Thursday, October 31, 2019

The Difference between Writer's or Reader's Role Essay

The Difference between Writer's or Reader's Role - Essay Example The printed expression is not anything additional than dark scribbles on a white sheet, and hitherto it is those scribbles that posses the influence to yield functional replies in the humanoid frame. I gained this knowledge, this experience prematurely in life, and I cannot ever, ever disremember it. I reason to myself that I have to be a writer since I relish writing. I am delighted to type and I appreciate knowing the fact that I am not dull but imaginative being.I am inclined to develop my notions by looking at the realm surrounding me, from the dreams inside of me. I make an effort to write in not one continuous time-slot a day but in fact in one unrelenting moment when motivation stirs me. I consider that adverbs and adjectives should not be used frugally but instead should be used robustly, profusely, and without dry spells. They bring the writing to life and invoke the readers to feel like a part and live in the script. To me, personally, a real writer has the impulse to scribble, affection towards linguistics, a class on the use of sentence structure and figures of speech, a varied association with inscription in diverse genera and from dissimilar ancient eras, colossal know-how of the use of jargons, collected with a disposition for selecting words fitting to perspective and spectators, and the talent to inscribe in spite of hindrance and interferences. Impartially placing verses on paper (or onto a computer folder) ensures not that ‘writing’ has occurred.â€Å"Being talented in very simple terms means that you were born to write. You have the gift of the muse, and whatever you might do for a living, you simply have to write something every now and then. To some extent, all of us have that gift, or at least most of us. This is the most probable reason why blogging has become so popular today†(Panter). For a ‘genuine writer’letteringshould not bean activity to do sometime or the other, a flair to be engagednow and then, but in fact a compulsion that boils itself and issensed as instantly as hot and cold.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

What Is Literature Essay Example for Free

What Is Literature Essay I am grateful for help with this book from many people, especially Julian Wolfreys, Jason Wohlstadter, and Barbara Caldwell, my â€Å"Senior Editor† and invaluable assistant at the University of California, Irvine. I thank Simon Critchley for ? rst suggesting that I might write this book for the series he edits, as well as for his careful reading of the manuscript. I am grateful also to the co-editor of the series, Richard Kearney, for a helpful reading of the manuscript. Muna Khogali and Tony Bruce, of Routledge, have been unfailingly generous and courteous. Tony Bruce read the manuscript with care and made useful suggestions. A preliminary version of some of the ideas in this book, especially those in Chapter 4, was presented as a lecture for the Koehn Endowed Lectureship at the University of California, Irvine, in Febuary 2001. The lecture was called â€Å"On the Authority of Literature. † Subsequently, the talk was given as the ? rst annual Lecture on Modern Literature for the Department of English at Baylor University in April, 2001. The lecture was then printed there as a pamphlet for local circulation. I am grateful to my host and sponsor at Baylor, Professor William Davis, for his many kindnesses. Di?  erent versions of the talk were given at two conferences, in August 2001, in the People’s Republic of China: at a triennial conference of the Chinese Association for Sino-Foreign Literary and xi On Literature Cultural Theory, held in Shenyang, and at an International Symposium on Globalizing Comparative Literature, sponsored by Yale and Tsinghua Universities. I thank Professor Wang Ning for arranging these invitations and for many other courtesies. A German translation will be published as my contribution to a research project on â€Å"representative validity,† sponsored by the Zentrum fur Literaturforschung in Berlin. I especially thank Ingo Berensmeyer, as well as other colleagues in Berlin, for the chance to try out my ideas on them. A Bulgarian translation will be published in a Festschrift for Simeon Hadjikosev, of So? a University. I thank Ognyan Kovachev for inviting me, and for other kindnesses. Altogether, my preliminary ideas for Chapter 4 and for some other germs of this book have had the bene? t of many helpful comments and reactions. Finally, I thank the dedicatee of this book for su? ering once more through my ordeals of composition. She had to endure my faraway look, my dreamy absentmindedness. I was dwelling again in imagination on the other side of Alice’s looking-glass or on the deserted island where the Swiss Family Robinson made such an enchanting home. It has taken me a good many months to ? gure out what to say about that experience. Sedgwick, Maine December 15, 2001 xii Acknowledgements What is Literature? One FAREWELL LITERATURE? The end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up. It is about time. It is about, that is, the di? erent epochs of di? erent media. Literature, in spite of its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes. Literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place. These two contradictory premises must govern all serious re? ection â€Å"on literature† these days. What brings about this paradoxical situation? Literature has a history. I mean â€Å"literature† in the sense we in the West use the word in our various languages: â€Å"literature† (French or English) â€Å"letteratura† (Italian), â€Å"literatura† (Spanish), â€Å"Literatur† (German). As Jacques Derrida observes in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, the word literature comes from a Latin stem. It cannot be detached from its Roman-ChristianEuropean roots. Literature in our modern sense, however, appeared in the European West and began in the late seventeenth century, at the earliest. Even then the word did not have its modern meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word â€Å"literature† was ? rst used in our current sense only quite recently. Even a de? nition of â€Å"literature† as including memoirs, history, collections of letters, learned treatises, etc. , as well as poems, printed plays, and 1 On Literature  novels, comes after the time of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755). The restricted sense of literature as just poems, plays, and novels is even more recent. The word â€Å"literature† is de? ned by Johnson exclusively in the now obsolescent sense of â€Å"Acqaintance with ‘letters’ or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture. † One example the OED gives is as late as 1880: â€Å"He was a man of very small literature. † Only by the third de? nition in the OED does one get to: Literary production as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the grounds of beauty of form or emotional effect. This de? nition, says the OED, â€Å"is of very recent emergence both in England and France. † Its establishment may be conveniently dated in the mid-eighteenth century and associated, in England at least, with the work of Joseph and Thomas Wharton (1722–1800; 1728–90). They were hailed by Edmund Gosse, in an essay of 1915–16 (â€Å"Two Pioneers of Romanticism: Joseph and Thomas Wharton†), as giving literature its modern de? nition. Literature in that sense is now coming to an end, as new media gradually replace the printed book. WHAT HAS MADE LITERATURE POSSIBLE? 2 On Literature What are the cultural features that are necessary concomitants of literature as we have known it in the West? Western literature belongs to the age of the printed book and of other print forms like newspapers, magazines, and periodicals generally. Literature is associated with the gradual rise of almost universal literacy in the West. No widespread literacy, no literature. Literacy, furthermore, is associated with the gradual appearance from the seventeenth century onward of Western-style democracies. This means regimes with expanded su? rage, government by legislatures, regulated judicial systems, and fundamental human rights or civil liberties. Such democracies slowly developed more or less universal education. They also allowed citizens more or less free access to printed materials and to the means of printing new ones. This freedom, of course, has never been complete. Various forms of censorship, in even the freest democracies today, limit the power of the printing press. Nevertheless, no technology has ever been more e? ective than the printing press in breaking down class hierarchies of power. The printing press made democratic revolutions like the French Revolution or the American Revolution possible. The Internet is performing a similar function today. The printing and circulation of clandestine newspapers, manifestoes, and emancipatory literary works was essential to those earlier revolutions, just as email, the Internet, the cell phone, and the â€Å"hand-held† will be essential to whatever revolutions we may have from now on. Both these communication regimes are also, of course, powerful instruments of repression. The rise of modern democracies has meant the appearance of the modern nation-state, with its encouragement of a sense of ethnic and linguistic uniformity in each state’s citizens. Modern literature is vernacular literature. It began to appear as the use of Latin as a lingua franca gradually disappeared. Along with the nation-state has gone the notion of national literature, that is, literature written in the language and idiom of a particular country. This concept remains strongly codi? ed in school and university study of literature. It is institutionalized 3 What is Literature? in separate departments of French, German, English, Slavic, Italian, and Spanish. Tremendous resistance exists today to the recon? guration of those departments that will be necessary if they are not simply to disappear. The modern Western concept of literature became ? rmly established at the same time as the appearance of the modern research university. The latter is commonly identi? ed with the founding of the University of Berlin around 1810, under the guidance of a plan devised by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The modern research university has a double charge. One is Wissenschaft, ? nding out the truth about everything. The other is Bildung, training citizens (originally almost exclusively male ones) of a given nation-state in the ethos appropriate for that state. