Spilling Open: The Blogging Personality

In the past, the only people who got to widely broadcast information about their lives were celebrities - after all, going on the Johnny Carson show is a pretty fantastic means of disclosing things about yourself to a wide network of people. However, with the broad-based communication tools of social media available to virtually everyone, is Perez Hilton correct in asserting that in the modern setting everyone will be "famous" to fifteen people?

Michael Stefanone (University of Buffalo) and Chyng-Yang Jang (University of Texas, Arlington) took a hard look at personal bloggers - folks who maintain an online presence analogous to an offline diary on a site like LiveJournal or Blogger. This study was conducted in 2007 - right about the time that the social networking savvy were switching from personal blogs to things like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. Jang and Stefanone set out to discover what personality traits personal bloggers possessed, and what sort of effect the blog had on the offline social networks of the bloggers themselves.

Before we talk about the findings of the research, it's worth it to define a central concept of the study. Social scientists often talk about people's "ego-centric networks" - a fancy name for the cloud of friends and acquaintances that you have, which if diagrammed would have you at the center and lots of lines connecting you to other people in your life. Some of these ties are more tenuous, or "weak" - say, a friend you only talk to occasionally, or don't reveal much about yourself to. Other ties are "strong" - you know a lot about one another, and feel a sense of intimacy with each other. Strong ties, or close relationships, are quite "costly" - they involve a great deal of time, involvement, and risk to develop. You have to expend yourself significantly more to cultivate these relationships!

Let's return to Jang and Stefanone. The researchers identified, fairly unsuprisingly, that folks who maintained personal blogs had personalities with high levels of extraversion and high levels of self-disclosure. However, somewhat less logically, the bloggers were significantly "closer" to larger groups of friends. The bloggers were actually using a very "cost-effective" means of disclosing information about themselves to strong-tie ego-centric networks - in other words, they were actually deepening their existing friendships!

This has a fascinating implication: in this  era, people who are both extraverted and who possess a high level of self-disclosure in their personalities now have access to "cost-saving" tools that enable them to develop and maintain more close friendships than the average person would have in the past. In other words, the average person's circle of friends can be bigger than the average person's circle even twenty years ago! 

Do you have any stories of blogging or social media bringing you closer to your offline friends? Any horror stories? Sound off in our comments!