The Functions of Commenting

When I first heard about "mommybloggers," it was 2005. I had a seriously broken leg and was feeling might sorry for myself. For most people, breaking a bone is relatively straightforward: trip to the ER, x-ray, casting, crutches, and six weeks of itching, aching, and inconvenience. But when it comes to injuring myself, I am not like most people. I do it up, I really do. Break more than one bone? Check. Shatter the bones instead of breaking them cleanly? Check. Surgery? Check. Four months of bedrest? Check. Six months of intensive physical therapy? Check.

I had been directed by doctors to lie 24/7 on a hospital bed wheeled into our family room for the duration. The lower half of the bed was permanently elevated so that my leg would be up in the air and hopefully heal better and faster. I could have watched TV, but it held no appeal. I did, however, have a laptop by my side. And one day, a neighbor of mine stopped by to commiserate with me, and we chatted for a while. In the course of conversation, she mentioned that she was a blogger. “What’s a blogger?,” I asked, Luddite that I was. She explained, and I was intrigued. That night, I found her site and read through a good-sized chunk of her archives. I was hooked.

A few weeks later, still reading her blog, I noticed her blogroll on the sidebar, and, on a whim, I clicked over to Breed 'Em and Weep and Dooce. Hooked. Hooked. Now I was reading three blogs. Reading blogs, but not reading comments. Not writing them, either. I remember wondering why I would ever want to read the comments on someone’s blog. I was interested in reading good writing. It had not yet dawned on me that there might be a community aspect to blogging. I’m a little slow on the uptake.

Time passed, and I discovered a fourth blog, Suburban Bliss. Melissa’s writing was different from the other writers with whom I had become familiar. She wrote more for an audience. She still does. She talks to her audience within her posts. She asks for advice. She asks her readers to stop giving her advice when she’s had enough advice, or the wrong advice. She banters with her readers. One day, her post was a direct response to a comment she had received on an earlier post. Curious, I found the comment that had provoked her post. And, once I read that comment, I had to read the ones that came after. Hooked.

Still, I did not comment myself. I did not have a blog. I did not have any intention of starting my own blog. I thought that one had to have a blog in order to comment on someone else’s blog. I had no idea what I was doing. Months went by, my leg finally healed, I got busier. Life intervened. My blog reading fell off.

Then Jenn wrote this post about her daughter Sophie, who was trying to understand the politics of friendships among girls, and her writing took my breath away. The post was so beautiful and sad and poignant and true and heartbreaking. I just had to tell her how much it had moved me. So, with a bit of trepidation, I wrote a comment, maybe my first, maybe not, but certainly one of my first. And much to my surprise, it wasn’t hard to comment at all! (I sabotage myself this way all the time. I assume that something will be difficult, avoid it for far too long, and then am shocked that it’s not that hard. You’d think I would know better by now. But no.)

Ever since that time when I made my first forays into the world of commenting, I’ve been thinking about why people comment (and why they don’t), and all that thinking has led to… a list. Yes, I'm an inveterate list-maker. This list is my attempt to document and describe some of the functions of commenting. Needless to say, these functions can and do operate in tandem. They are not mutually exclusive.

Functions of Commenting:

• Emotional
The power of the emotions that can be stirred up by reading blogs and viewing blog images has been explored beautifully by HBM in this post, in which she uses the term 'puncture' (or 'punctum,' borrowed from Barthes) to describe the impact of an image (but equally a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or post); it’s a must-read. If a story, an image (as in HBM’s post), or a turn of phrase moves a reader sufficiently, he or she may document that emotional response by commenting. (This is what motivated me to write that comment on Jenn’s post.)

• Self-promotional
Bloggers may comment as a means of directing traffic back towards their own blogs. Because comments include the comment author’s site address, this kind of self-promotion is easy, and, more importantly, when handled deftly, subtle. To the readers of a comment, it would not be clear whether the commenter had commented simply to gain a larger audience, or for any or all of the other reasons I’ve listed here. No blogger wants to be seen as shamelessly and directly promoting his or her blog, and commenting is a kinder, gentler way of achieving the same effect, as long as the comment is meaningful and not too transparent. No one has written about this more honestly than bubandpie did in this post, from which the following is excerpted:

Commenting functioned as currency. It was like free advertising space, right there at the end of every post. I could click my way through the blogosphere, scattering a trail of crumbs wherever I went, hoping that somebody would follow them back home to my blog. (And I put a lot of effort into those crumbs – they had to look all casual and crumbly-like, but really they were laced with as much chocolatey goodness as I could manage without looking like I was trying too hard.)

Interestingly, bubandpie argues that this motivation for commenting recedes as the blogger gains higher status and recognition in the blogosphere. But she’s one of the most well-known bloggers out there, and I’m not sure that her argument would hold for the more typical blogger.

• Representational
Bloggers comment to leave their mark as members of a community with which they identify. In this way, they suggest to others that they believe that they are part of a group. The group may fluctuate: it may simply be the blogging community, or the blogger may have in mind a smaller group within that community. Clues to the group of which the commenter wants to be a representative can be found in the content and, just as important, the tone of the comment.

• Supportive
Parenting bloggers, who are by and large women, find it extremely important to offer support, empathy, and/or sympathy in their commenting. This is likely because women count supporting others as a critical, if not primary, function of their gender role. Whether that is because of innate factors, or because women are fulfilling the societal expectation that they be supportive, isn’t clear.

There are abundant examples of supportive commenting. Most recently, WhyMommy’s battle with inflammatory breast cancer has moved many, many bloggers to leave supportive comments at her site.

I've written more extensively about the supportive function of commenting on my own blog. In this post, I suggested that commenters, when in a supportive mode, enact a role startlingly like that of an ancient Greek chorus.

• Critical
A small number of bloggers who are actively writing short stories or novels explicitly solicit feedback on their work from their readers. Two such bloggers are cce and emily.

Lurking and Delurking:

About a month ago, I conducted an informal survey on my own blog. I asked my lurkers why they lurk. And they were kind enough to delurk in order to respond to my query. I attempted to categorize their answers and came up with this list (I make lists, it's what I do!) of reasons lurkers lurk:

• Time pressures
• Privacy concerns
• No blog of one’s own/no faith in one’s writing (commenting) ability
• Belief that there are already so many comments that one’s comment will get lost in the shuffle/perception that one has nothing unique or interesting to add to the conversation/belief that the post doesn’t lend itself to comments
• Uncertainty about the rules of the blogosphere

Lurkers will delurk when specifically asked to delurk. In fact, one or two of my lurkers wrote that they felt flattered to be singled out, to feel that their thoughts and opinions mattered.

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Phew. Are you still with me? This post, as long as it is (sorry!), barely scratches the surface, I think. Please feel free to weigh in. In other words, to comment. Heh.