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that the modern concept of literature was created by the research university and by lower-school training in preparation for the university. After all, newspapers, journals, non-university critics and reviewers also contributed, for example Samuel Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. Nevertheless, our sense of literature was strongly shaped by university-trained writers. Examples are the Schlegel brothers in Germany, along with the whole circle of critics and philosophers within German Romanticism. English examples would include William Wordsworth, a Cambridge graduate. His â€Å"Preface to Lyrical Ballads† de? ned poetry and its uses for generations. In the Victorian period Matthew Arnold, trained at Oxford, was a founding force behind English and United States institutionalized study of literature. Arnold’s thinking is still not without force in conservative circles today. Arnold, with some help from the Germans, presided over the transfer from philosophy to literature of the responsibility for Bildung. Literature would shape citizens by giving them 4 On Literature knowledge of what Arnold called â€Å"the best that is known and thought in the world. † This â€Å"best† was, for Arnold, enshrined in canonical Western works from Homer and the Bible to Goethe or Wordsworth. Most people still ? rst hear that there is such a thing as literature from their school teachers. Universities, moreover, have been traditionally charged with the storage, cataloguing, preservation, commentary, and interpretation of literature through the accumulations of books, periodicals, and manuscripts in research libraries and special collections. That was literature’s share in the university’s responsibility for Wissenschaft, as opposed to Bildung. This double responsibility was still very much alive in the literature departments of The Johns Hopkins University when I taught there in the 1950s and 1960s. It has by no means disappeared today. Perhaps the most important feature making literature possible in modern democracies has been freedom of speech. This is the freedom to say, write, or publish more or less anything. Free speech allows everyone to criticize everything, to question everything. It confers the right even to criticize the right to free speech. Literature, in the Western sense, as Jacques Derrida has forcefully argued, depends, moreover, not just on the right to say anything but also on the right not to be held responsible for what one says. How can this be? Since literature belongs to the realm of the imaginary, whatever is said in a literary work can always be claimed to be experimental, hypothetical, cut o? from referential or performative claims. Dostoevsky is not an ax murderer, nor is he advocating ax murder in Crime and Punishment. He is writing a ? ctive work in which he imagines what it might be like to be an ax murderer. A ritual formula is printed at the beginning of many modern detective stories: â€Å"Any 5 What is Literature? resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. †This (often false) claim is not only a safeguard against lawsuits. It also codi? es the freedom from referential responsibility that is an essential feature of literature in the modern sense. A ? nal feature of modern Western literature seemingly contradicts the freedom to say anything. Even though democratic freedom of speech in principle allows anyone to say anything, that freedom has always been severely curtailed, in various ways. Authors during the epoch of printed literature have de facto been held responsible not only for the opinions expressed in literary works but also for such political or social e?ects as those works have had or have been believed to have had. Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have in di? erent ways been held responsible for causing the American Civil War, the former by instilling absurdly outmoded ideas of chivalry in Southern gentry, the latter by decisively encouraging support for the abolition of slavery. Nor are these claims nonsensical. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Chinese translation was one of Mao Tse Tung’s favorite books. Even today, an author would be unlikely to get away before a court of law with a claim that  it is not he or she speaking in a given work but an imaginary character uttering imaginary opinions. Just as important as the development of print culture or the rise of modern democracies in the development of modern Western literature, has been the invention, conventionally associated with Descartes and Locke, of our modern sense of the self. From the Cartesian cogito, followed by the invention of identity, consciousness, and self in Chapter 27, Book II, of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the sovereign. I or Ich of Fichte, to absolute consciousness in Hegel, to the I as 6 On Literature  the agent of the will to power in Nietzsche, to the ego as one element of the self in Freud, to Husserl’s phenomenological ego, to the Dasein of Heidegger, explicitly opposed to the Cartesian ego, but nevertheless a modi? ed form of subjectivity, to the I as the agent of performative utterances such as â€Å"I promise† or â€Å"I bet† in the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others, to the subject not as something abolished but as a problem to be interrogated within deconstructive or postmodern thinking – the whole period of literature’s heyday has depended on one or another idea of the self as a selfconscious and responsible agent. The modern self can be held liable for what it says, thinks, or does, including what it does in the way of writing works of literature. Literature in our conventional sense has also depended on a new sense of the author and of authorship. This was legalized in modern copyright laws. All the salient forms and techniques of literature have, moreover, exploited the new sense of selfhood. Early ? rst-person novels like Robinson Crusoe adopted the direct presentation of interiority characteristic of seventeenth-century Protestant confessional works. Eighteenth-century novels in letters exploited epistolary presentations of subjectivity. Romantic poetry a? rmed a lyric â€Å"I. † Nineteenth-century novels developed sophisticated forms of third-person narration. These allowed a double simultaneous presentation by way of indirect discourse of two subjectivities, that of the narrator, that of the character. Twentieth-century novels present directly in words the â€Å"stream of consciousness† of ? ctional protagonists. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is the paradigmatic case of the latter. 7 What is Literature? THE END OF THE PRINT AGE Most of these features making modern literature possible are now undergoing rapid transformation or putting in question. People are now not so certain of the unity and perdurance of the self, nor so certain that the work can be explained by the authority of the author. Foucault’s â€Å"What is an Author? † and Roland Barthes’s â€Å"The Death of the Author† signaled the end of the old tie between the literary work and its author considered as a unitary self, the real person William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. Literature itself has contributed to the fragmentation of the self. Forces of economic, political, and technological globalization are in many ways bringing about a weakening of the nation-state’s separateness, unity, and integrity. Most countries are now multilingual and multi-ethnic. Nations today are seen to be divided within as well as existing within more permeable borders. American literature now includes works written in Spanish, Chinese, Native American languages, Yiddish, French, and so on, as well as works written in English from within those groups, for example African-American literature. Over sixty minority languages and cultures are recognized in the People’s Republic of China. South Africa after apartheid has eleven o? cial languages, nine African languages along with English and Afrikaans. This recognition of internal division is ending literary study’s institutionalization according to national literatures, each with its presumedly selfenclosed literary history, each written in a single national language. The terrible events of the mid-twentieth century, World War II and the Holocaust, transformed our civilization and Western literature with it. Maurice Blanchot and others have even argued persuasively that literature in the old sense is impossible after the Holocaust. 