Blogar por quê? Por que blogar?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to answer the question: what makes someone to write about their own inner life and to publicize it in blogs? Before doing the analysis that leads to the answer to this question, it was necessary, as an input to the study, to define what a blog is and specify what it is a personal blog, also called on this work as a confessional blog. Since confessional blogs have certain similarities with other rules of writing found in History from ancient times, an overview of these other forms of narrative was made. To get the answer on what are the motivations for writing confessional blogs, a survey of these motives, found in studies of Brazilian researchers on cyber culture that have these virtual pages as a theme and a empirical research that analyzed the discourse of bloggers who maintain personal web pages and the content of their blogs, was made. It was noted that there is a group of motives always present to promote this practice such as catharsis, the desire to give visibility to their lives, the use of the blog as a space for free expression and the desire to have their text read by others, besides of other motivations more sporadic. Of these, the most frequent were the desire to become a writer, be a form of ‘self’ construction, a motivator of life outside the virtual world and use the blog as a source of entertainment.