Blogging: self presentation and privacy

Mccullagh, K

Abstract

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children’s daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers’ subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the ‘private’ to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so.

Citation

Mccullagh, K. (2008). Blogging: self presentation and privacy. Information and Communications Technology Law, 17(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600830801886984

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Jan 11, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2016
• Journal: Information & Communications Technology Law
• Print ISSN: 1360-0834
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-23
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13600830801886984
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600830801886984