8 On Literature In addition, technological changes and the concomitant development of new media are bringing about the gradual death of literature in the modern sense of the word. We all know what those new media are: radio, cinema, television, video, and the Internet, soon universal wireless video. A recent workshop I attended in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) brought together American literary scholars and representatives of the Chinese Writers Association. At that meeting it became evident that the most respected and in? uential Chinese writers today are those whose novels or stories are turned into one or another television series. The major monthly journal printing poetry in the PRC has in the last decade declined in circulation from an amazing 700,000 to a â€Å"mere† 30,000, though the proliferation of a dozen or more new in? uential poetry journals mitigates that decline somewhat and is a healthy sign of diversi? cation. Nevertheless, the shift to the new media is decisive. Printed literature used to be a primary way in which citizens of a given nation state were inculcated with the ideals, ideologies, ways of behavior and judgment that made them good citizens. Now that role is being increasingly played, all over the world, for better or for worse, by radio, cinema, television, VCRs, DVDs, and the Internet. This is one explanation for the di? culties literature departments have these days in getting funding. Society no longer needs the university as the primary place where the national ethos is inculcated in citizens. That work used to be done by the humanities departments in colleges and universities, primarily through literary study. Now it is increasingly done by television, radio talk shows, and by cinema. People cannot be reading Charles Dickens or Henry James or Toni Morrison and at the same time watching television or a ? lm on VCR, though some 9 What is Literature? people may claim they can do that. The evidence suggests that people spend more and more time watching television or sur? ng the Internet. More people, by far, probably, have seen the recent ? lms of novels by Austen, Dickens, Trollope, or James than have actually read those works. In some cases (though I wonder how often), people read the book because they have seen the television adaptation. The printed book will retain cultural force for a good while yet, but its reign is clearly ending. The new media are more or less rapidly replacing it. This is not the end of the world, only the dawn of a new one dominated by new media. One of the strongest symptoms of the imminent death of literature is the way younger faculty members, in departments of literature all over the world, are turning in droves from literary study to theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies (? lm, television, etc. ), popular culture studies, Women’s studies, African-American studies, and so on. They often write and teach in ways that are closer to the social sciences than to the humanities as traditionally conceived. Their writing and teaching often marginalizes or ignores literature. This is so even though many of them were trained in old-fashioned literary history and the close reading of canonical texts. These young people are not stupid, nor are they ignorant barbarians. They are not bent on destroying literature nor on destroying literary study. They know better than their elders often do, however, which way the wind is blowing. They have a deep and laudable interest in ? lm or popular culture, partly because it has done so much to form them as what they are. They also have a proleptic sense that traditional literary study is on the way to being declared obsolete by society and by university authorities. This will probably happen not in so 10 On Literature many words. University administrators do not work that way. It will happen by the more e? ective device of withdrawing funding in the name of â€Å"necessary economies† or â€Å"downsizing. † Departments of classics and modern languages other than English, in United States universities, will go ?rst. Indeed, they are in many universities already going, initially through amalgamation. Any United States English department, however, will soon join the rest, if it is foolish enough to go on teaching primarily canonical British literature under the illusion that it is exempt from cuts because it teaches texts in the dominant language of the country. Even the traditional function of the university as the place where libraries store literature from all ages and in all languages, along with secondary material, is now being rapidly usurped by digitized databases. Many of the latter are available to anyone with a computer, a modem, and access to the Internet through a server. More and more literary works are freely available online, through various websites. An example is â€Å"The Voice of the Shuttle,† maintained by Alan Liu and his colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara (http://vos. ucsb. edu/). The Johns Hopkins â€Å"Project Muse† makes a large number of journals available (http:// muse. jhu. edu/journals/index_text. html). A spectacular example of this making obsolete the research library is the William Blake Archive website (http:// www.blakearchive. org/). This is being developed by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. Anyone anywhere who has a computer with an Internet connection (I for example on the remote island o? the coast of Maine where I live most of the year and am writing this) may access, download, and print out spectacularly accurate reproductions of major versions of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and some 11 What is Literature? of his other prophetic books. The original versions of these â€Å"illuminated books† are dispersed in many di? erent research libraries in England and the United States. Formerly they were available only to specialists in Blake, to scholars with a lot of money for research travel. Research libraries will still need to take good care of the originals of all those books and manuscripts. They will less and less function, however, as the primary means of access to those materials. Literature on the computer screen is subtly changed by the new medium. It becomes something other to itself. Literature is changed by the ease of new forms of searching and manipulation, and by each work’s juxtaposition with the innumerable swarm of other images on the Web. These are all on the same plane of immediacy and distance. They are instantaneously brought close and yet made alien, strange, seemingly far away. All sites on the Web, including literary works, dwell together as inhabitants of that non-spatial space we call cyberspace. Manipulating a computer is a radically di? erent bodily activity from holding a book in one’s hands and turning the pages one by one. I have earnestly tried to read literary works on the screen, for example Henry James’s The Sacred Fount. I happened at one moment not to have at hand a printed version of that work, but found one on the Web. I found it di? cult to read it in that form. This no doubt identi? es me as someone whose bodily habits have been permanently wired by the age of the printed book. WHAT THEN IS LITERATURE? 12 On Literature If, on the one hand, literature’s time (as I began by saying) is nearly up, if the handwriting is on the wall, or rather if the pixels are on the computer screen, on the other hand, literature or â€Å"the literary† is (as I also began by saying) universal and perennial. It is a certain use of words or other signs that exists in some form or other in any human culture at any time. Literature in the ? rst sense, as a Western cultural institution, is a special, historically conditioned form of literature in the second sense. In the second sense, literature is a universal aptitude for words or other signs to be taken as literature. About the political and social utility, import, e? ectiveness of literature I shall write later, in Chapter 4, â€Å"Why Read Literature? † At this point my goal is to identify what sort of thing literature is. What then is literature? What is that â€Å"certain use of words or other signs† we call literary? What does it mean to take a text â€Å"as literature†? These questions have often been asked. They almost seem like non-questions. Everyone knows what literature is. It is all those novels, poems, and plays that are designated as literature by libraries, by the media, by commercial and university presses, and by teachers and scholars in schools and universities. To say that does not help much, however. It suggests that literature is whatever is designated as literature. There is some truth to that. Literature is whatever bookstores put in the shelves marked â€Å"Literature† or some subset of that: â€Å"Classics,† â€Å"Poetry,† â€Å"Fiction,† â€Å"Mysteries,† and so on. It is nevertheless also the case that certain formal features allow anyone dwelling within Western culture to say with conviction, â€Å"This is a novel,† or â€Å"This is a poem,† or â€Å"This is a play. † Title pages, aspects of print format, for example the printing of poetry in lines with capitals at the beginning of each line, are as important in segregating literature from other print forms as internal features of language that tell the adept reader he or she has a literary work in hand. The co-presence of all these features allows certain collocations of  13 What is Literature? printed words to be taken as literature. Such writings can be used as literature, by those who are adept at doing that. What does it mean to â€Å"use a text as literature†? Readers of Proust will remember the account at the beginning of A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) of the magic lantern his hero, Marcel, had as a child. It projected on Marcel’s walls and even on his doorknob images of the villainous Golo and the unfortunate Genevieve de Brabant, brought into his bedroom from the Merovingian past. My version of that was a box of stereopticon photographs, probably by Matthew Brady, of American Civil War scenes. As a child, I was allowed to look at these at my maternal grandparents’ farm in Virginia. My great-grandfather was a soldier in the Confederate Army. I did not know that then, though I was told that a great-uncle had been killed in the Second Battle of Bull Run. I remember in those awful pictures as much the dead horses as the bodies of dead soldiers. Far more important for me as magic lanterns, however, were the books my mother read to me and that I then  learned to read for myself. When I was a child I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson had an author. To me it seemed a collection of words fallen from the sky and into my hands. Those