Article review

Viégas, F.(2006). Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3).

Critique of the article:
This research study investigates the perceptions of blog authors on issues of privacy and liability. Participants in this study are 492 bloggers who took an online survey composed of 34 Likert-scale questions and 16 open-ended questions. Results were reported mainly through descriptive statistics. Some correlations are also provided. The participants’ answers to the open-ended questions were analyzed and a summary of their content is provided.

The sample of this study has the following characteristics: 63% of the participants were male bloggers; 46.3% were 21-30 years old; 59% were college graduates and 31% attended graduate school; 79% were Caucasian.

Interesting findings regarding blog audience were reported. The bloggers pointed out three main strategies of learning about their audience: comments on their blog, access logs, and links (trackbacks and referrer). Interestingly, there was no correlation found between the frequency of checking access log and the feeling of knowing the audience. Thus, the bloggers who reported checking the access logs did not reported knowing their audience better.
The findings also reveal that bloggers’ perception of their audience does not always reflect the actual audience. The participants’ perceived audience was smaller than the actual audience. This perception is thought to have important implications for online privacy. Thus, the perceived smaller audience could be connected to a tendency to reveal more information on one’s private life. Yet, there is no evidence provided in this article for such a connection. In addition, the article does not discuss strategies of recording the actual audience of the participant bloggers.
Surprisingly, no correlation was found between the frequency of revealing personal info on the blog and the blogger’s attitude towards the persistence of their posts. Thus, those bloggers who post more private info do not necessarily worry more about their entries being maintained online over time.

Although some interesting findings are reported, the article has several flaws. The purpose of this article is not very clearly stated. In addition, the article does not provide information on the statistical procedures employed for data analysis. The sample was large yet the sampling technique did not involve randomization but snowball which is considered a disadvantage in terms of generalizing the findings. However, the author does acknowledge this drawback and cautions against extending these findings to the whole blogging population. Instead she provides detailed description of the sample which allows the readers to have a clear image of the targeted population.