Blogs

It has been almost a decade since Schau and Gilly (2003) described different ways in which personal web pages facilitate conspicious self-presentation. Since then, digital self-presentation has expanded and evolved into a diverse array of outlets, ranging from online social networks (boyd and Ellison 2007) to reverse chronological online diaries (Serfaty 2004) that are now ordinarily referred to as blogs. Blogs are progressively created personal narratives with textual and/or visual content about a variety of topics such as one’s everyday life, consumption experiences, political punditry, news, fan culture, and other interests (Reed 2005). A blog presents a world as the blogger sees and understands it, concretizes the blogger’s experiences and feelings over time, and provides an extended narrative of identity. Furthermore, bloggers converse with one another through dyadic or more complex forms of interconnectedness (Herring et al. 2005) and create networked, communal narratives (Kozinets et al. 2010). In this chapter, we seek to provide an overview of previous studies on blogging and highlight

potential areas for future research. At the time of this writing, it is estimated that about 166 million blogs are active across the world, with an average of 947,168 posts per day (BlogPulse 2011). While blogging may have already become an everyday practice for many consumers, current research on it is still underdeveloped, and much more is needed in order to understand this important consumer behavior. In the following sections, we will discuss two central issues about blogs and digital consumers: (1) the production of blogs as a medium for expressing and experimenting with consumer identity through representation and reinterpretation of consumption experiences; and (2) the consumption of blogs as cultural resources and cultural catalysts for social influence. Our focus is on personal blogs through which individuals write about their consumption experiences (Arsel and Zhao 2010; Zhao and Belk 2007), rather than content aggregating and filtering blogs or enhanced columns that provide political viewpoints and debates (Herring et al. 2004). We will highlight both emerging issues that characterize the transition from a pre-digital to the digital consumer culture, as well as questions that may bear potential for future research.