words allowed me magical access to a pre-existing world of people and their adventures. The words transported me there. The book wielded what Simon During, in Modern Enchantments, calls in his subtitle, â€Å"the cultural power of secular magic. † I am not sure, however, that secular and sacred magics can be all that easily distinguished. This other world I reached through reading The Swiss Family Robinson, it seemed to me, did not depend for its existence on the words of the book, even though those words were my only window on that virtual reality. The 14 On Literature LITERATURE AS A CERTAIN USE OF WORDS Literature exploits a certain potentiality in human beings as sign-using animals. A sign, for example a word, functions in the absence of the thing named to designate that thing, to â€Å"refer to it,† as linguists say. Reference is an inalienable aspect of words. When we say that a word functions in the absence of the thing to name the thing, the natural assumption is that the thing named exists. It is really there, somewhere or other, perhaps not all that far away. We need words or other signs to substitute for things while those things are temporarily absent. If I am out walking, for example, and see a sign with the 15 What is Literature? window, I would now say, no doubt shaped that reality through various rhetorical devices. The window was not entirely colorless and transparent. I was, however, blissfully unaware of that. I saw through the words to what  seemed to me beyond them and not dependent on them, even though I could get there in no other way than by reading those words. I resented being told that the name on the title page was that of the â€Å"author† who had made it all up. Whether many other people have had the same experience, I do not know, but I confess to being curious to ? nd out. It is not too much to say that this whole book has been written to account for this experience. Was it no more than childish naivete, or was I responding, in however childish a way, to something essential about literature? Now I am older and wiser. I know that The Swiss Family Robinson was written in German by a Swiss author, Johann David Wyss (1743 –1818), and that I was reading an English translation. Nevertheless, I believe my childhood experience had validity. It can serve as a clue to answering the question, â€Å"What is literature? † word â€Å"Gate,† I assume that somewhere nearby is an actual gate that I can see with my eyes and grasp with my hands to open or shut it, once I get in sight of it and get my hands on it. This is especially the case if the word â€Å"Gate† on the sign is accompanied by a pointing arrow and the words â€Å"? mile,† or something of the sort. The real, tangible, usable gate is a quarter of a mile away, out of sight in the woods. The sign, however, promises that if I follow the arrow I shall soon be face to face with the gate. The word â€Å"gate† is charged with signifying power by its reference to real gates. Of course, the word’s meaning is also generated by that word’s place in a complex di? erential system of words in a given language. That system distinguishes â€Å"gate† from all other words. The word â€Å"gate,† however, once it is charged with signi? cance by its reference to real gates, retains its signi? cance or signifying function even if the gate is not there at all. The sign has meaning even if it is a lie put up by someone to lead me astray on my walk. The word â€Å"Gate† on the sign then refers to a phantom gate that is not there anywhere in the phenomenal world. Literature exploits this extraordinary power of words to go on signifying in the total absence of any phenomenal referent. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s quaint terminology, literature makes use of a â€Å"non-transcendent† orientation of words. Sartre meant by this that the words of a literary work do not transcend themselves toward the phenomenal things to which they refer. The whole power of literature is there in the simplest word or sentence used in this ? ctitious way. Franz Kafka testi? ed to this power. He said that the entire potentiality of literature to create a world out of words is there in a sentence like, â€Å"He opened the window. † Kafka’s ? rst great masterpiece, â€Å"The Judgment,† uses that power at 16 On Literature the end of its ? rst paragraph. There the protagonist, Georg Bendemann, is shown sitting â€Å"with one elbow propped on his desk . . . looking out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank with their tender green. † Stephane Mallarme gave witness to the same amazing magic of words, in this case a single word. In a famous formulation, he pronounced: â€Å"I say: a ? ower! and, outside the forgetting to which my voice relegates any contour, in the form of something other than known callices, musically there rises, the suave idea itself, the absence of all bouquets. † Words used as signi? ers without referents generate with amazing ease people with subjectivities, things, places, actions, all the paraphernalia of poems, plays, and novels with which adept readers are familiar.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Role of Blog Marketing in Consumer Decision Making Process

Role of Blog Marketing in Consumer Decision Making Process A FUTURE MARKETING PERSPECTIVE The phenomenon of blogs is growing rapidly and is expected to increase even in a more rapid pace (Technorati, 2006, November 6). As Wright (2006) discuss; blogs provides a new way of communicating with customers, as customers want to be talked with, not to. Companies have newly started to pay attention to this and as a result, the concept of Blog marketing has been born. The use of blogs as a communication tool has the huge importance for companies to understand how consumers use blogs in their decision making. The purpose of this paper is to understand and explore how and why consumers use blogs in their decision making process. Interview technique was used on young adults, as research suggests that this population use blogs the most (Tremayne, 2007). It was identified that consumers use blogs throughout their decision making. Within the consumers decision making, collaborative blogs was mostly used as the consumers because it cover specific topic of interest for the consumers. Consumers were found mainly writing in the blogs when they had knowledge to contribute with or when they needed information that they could not otherwise find in the blogs. It was identified that consumers turned to groups they belonged to, so called normative group, or they turned to groups that they did not belong to, so called comparative groups. These groups influenced the consumer by providing them with knowledge and by giving them positive and negative confirmation on their choice of purchase. However normative groups also persuaded the consumer to buy products in order to belong to the group. Besides this, a pattern of characteristics of the individuals that the consumer blogged with were noticed. Consumers wanted user experiences and thus the vast majority of these individuals they turned to, seemed to be consumers themselves, with relevant product experiences. The consumers also seem to blog more with certain individuals, whose opinions were valued more. These individuals often shared the latest information on products. Lastly it was also identified that consumers seemed to be selective when reading blog posts. The blog posts needed to contain detailed- and up-to-date information. Moreover, consumers wanted blog post to be written by other consumers because they saw them as more credible then companies. The consumers also chose to read blog posts that show similarities between the consumer and the blogger in terms of either usage pattern of product or preference for product choices. INTRODUCTION Ever since the internet was introduced for the general public during the 1990s, people have used it as a source of information. Majority of the population in India use internet in order to get information regarding products and services. However most statistics available does not tell how the consumers use the internet and what kind of information they search for. There are many different sources of information online, for example company web pages, communities, blogs etc. The concept of blogs and blogging is a relatively new phenomenon in todays society and it has not really been explored before. Nevertheless, magazines are today filled with articles on the importance for companies to start blogging and join the communication of the future, if they do not want to loose ground to their competitors (Lindstedt, 2005, November). The major blog search engine, Technorati, shows some interesting facts on the number of blogs and its growth. In October, 2006, Technorati counted 57 million blogs and a growth rate of one hundred thousand new blogs per day. This number is expected to keep growing and double every eight month (Technorati, 2006, November 6). However, when it comes to the number of blogs in India, there is uncertainty. Different articles talk about a wide interval of blogs, starting at around 18,000 (Lindstedt, 2005, August) and counting up to more then hundred thousands (Johansson, 2007). The reason to this wide span is due to the lack of a clear definition on what a blog is and also the fact that the figures are 18 months apart from each other. But the fact is that the tremendous growth of blogs worldwide also is true for India. India contains actors like Twitter, Facebook and MSN spaces whom all contain blogs and allow for a creation of your own blog. As a result of this growth, blog marketing has emerged as a new innovative way to create closer relationship with customers. It has also given the consumers the possibility to discuss amongst each other. Blog marketing allows marketers to establish closer relationships with its segment. Today limited research has been made within the concept of blog marketing. Furthermore, all research that has been