Silicon Insider: Teen Blogs
July 9, 2004 -- The Web was supposed to bring us all together in some great digital kumbaya. Thanks to video beheadings and various jihad sites, we all know better than that — except perhaps for the fine job the Internet has done in bringing the world together in a universal hatred of the United States.
But what if there is another, even greater schism emerging in the Web, one that reflects the most fundamental division of all in nature: male versus female?
A clue to that potential fate of the Net can be found in a recent article in the San Jose Mercury-News dealing with the rise of blogging among Silicon Valley's teenagers.
According to the article, a study by the Perseus research firm has found that 52 percent of all Web bloggers (that is, Web diarists) are teenagers. Add kids in their 20s and the number jumps to 92 percent.
The rest, I suspect are hobbiests, shut-ins, compulsives, prisoners and (not that there is much difference from the aforementioned) several hundred mainstream bloggers, as well as a herd of self-proclaimed political pundits. This column, though it pretends to be otherwise, with its regular comments about kids and vacations is essentially a blog too, only on a fancy platform. But leaving us bloviating old fools aside, the real action in blogging these days lies with the kids.
Heartland of Teen Blogging
As you might expect, the heartland of teen blogging, like so many things virtual, is right here in Silicon Valley.
This came as news to me — so, as usual, I consulted my in-house teenager. He made his usual shrug and replied, "You mean, like, Xanga? Well, actually, it's not cool anymore. Everybody's using, like, GreatestJournal and LiveJournal."
Firing up AOL Instant Message, he said, "Here. Lemme show you." He called up the names of some of his friends on AIM, and pointed out, under the individual profiles, the links to various blog sites.
My virtual Virgil then took me a tour of some of these blogs. The experience, as you might expect, is akin to opening someone's diary: the momentary fisson of encountering a person's secret inner existence is quickly replaced by the sheer drudgery of wading through the excruciating and endless details of an average person's average life.
Meanwhile, despite this unexpected epistolary efflorescence — wasn't this supposed to be the post-literate age? So why are we all busy writing e-mails and blogs?
One would expect that, even in this age of public confessions, that there might be some differences between a public blog and a traditional private diary. But, except for a certain restraint about using the name of one's secret, unrequited love, and a predilection by teenaged girls to show they are worldly by using the f-word, I couldn't detect such much change.
Frankly, there are few things in this world more dreary to me than the endless musings, gushing and reminiscences of a teenaged girl. I had certain, er, motivations to listen when I was 15. I have none now. As the guy-saying goes: "Hey, if I cared I'd be a chick." Or, as my son said as he scrolled through the thousands of words and dozens of entries of one girl's blog, "Blah, blah, blah. She hates her life. Blah, blah. Shut up."
At that moment, I had an epiphany.
My oldest son is a born scribbler, likely to become the fifth generation of Malone professional writers. I remember a few months ago that, seemingly out of the blue, he announced that he was going to start a blog. Yet, for all of his budding literary prowess, being a guy, his commitment lasted about three days; just about as long as my one foray into literary journal writing 30 years ago.
Boys Can't Commit
That gave me an idea. I told my son to forget the girl-blogs and show me those created by his buddies. Back to AIM and a new list of strange and crude monikers, then off into the world of boy-blogs.
And just as I expected. Most of the guys had started a blog site, typed in about two weeks worth of increasingly desultory entries — and stopped sometime shortly after. Just about the time my son was talking about starting his own blog site.
The girls had gone on, day after day. They had been dutiful, confessional, endlessly verbal and happy to revisit all of the little details of their day, from what they had for breakfast to the color of their new bedspread that night.
The guys had announced that "Linkin Park Rules!," that "School Sucks" — and then lapsed into lumpen silence forever.
I went back to the Mercury-News story, noting that it centered around a high school boy who created a blog site to carry lengthy entries about his feelings, his crushes and his friendships. Here, it seemed, was a counterargument to the sexual division I was seeing. Then I read on … to discover that this young man had ultimately used his blog to announce to the world that he was gay.
That was my epiphany. For a decade now, ever since the rise of the Web and the tools to navigate it, the Internet has been perceived as an inclusive medium. Sure it was largely inhabited by young males during the early years, but ever since the dot-com boom it's been a pretty ecumenical medium — with women users catching up rapidly with men, and the very young and very old the fastest growing new groups of surfers.
But will it stay that way? The teen blogosphere suggests differently.
Gender Differences
What if the Web begins to bifurcate between a largely verbal Women's Web — online shopping, chat personal journals, education and health (and, according to recent news reports, certain kinds of porn) and a mostly empirical Men's Web — news and box scores, politics, bulletin boards and hard-core?
I'm sexual stereotyping here, but if the last couple decades have reminded us of anything, it is that men and women are indeed different. And if that is true, and as the Web — via cell phones, car dashboards, PDAs and billions of new nodes scattered everywhere — further interpenetrates our private lives, why won't those differences become dominant?
Why won't there be two de facto Webs — one we consider home, the other that we occasionally visit, before scampering home — like our current visits to say, the Lifetime Channel on one hand, and Spike on the other?
My buddy Bob jokingly suggests that we even add a new suffix — dot.Ms and dot.Mr — to every site as a kind of gender warning to visitors.
Is this a good thing or bad? Oh, like most new cultural phenomena, probably both. One thing for certain: It is yet another reminder that all great technologies not only change the world, but ultimately the world changes them as well. No matter how pure the tech, human nature will ultimately pound it, tarnish it, and bend it into a more human form.
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.