Analyzing a Blog Post - Assignment 1

Blogger Gets Real About Real Conversations, Cindy Peckham, January 21, 2018

In his blog post Because Reading is Fundamental, author Jeff Atwood’s target audience seems to be persons, predominantly males who have post secondary education, and are employed in or are very interested in technology, especially coding and programming. This is not to suggest that women of the same mindset are excluded, but rather to acknowledge the current state of affairs that males outnumber females in this particular industry. I gather this information based on the name of the blog, Coding Horror, Programming and Human Factors, and from the side bar ads and links throughout the article which are geared toward programming and coding also. The age was a bit harder to pin down, but I have the sense that it is not aimed at younger generation techies, but rather older ones, no younger than late 20’s up to early 40’s given the overall reflective tone of the article as well as references to terms common to a generation x writer, such as “old school”, and “chat room” and “stream of consciousness”. The vocabulary used in the article, words such as “pagination” and “incentivise” also lead me to believe the audience is at a post secondary level, in addition to the subject mater of the article itself.

The headline does grab the attention as it starts with the word because and you are enticed to read the article to discover the question within the article that the headline has already provided the answer to. The use of imagery is good, even if it is just screen shots of data and comment streams, and given the intended audience, would most likely be satisfactory for them. Although it is a techie piece, the author is careful to pepper the article with just enough academic and industry jargon to connect with the readers without becoming boring or like reading a how to guide. Atwood believes we are tracking and paying attention to the wrong things online as a way of measuring the quality and caliber of conversations. His opinion is that we need to spend less time talking and more time listening, and that reading is the answer. His position is bolstered by supporting research material from independent parties. He not only summarizes the material, but also provides links to the original bodies, which is something not always included in opinion-based blog posts, and serves to improve the overall credibility of his post.

In the first supporting article, Ars Banana Experiment – the author, Ars Technica ran an article and imbedded an experiment into it in which he asked readers to comment “bananas” if they had read that far into the article which was paragraph 7 – the first person to do this was the 93^rd person to comment – and this highlighted the speculation – that most people don’t read the article/blog in it’s entirety before commenting. In the second one, The Slate Experiment – Author Farhad Manjoo collected analytics on real usage to validate his hypothesis that most readers do not finish reading article to the end before commenting.

The material serves to demonstrate his point, that people are too busy talking, rather than listening, but is only as convincing as one will allow themselves to be convinced by two articles. They do however set down a path that a person could take if they wanted to find more evidence of the same on the internet conducting their own research.

Atwood offers some solutions to the problem he as brought to light. To encourage reading he suggests posts could be modified to require readers to do something before commenting, or have the next page load automatically, he suggests we measure and post time spent on an article as a way of measuring reading rather than number of clicks or page loads to improve comment quality and bolster credibility of the commenter. He also suggests rewarding the commenter for reading by creating things like badges. Lastly, he suggests we can update in real time – that is to say he encourages the notion that likes, edits etc., be shown as they happen – to allow for the flow of conversation to occur He ultimately believes reading is the fundamental key throughout our lives that create people who are better listeners not just more talkative.