conducted has had the focus on how companies can use blogs in order to interact with consumers. Something that has not been considered, and has been taken for granted, is the issue of how consumers use blogs in their decision making. Moreover, how consumers consider the information that is being transmitted on the blog has not yet been explored. The truth could be that consumers use blogs in a way that companies have not thought about. The existing use of blog marketing could thus miss its objectives if companies do not know how their audience perceives it. PROBLEM DISCUSSION The paper focuses on consumer decision making process and tried to explore how consumers use blogs in this process. As there is not so much work done on the area, this increases the importance to conduct such study. Blogs provides a new way of communicating with customers (Wright, 2006). In order to use this communication tool, it is of big importance for companies to understand how consumers use blogs in their decision making. The focus on the consumer decision making process in the context of blog is of importance for several reasons. It is today unclear how and in what stages consumers use blogs in their decision making process. An overview of the literature shows that not much research has been done within this subject. Traditional marketing tools such as advertising, sales promotion etc have different impact in the different stages of the consumer decision making process. But it is unclear what impact blogging has in those stages. By mapping out this information, companies can learn how to use their marketing in a new and innovative way to appeal consumers. Moreover, whatever research is conducted is from company perspective. To be successful in blog marketing, activities needs to be shaped in accordance to consumers blog usage. If companies learn how blogs are used, they can benefit in several ways like they can engage in the viral marketing on the blogs to create knowledge of their products, or can listen on why consumers prefer competitors products. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK What is Blog? A blog is a web page that contains regularly posted inlays that are archived and arranged in reversed chronological order (Wright 2006). They are user-friendly, inexpensive, self-publication of content for a potentially vast audience on the web. The entries in the blogs are called blog posts. Blogs are more flexible and interactive than previous publication print and digital formats. They contain numerous hyperlinks that are often accompanied by comments regarding the destination of the link. Blogs are designed to be a part of a network where they are connected to each other through links, which are generally related to the content. The readers then have the possibility to comment on the blog posts. Blogosphere is the term used to describe the global network of blog postings. Blogs can be thought of as a gateway to vast sources of information where users may respond to a blogger by sending comments and links to additional information. In this sense, it is fulfilling many needs (Trema yne, 2007). Type of Blogs Diary blog A diary blog is a web based tool that gives the author the possibility to post information for consumption for others. Also, diary blogs gives the reader the possibility to add comments regarding its content; however, this is not applicable for all diary blogs. The authors that are writing on a diary blog all have different opinions regarding things and express their view of whatever they are writing about. This is a demonstration to the personal and dynamic capacity of a diary blog according to Searles and Sifry (2002). Pomerantz and Stutzman, (2006) describes diary blogs as web pages that arranges discrete posts that contains chunks of information that may contain images, multimedia and text. According to Lamshed, Berry and Armstrong (2002) diary blogs are very personal and if the reader does not like the author and his/her opinion, it may not interest them enough to return. The blogger can use the diary blog for personal enjoyment and archive the happenings in their li ves. Collaborative blog It contains information that is posted by several individuals not just one author. In collaborative blogs, readers have the possibility to contribute with links or posts comments, in order to participate with their opinions, answers and questions. Most collaborative blogs focus on a specific topic, and the authors can be both regular people as well as experts within the topic (Holtz and Demopoulos, 2006). The collaborative blogs are an online group created by the bloggers in the blogosphere. These groups have focus on certain topics in order to encourage readers to correspond to each other, which is similar to a normal discussion group. The purpose, according to Lamshed et al. (2002), is to break down the barriers between people and to extend the blog to more than just one author, in order to create a discussion among its members. Collaborative blogs have standard rules about participation in order to avoid development of poor quality content, which do not encoura ge new and current readers to come back on a regular basis. Company blog It include two types of blogs, product and customer service blog. Product blogs can consist of different approaches. One approach is to provide updates about the product so customers can receive the latest information. A second approach is to provide customers with insights and information directly from those who are responsible for the products. A product blog that keeps customers updated can build loyalty to the product and the brand/company. The customer service blog is rather similar to product blogs, but customer service blogs focus completely on issues on the already purchased products. The customer service blogs is a channel in order to address the issues on the products to the customers that have purchased the product (Holtz and Demopoulos, 2006). When the first blogs appeared in the late 1990s, they were primary web pages that contained many links, offering mostly â€Å"personal information† and easy to update. The blogosphere has been expanding rapidly over the last few years. According to the New York Times and Pew Research, nearly one blog per second is created (Tremayne, 2007). The Current Scenario People have blogged long before the term was coined, but the trend gained force with the introduction of automated published systems, especially Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and increase the publishing process. People started using the blogs because they wanted to express themselves about mentioned events. Blogging about events has attracted the attention of the mainstream news media, further contributing to the popularisation and adoption of this new phenomenon of computer mediated communication. Today the blogging in the blogosphere concerns business, for example about markets, customer service, product etc. (Tremayne, 2007). According to the search engine Technorati (2006, November 6) there were more than 57 million blogs available on the internet as of the end of October 2006. Approximately 12% of those blogs had posted comments or links. Research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project presented by Tremayne (2007) also indicates that blog readers today are similar to the early adopters of the internet and other new communication technologies. The bloggers are young, well-educated and more likely to be males. According to Tremayne (2007) the development of blogs seems to follow the traditionally diffusion path of successful new communication technologies and users with great interest in technology. The final step to become a part of the broader public of the internet community is then to shift to the general internet users. The new stage of the development of blogs is the business sector. Business has become a new phase of the communications that appears on the blogosphere today. Bloggers communicate and share information to each other since blogs are the new ways for customers to reach out to the companies. This scenario has made the companies more alert to listen to their customers demands through the blogosphere. Enterprises now have the opportunity to gain new knowledge from the customer and to gain an idea about what the customers are saying about them (Tremayne, 2007). Observations have been done on why internet users connect to blogs. Blogs seem to encourage a sense of community, especially for those who seek more in-depth information than what is available through traditional media. Blog content generally reflects the bias of the blogger, who tends to take one side of an issue. Furthermore it contains a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals. Information seeking is also a reason for accessing blogs. Bloggers provide the latest news and analysis by experts and other with inside knowledge, some of which is glossed over or omitted by the traditional channels. Blog users can also frequently use one certain blog due to they follow a story for a longer period of time than that they would be able to do if the story came from traditional media (Tremayne, 2007). Blog as mode of Communication In business, companies are required to communicate with their customer and have a strategy for the implementation of the chosen approach (Kotler et al. 2005). Communication with customer can take many forms, such as advertising, mailed brochures, sales promotion and personal selling etc. The marketers are often those who conduct this communication. They are often perceived as people with something to sell; they express what is good, great and irresistible with the product/service (Varey 2002). Blog enjoys characteristics of different types of flow of communication like: It enjoys characteristics of One-step flow of communication as: Flow of information from company to the target audience (Fill 1999, Harrell et al 1999, Ottesen 2001). It is non-personal communication