs were also more likely to also use complementary sources, such as educational videos on YouTube, to meet their learning needs. The concept of shared utility is introduced as a basis for explaining reasons for use of the blog format, and conclusions are drawn about why blogs, an early Web form, are still useful to millennials as sources of continued learning.

Sharing information through book reviews in blogs

“…Since the 1990s, blogs have developed from online diaries to a major type of social media featuring frequent, medium-length posts, written in an informal style and reflecting an assumption of a community of regular readers, who often comment publicly on them (Head, Van Hoeck and Hostetler, 2017). For example, book blogs provide people with a creative outlet for sharing information with like-minded individuals and connecting members through shared experience.…”

“…In a study on cancer blogs Chung and Kim (2008) found that the strongest motivations for blog use among cancer patients and their companions were emotion management and information sharing. More recently, Head, Van Hoeck and Hostetler (2017) reported the results from a survey where graduates were asked if and why they used blogs as sources for continued learning purposes. The findings suggest that blogs are an affordable source of information to these readers, especially for acquiring additional knowledge and closing skill gaps in their personal lives after college.…”

Healthy eating blog readership: A cross‐sectional survey in Australian adults

“…Currently, there is limited and inconsistent literature describing the demographic profile (i.e., gender, age, body mass index [BMI]) and behaviours of blog readers in general, and more specifically, for those readers who access blogs for nutrition and health-related information. [16][17][18][19] General demographic descriptions of blog readers in both the grey and scientific literature suggest an age profile of between 30 and 49 years, male gender, with a high level of education. 8,[17][18][19] While it is unclear how many active users read blogs, it has been suggested that the number of blog readers surpass blog writers (bloggers).…”

Growing Online: Activist Identities in the “Grow Your Own” English Blogging Community

“…An increasing number of those who grow their own food -the activity known as 'Grow Your Own' (hereafter GYO) -are sharing information about their growing and harvesting experience through social media (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2013;Hearn et al 2013), an umbrella term that refers to a variety of digital platforms such as social networking websites, photo and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, and blogs (Aichner and Jacob 2015). While technology writers have proclaimed the impending death of blogs, depicting them as outdated media, recent research has shown their vitality and long-lasting popularity, and attested to the uniqueness of these online social spaces where users learn from one another (Head et al 2017;Pettigrew, et al, 2016). Despite this, following a proliferation of academic studies focusing on blogs from 2004 to 2008 (Larsson and Hrastinski 2011), scholarly interest in this area seems to have somewhat decreased (Elega and Özad 2018), arguably due to the rise in popularity of competing, more recent online 'self-publication' platforms such as microblogging and social networking websites that offer researchers new opportunities for exploration (Head et al 2017;Pinjamaa and Coye 2016).…”

“…While technology writers have proclaimed the impending death of blogs, depicting them as outdated media, recent research has shown their vitality and long-lasting popularity, and attested to the uniqueness of these online social spaces where users learn from one another (Head et al 2017;Pettigrew, et al, 2016). Despite this, following a proliferation of academic studies focusing on blogs from 2004 to 2008 (Larsson and Hrastinski 2011), scholarly interest in this area seems to have somewhat decreased (Elega and Özad 2018), arguably due to the rise in popularity of competing, more recent online 'self-publication' platforms such as microblogging and social networking websites that offer researchers new opportunities for exploration (Head et al 2017;Pinjamaa and Coye 2016). Although it is challenging to find accurate statistics about blogs due to their highly dynamic and decentralised nature (Schmidt 2007), recent figures provided by the blogging platform Tumblr show that, as of January 2019, the To appear in: Tovares and Gordon (eds) 2020: "Identity and ideology in digital food discourse: Social media interactions across cultural contexts" Bloomsbury.…”