Navel gazing predicts blogging behaviour

In past posts, I’ve looked at various aspects of motivation that influence people and their adoption of social computing tools. Originally, this was influenced by Andrew Boyd’s post on Maslow and meeting social needs. More recently, though, I’ve been looking at Hofstede’s cultural dimensions — Individualism, Collectivism, Power-Distance, etc — and asking the question, “how does culture affect use of social computing tools?” When writing my recent article on this topic, I was looking at descriptions of Individualism and wondered whether it specifically influences blogging behaviour.

Oyserman, Coon and Kemmelmeier [1] showed that core aspects of Individualist beliefs include:

• personal independence
• uniqueness
• competition
• personal achievement and success
• introspection
• emphasis on internal attributes rather than other people’s opinions and indications

It was introspection in particular that started me thinking, “is this why people blog?” Do Individualist beliefs motivate people to gaze away at their proverbial navels?

Andrew’s lean on this was toward achievement and success, saying that his “pick for Maslow’s sustainable motivator of choice for bloggers is Esteem”.

Kimando, though, thinks introspection is behind her musings:

“I have felt that I have nothing much that I want to write about. This is bad not because I delude myself to think that anyone is depending on me writing in my little blog but because the introspection that I do while blogging is good for me.”

I agree with Kimando — introspection drives my blogging behaviour and I suspect the majority of others’ behaviour.

This may suggest that, for those cultures high on the Collectivism index, the networking building aspect is what drives them. This is certainly the activity we see reflected in Korea and their use of websites like CyWorld — where 90% of Korean’s under the age of 20 are said to have accounts. For those cultures high on the Individualism index, though, blogging might well be more their preferred activity.

So, what drives your blogging behaviour? Or even your other social computing habits? And does it reflect your countries cultural dimensions?

M

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[1] Oyserman, D., Coon, H.M. & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking Individualism and Collectivism: Evaluation of Theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 3-72.