since the message is carried without personal involvement by Kotler et al. (2005). All consumers are exposed to the same message at the very same time. It follows the principle of Mass Communication (Fill 1999). It enjoys characteristics of Two-step flow of communication as: In this information goes from the sender to certain receivers, that in turn reach the target audience through interpersonal networks (Fill 1999). Mass communication reaches the target audience, opinion leaders and opinion formers are there to strengthen the influence of the message (Blackwell 2001). Blogs helps the opinion formers and leaders in reaching targets that were missed by the traditional mass communication. It enjoys characteristics of Multiple-step flow of communication as: It overcomes the problem of two-step flow of information that neither allow the information to flow between individuals in the target audience, nor it includes the communication between the original senders, via a consumer, to the opinion leader and then passed on to other consumers. It adds the function of gatekeepers, who are people in a position able to decide whether or not the target audience will be able to take part of the message. Relationship between Blog and Word of mouth (WOM) WOM is defined by (Blackwell et al 2001 p.404) as â€Å"the informal transmission of ideas, comments, opinions, and information between two people, neither one of which is a marketer†. According to them, both the sender and the receiver gains from WOM, which is supported by Fill (1999), who also argues for the above. The benefits for the receiver are rather straight-forward; as they gain lots of information they would not be able to obtain otherwise. The benefits for the sender can be a little vaguer at first glance, but according to both Blackwell et al (2001) and Fill (1999) people like to talk about the purchases for a number of reasons, such as confirmation, satisfaction, status etc; which is what the purpose of blogs. According to Blackwell et al (2001) the affect of WOM has increased rapidly due to Internet. Consumers of today are able to spread the word of something faster and further than ever before. Schindler and Bickart (2005) discuss that the traditional WOM and online WOM differs in the strength of ties between consumers when they are exchanging information between each other. Granovetter (1973) previously argued that the strength of ties between two individuals is a function of the amount of time spent together, the emotional intensity and degree of intimacy in the relationship. Following this discussion, online WOM is characterized by weak ties. Weak ties then provide three possible benefits for the consumer. Friedkin (1982) argues that it first provides a potential input for a decision. Second, consumer information should be more diverse then that coming from stronger ties. Thirdly, it also gives consumers the opportunity to gain access to expertise which they normally would not get access to (Constant, Sproull and Kiesler, 1997). One downside is however, that consumers do not know the motives of the person that provides the online WOM. It can be difficult to access the in formants background and expertise in the topic (Schindler and Bickart, 2005). Consumer Decision Making Process The consumer decision making process provides a general description on how a purchase decision is made. Consumers does not necessarily go through all the stages for all the kinds of decisions they make, and neither do they always go through the stages in the very specific order that is presented below (Blackwell et al 2001). The process consists of mainly five steps (need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase and the post-purchase process) according to most researchers within the field (Blackwell et al. 2001, Statt 1997, Kotler et al. 2005), but there are number of factors that affects the consumer in their purchasing process. Consumer are affected by individual determinants (Blackwell et al., 2001) and physical factors (Harell Frazier, 1999) because they are different, have different experiences and motivations, therefore, they will interpret things differently. Also consumers differ in available resources and knowledge which will further affect thei r decision. Another aspect that affects the consumers is the environmental influences (Blackwell et al., 2001) and societal and social factors (Harell et al., 1999). Here the authors talk about external factors that affect consumer, such as culture, social class and reference groups, but also the influence of the family and other individuals by whom the consumer is affected because every individual strive to some extent â€Å"fit in† heavily affect consumers. Also the information provided by these groups tend to have high credibility, depending on the consumers need to belong. Lastly, consumers are also affected by their degree of involvement (Harell et al. 1999). Involvement is the degree to which the consumers perceive the purchase to be of importance to them, and how complex they find the purchase situation (Blackwell et al 2001). The more complex the purchase, the more effort will be needed from the consumer in order to make a good decision. The involvement in turn affects the way in which consumes will learn about the products. Since a low involvement purchase is fairly routine consumers do not engage in a very extensive information search on the product, they mainly gather their information passively. A high-involvement purchase will demand more from the consumer and they will be more motivated to actively search for information. LITERATURE REVIEW Bickart Schindler (2001) investigated the WOM in online forums on the Internet. They assigned students to look at either corporate web pages or consumer forums about specific products. They found that after one semester, there was a higher interest in the product category for those who used the online discussion forum. They then suggested that a reason for this was because the content posts in the online discussion forums are thought to be more credible and more relevant but also having more empathy among its readers. In another study, Bickart Schindler (2005) tried to explore the consumer use of online WOM. They found three motives for using online WOM a) To gain information on purchase decisions, in which consumer reviews and negative information was of most interest; b) To get support from decision already made in which positive was used most for confirmation of that the right choice have been made; and c) Whether information was searched for fun or not. Another theme they discovered was the evaluation of the content of information in online WOM. They identified, corporate web pages are more biased and untrustworthy. Independent web pages free from corporate marketing, in which detailed information and authentic first person experience was viewed more credible and reliable. A consensus of agreement among consumers in the online WOM also tended to increase the credibility. Finally, they found online WOM disperse more information in all stages of consumer decision-making process. During the nee d recognition, when product was mentioned, it sometimes stimulated interest or problem recognition for the consumer. Other consumers sometimes provide ideas that lead for alternative product to be included, or removed, in the consumer consideration set. Online WOM also suggested important attributes that could influence the criteria of which alternatives are compared. Information from consumers on how alternative rate on those criteria was also of importance when comparing alternatives. After purchase was done, online WOM information could increase the consumers satisfaction of the purchase through positive information. They also discovered that their informants were selective in their information gathering process. This was done to simplify the information but also to help them absorb the information with amount of consumer information about a large area of different products. They continue and suggest that future research should look deeper into what characterise the content in those online WOM consumers choose to read. Bernhad, Bjurling and Ã…hrà ©n (2006) did another study on un-addressed consumer complaints through blogs. They found that the blog is used as a way to express dissatisfaction on companies and their products and services. It is used when the consumer do not get enough amendments from the companies. Blogs then works as a complement to complaints through friends and family, and it is an easy way to ease the consumers experiences and reduce the stress of a distasteful treatment from companies. The consumers have then used blog to warn other consumers on products and companies but also to tell their own story regarding the complaint. Bernhad et al. (2006) discuss that the technical development has reduced the barriers to complain and this had led to increased likelihood to present complains for products of less value. Wallstà ©n (2005) then comes to the conclusion that the collaborative blogs increase the learning process in which people can learn from each other by reading blog pos t. It also gives a shared knowledge base for the participants. In another study by Constant, et al. (1997) weak-tie sources were found to make it harder for consumers to assess the quality of the WOM information they received. Schindler and Bickart (2005) then discuss that the reason for this may be that the consumer do not know the motives of the informant and it may also sometimes be hard to assess the background and expertise in the topic of the informant. RESEARCH METHOD Research approach As the purpose of study is to understand how consumers perceive their own experiences and behaviour which can be best analysed through inductive approach. As this approach allows researcher to have more flexible structure that will permit alternative explanations of the phenomena. This approach is qualitative in nature that begins with