No doubt lots of people have seen this story from the ABC website:
Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.
The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.
I won’t go over the same ground that Claudine Ryan does in the story in summarising the research, but I had a quick thought when I read that the population for the survey was drawn from Myspace users. Without having seen the paper, which hopefully has demographic data, I’d imagine that the sample was quite young. It might have been interesting to see if the same effect was found among older people who don’t necessarily either have well developed school/uni peer group networks, or feel as if they should. I’m also not sure that blogging on Myspace is exactly comparable to blogging on other platforms. As a social networking platform, Myspace (and in a different way, Facebook) enables users to access feeds of friends’ blogs, participate in groups and form affiliations, plan and attend events – not necessarily things you can do in the same way or as easily from a standalone blogging application. It seems to me that would impact on any generalisation of the results outside Myspace.
Still, interesting stuff.
Makes sense to me!
I started blogging when newly a parent. I wasnt getting out much at the time.
Made me feel like I was doing something other than change nappies, and trying to put a wailing child to sleep.
It makes sense to me, too, Lefty E, but I’d still like to see a different age cohort surveyed, and also a distinction made between blogging on stand alone and social networking sites.
I noticed that this was after 2 months of regular blogging. It normally takes way longer than that to pick up some decent enmity towards your fellow bloggers.
I’d like to know how the testing would play out on bloggers who have spent several years fighting TeH Crusades or the Culture Wars.
Hell, we’ve all seen what the Shamaham has been reduced to as a result of immersing himself into the Poll Wars.
Musos seem to like Myspace as well. The older people I know on it are those with tunes etc to share.
I tried to stick some of my old band’s songs up, and it worked for a while, but the site kept disappearing for mysterious reasons myspace could never explain when asked.
So, I kinda declared it a waste of time.
Not like the uber- productive time I spend here!
Hmm how old is “older” I wonder?
Though lacking hard evidence I would say older people often would feel uncomfortable on places like MySpace and Facebook.
Before these newer social networking sites, Live Journal was a popular site for a while for a variety of age groups, and older people I knew from a forum posted there but some of the things occurring there were somewhat disturbing…for instance the boards were abuzz when some girl signalled her intention to commit suicide, another girl confessed to having killed her mother.
I think the discomfort comes from the feeling these sites may give some people that they have to self-disclose, with all the security issues that brings with it. Also older people , while maybe wanting a point of contact with relatives and friends, are often not Net-savvy, and these sites require a certain amount of knowledge to use properly. They can of course join a group (Willy Warmer Knitters’ Guild or the like) but this lacks some of the advantages of contributing as an individual.
This is where blogging is probably more likely to be the arena of choice for older people for some time to come.
Facebook has captured (and indeed created) a large market for 25-45 year olds in the social networking space, sorcerer, since it threw open membership to non college kids. In its previous incarnation, it was already being used very heavily by US college faculty, which is probably what put them onto the fact that many of those older than the Myspace demographic would take to a social networking platform.
While I’m predisposed to want to believe the results, I can’t help wondering about the methodology. The followup response rate is pretty low (and at only two months, too), so the results could possibly be readily explained by a simple self-selection bias by the responders. For example, the people who found blogging unrewarding may have chosen not to respond, or may have disappeared off the internet altogether.
A simple but powerful suggestion to science journalists: put a reference at the foot of every article. I realise that would involve finding the actual cite instead of just scanning the press release, but it would sure be conducive to more informed public discourse. The Baker & Moore reference I found is only a Rapid Communication, not a full article, and only talks about a survey of newbies as they signed up to Myspace, with nothing about a two-month followup. Perhaps the followup has yet to be published? Or perhaps I misread – but I’ve re-searched, and just can’t find it.
[Aside: the mean age was 24.5, a bit older than I might have expected for a random Myspace newbie sample.]
Lauredhel, I think the story says the followup has yet to be published. The article is probably based on a press release in advance of publication. It would be very helpful if such articles included either a live link to the paper, or some sort of footnote summarising the methodology.
One of the reasons I like blogging (at the age of 63)is that for all intents and purposes I’m only partially mobile. With all my various ailments. it takes me quite a while to ger from point A to Point B.So apart from communicating with people mostly of like mind mostly on topics that hold my interest, it is a social thing with me. (And I prefer writing to talking face to face). So I suppose that bearsa the research out.
Yeah, a methodological summarisation as a footnote would be nice. I’d also agree with Mark that myspace and Facebook specifically are not really comparable to standalone blogging apps, though I disagree that such app’s can’t enable “users to access feeds of friends’ blogs, participate in groups and form affiliations, plan and attend events”. Nor are standalone blogging app’s similar to like travel network sites which also were born out of exchange students traveling the globe and setting them up in colleges, of which I was one. The first site I began with was WAYN (whereareyounow) which is a social networking site dedicated to travelers. However, I’d hazard a guess that the average age of the user of Wayn has risen since I began on that site.
http://www.wayn.com/
Well, not quite in the same way, Benjo. Nothing about WP tells me when friends’ birthdays are, enables me to invite others to events easily, join groups, etc. Livejournal, which was mentioned above, does do some of those things, but it was an early example of combining a blogging platform with social networking features. And while community formation is a good thing for blogs like this one, it’s not exactly a primary aim. Mind you, it’s become easier to do things like send messages to LPers, invite people to events, etc, since the blog has had a Facebook group.
My whole point is that there is significant imprecision in what the study means by “blogging”, at least going by the report in the article.
Plausable findings but it also might have been the participation in a university survey that boosted their mood. Or was it that they gave more positive answers second time around? (the answers may have changed but the mood may not have – I assume the mood was self reported)