data. It develops an empirical generalisation that describes patterns of that data and it seeks to identify or develop a theoretical proposition that is consistent with those patterns (Schutt, 1996). Research Strategy Putting emphasis on the inductive approach, research strategy of the paper is built on an exploratory study, though it also includes a cross-sectional study as interviews were held over a short period of time (Saunders et al. 2003). As the paper does not allow for sufficient time for conducting a longitudinal study and it is not intended to study the effects of change and development of the blogging phenomena on the consumers decision making process, a cross-sectional study is more appropriate. As the purpose of paper is from the consumers perspective, qualitative research method will enable us to get information from the informants and will allow us to understand the meaning that the informants attach to their experiences of blogging. Description is based on the meanings that informants express through words. A qualitative approach will allow getting this non-standardised data without being locked into a standardised set of questions. This is because the nature of the questions will need to be flexible and open-ended in order to explore what emerges during the interview. Furthermore, to get a rich description of this non-standardised data and to get into the thoughts of our informants, the interviews will need to allow a long length of time. Sample selection The sample selection consists of young educated adults; as previous research suggests they use blogs the most. The sample size consisted of nine people within the ages of 21 to 28. Of those nine people, three are females and six are males. Judgement sampling technique was used for identifying the informants who had rich experiences of blogging. The low number of informants can be justified by this as it allows getting a richer description of the phenomena studied. Data collection This primary data has been collected through interviews which are qualitative (semi-structured and in-depth) in nature. Limited research that exists and relates to our study has been used as secondary data. To check the effectiveness of semi-structured interview, two pilot studies were conducted. First semi-structured interview uses too much theoretical jargons that fail in retrieving the information. The second test then avoided the theoretical jargon and explanations. To get a rich description, informants were briefed two days prior on the themes to be covered in the interview. It was ensured that each informant had read the information letter before the interview took place. The informants were interviewed in two different ways -a) 6 informants were interviewed face-to-face in quiet rooms and conversations were recorded; and b) remaining 3 informants were interviewed through Skype because of distance and conversations were again recorded. However, attempt was made to conduct all interviews face-to-face as it enables to establish personal contact which is also important as Saunders et al (2003) argue; qualitative data favours the establishment of personal contact. It was also judged that the face-to-face contact would increase the likelihood of describing and identifying our informants accurately. In all cases, focus was on recording the findings from the interview as the findings emerged naturally. To really understand the informants meanings to their experiences and actions, flexible approach was used within the semi-structured interview. Although questions were bound to the themes, questions were flexible to allow an understanding of the participant. DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS Data is presented through sectioning each interview individually. Collected raw data was put into categories and themes that emerged from the interview as need is to have a close understanding to our informants. Information collected and compiled under each category will be compared with other categories. This helps in identifying relationships; in discovering key themes, and recognising patterns and trends. Later on, theoretical framework will be applied on those patterns in order to understand it in a new way. Quotes will be made to simplify the meaning and in drawing conclusions. Empirical Findings a) Interview with Reema Sharma: Reema, 25 years old, was interviewed at her office in Jammu and studying at Jammu University. She uses blogs when she wants to buy something new or wants to find out different type of products available. She also uses blogs for reading travel diaries for fun and to be in touch with people she knows. When it comes to blogging about a future purchase, she reads blogs by people who are in the same situation as her and that have experience from the things she is interested in. She blogs travels but sometimes for electronics products and hiking. She has never used blogs actively, she only reads them. The kind of blogs she uses is mainly product blogs, and collaborative blogs, where she can read and learn more. She does not really read the blogs from companies. Rarely she reads a blog and completely changes her mind. The blog can instead make her choose a different brand. Relationship with bloggers: For her, the blogger is just someone whose blog she happens to find. Reema trusts all the information that is written in the blogs, but she explains that the more detailed description on how the product has been used, the more she relies on the inlay. People whose blogs she reads most often posses greater knowledge then her, within the subject. Need and awareness discovered with blogs:Reema agrees that she discovers a lot of new kinds of products, but this has never actually evolved to a need. This has occurred, for example, when she has blogged about hiking gear, she has learned about many new products and the advantaged with those products, but as she is not very experienced in the area, many of those products are just too complicated. However, the blogs she reads regarding travels could actually create a need sometimes. From these blogs she learns more about possible places to travel to which she might visit later in her life she explains. Blogging for information and evaluation of potential purchase: Reema searches for information about experience from others consumers and their opinions. She looks for new things and assesses which of the product will give most value for her money. For her, price is often one of the most important factors affecting her decision. The reason to why she chooses to collect the information from blogs is because she feels that this is the only place where she can learn about peoples experiences and opinions, and also since this information is more neutral then if it would be from a company. When it comes to evaluating products, she mainly uses collaborative blogs in where many people can express their opinions on things. While evaluating the products she mainly stick within one price category that will offer her maximum value of her money. Bloggi Role of Blog Marketing in Consumer Decision Making Process Role of Blog Marketing in Consumer Decision Making Process A FUTURE MARKETING PERSPECTIVE The phenomenon of blogs is growing rapidly and is expected to increase even in a more rapid pace (Technorati, 2006, November 6). As Wright (2006) discuss; blogs provides a new way of communicating with customers, as customers want to be talked with, not to. Companies have newly started to pay attention to this and as a result, the concept of Blog marketing has been born. The use of blogs as a communication tool has the huge importance for companies to understand how consumers use blogs in their decision making. The purpose of this paper is to understand and explore how and why consumers use blogs in their decision making process. Interview technique was used on young adults, as research suggests that this population use blogs the most (Tremayne, 2007). It was identified that consumers use blogs throughout their decision making. Within the consumers decision making, collaborative blogs was mostly used as the consumers because it cover specific topic of interest for the consumers. Consumers were found mainly writing in the blogs when they had knowledge to contribute with or when they needed information that they could not otherwise find in the blogs. It was identified that consumers turned to groups they belonged to, so called normative group, or they turned to groups that they did not belong to, so called comparative groups. These groups influenced the consumer by providing them with knowledge and by giving them positive and negative confirmation on their choice of purchase. However normative groups also persuaded the consumer to buy products in order to belong to the group. Besides this, a pattern of characteristics of the individuals that the consumer blogged with were noticed. Consumers wanted user experiences and thus the vast majority of these individuals they turned to, seemed to be consumers themselves, with relevant product experiences. The consumers also seem to blog more with certain individuals, whose opinions were valued more. These individuals often shared the latest information on products. Lastly it was also identified that consumers seemed to be selective when reading blog posts. The blog posts needed to contain detailed- and up-to-date information. Moreover, consumers wanted blog post to be written by other consumers because they saw them as more credible then companies. The consumers also chose to read blog posts that show similarities between the consumer and the blogger in terms of either usage pattern of product or preference for product choices. INTRODUCTION Ever since the internet was introduced for the general public during the 1990s, people have used it as a source of information. Majority of the population in India use internet in order to get information regarding products and services. However most statistics available does not tell how the consumers use the internet and what kind of information they search for. There are many different sources of information online, for example company web pages, communities, blogs etc. The concept of blogs and blogging is a relatively new phenomenon in todays society and it has not really been explored before. Nevertheless, magazines are today filled with articles on the importance for companies to start blogging and join the communication of the future, if they do not want to loose ground to their competitors (Lindstedt, 2005, November). The major blog search engine, Technorati, shows some interesting facts on the number of blogs and its growth. In October, 2006, Technorati counted 57 million blogs and a growth rate of one hundred thousand new blogs per day. This number is expected to keep growing and double every eight month (Technorati, 2006, November 6). However, when it comes to the number of blogs in India, there is uncertainty. Different articles talk about a wide interval of blogs, starting at around 18,000 (Lindstedt, 2005, August) and counting up to more then hundred thousands (Johansson, 2007). The reason to this wide span is due to the lack of a clear definition on what a blog is and also the fact that the figures are 18 months apart from each other. But the fact is that the tremendous growth of blogs worldwide also is true for India. India contains actors like Twitter, Facebook and MSN spaces whom all contain blogs and allow for a creation of your own blog. As a result of this growth, blog marketing has emerged as a new innovative way to create closer relationship with customers. It has also given the consumers the possibility to discuss amongst each other. Blog marketing allows marketers to establish closer relationships with its segment. Today limited research has been made within the concept of blog marketing. Furthermore, all research that has been conducted has had the focus on how companies can use blogs in order to interact with consumers. Something that has not been considered, and has been taken for granted, is the issue of how consumers use blogs in their decision making. Moreover, how consumers consider the information that is being transmitted on the blog has not yet been explored. The truth could be that consumers use blogs in a way that companies have not thought about. The existing use of blog marketing could thus miss its objectives if companies do not know how their audience perceives it. PROBLEM DISCUSSION The paper focuses on consumer decision making process and tried to explore how consumers use blogs in this process. As there is not so much work done on the area, this increases the importance to conduct such study. Blogs provides a new way of communicating with customers (Wright, 2006). In order to use this communication tool, it is of big importance for companies to understand how consumers use blogs in their decision making. The focus on the consumer decision making process in the context of blog is of importance for several reasons. It is today unclear how and in what stages consumers use blogs in their decision making process. An overview of the literature shows that not much research has been done within this subject. Traditional marketing tools such as advertising, sales promotion etc have different impact in the different stages of the consumer decision making process. But it is unclear what impact blogging has in those stages. By mapping out this information, companies can learn how to use their marketing in a new and innovative way to appeal consumers. Moreover, whatever research is conducted is from company perspective. To be successful in blog marketing, activities needs to be shaped in accordance to consumers blog usage. If companies learn how blogs are used, they can benefit in several ways like they can engage in the viral marketing on the blogs to create knowledge of their products, or can listen on why consumers prefer competitors products. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK What is Blog? A blog is a web page that contains regularly posted inlays that are archived and arranged in reversed chronological order (Wright 2006). They are user-friendly, inexpensive, self-publication of content for a potentially vast audience on the web. The entries in the blogs are called blog posts. Blogs are more flexible and interactive than previous publication print and digital formats. They contain numerous hyperlinks that are often accompanied by comments regarding the destination of the link. Blogs are designed to be a part of a network where they are connected to each other through links, which are generally related to the content. The readers then have the possibility to comment on the blog posts. Blogosphere is the term used to describe the global network of blog postings. Blogs can be thought of as a gateway to vast sources of information where users may respond to a blogger by sending comments and links to additional information. In this sense, it is fulfilling many needs (Trema yne, 2007). Type of Blogs Diary blog A diary blog is a web based tool that gives the author the possibility to post information for consumption for others. Also, diary blogs gives the reader the possibility to add comments regarding its content; however, this is not applicable for all diary blogs. The authors that are writing on a diary blog all have different opinions regarding things and express their view of whatever they are writing about. This is a demonstration to the personal and dynamic capacity of a diary blog according to Searles and Sifry (2002). Pomerantz and Stutzman, (2006) describes diary blogs as web pages that arranges discrete posts that contains chunks of information that may contain images, multimedia and text. According to Lamshed, Berry and Armstrong (2002) diary blogs are very personal and if the reader does not like the author and his/her opinion, it may not interest them enough to return. The blogger can use the diary blog for personal enjoyment and archive the happenings in their li ves. Collaborative blog It contains information that is posted by several individuals not just one author. In collaborative blogs, readers have the possibility to contribute with links or posts comments, in order to participate with their opinions, answers and questions. Most collaborative blogs focus on a specific topic, and the authors can be both regular people as well as experts within the topic (Holtz and Demopoulos, 2006). The collaborative blogs are an online group created by the bloggers in the blogosphere. These groups have focus on certain topics in order to encourage readers to correspond to each other, which is similar to a normal discussion group. The purpose, according to Lamshed et al. (2002), is to break down the barriers between people and to extend the blog to more than just one author, in order to create a discussion among its members. Collaborative blogs have standard rules about participation in order to avoid development of poor quality content, which do not encoura ge new and current readers to come back on a regular basis. Company blog It include two types of blogs, product and customer service blog. Product blogs can consist of different approaches. One approach is to provide updates about the product so customers can receive the latest information. A second approach is to provide customers with insights and information directly from those who are responsible for the products. A product blog that keeps customers updated can build loyalty to the product and the brand/company. The customer service blog is rather similar to product blogs, but customer service blogs focus completely on issues on the already purchased products. The customer service blogs is a channel in order to address the issues on the products to the customers that have purchased the product (Holtz and Demopoulos, 2006). When the first blogs appeared in the late 1990s, they were primary web pages that contained many links, offering mostly â€Å"personal information† and easy to update. The blogosphere has been expanding rapidly over the last few years. According to the New York Times and Pew Research, nearly one blog per second is created (Tremayne, 2007). The Current Scenario People have blogged long before the term was coined, but the trend gained force with the introduction of automated published systems, especially Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and increase the publishing process. People started using the blogs because they wanted to express themselves about mentioned events. Blogging about events has attracted the attention of the mainstream news media, further contributing to the popularisation and adoption of this new phenomenon of computer mediated communication. Today the blogging in the blogosphere concerns business, for example about markets, customer service, product etc. (Tremayne, 2007). According to the search engine Technorati (2006, November 6) there were more than 57 million blogs available on the internet as of the end of October 2006. Approximately 12% of those blogs had posted comments or links. Research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project presented by Tremayne (2007) also indicates that blog readers today are similar to the early adopters of the internet and other new communication technologies. The bloggers are young, well-educated and more likely to be males. According to Tremayne (2007) the development of blogs seems to follow the traditionally diffusion path of successful new communication technologies and users with great interest in technology. The final step to become a part of the broader public of the internet community is then to shift to the general internet users. The new stage of the development of blogs is the business sector. Business has become a new phase of the communications that appears on the blogosphere today. Bloggers communicate and share information to each other since blogs are the new ways for customers to reach out to the companies. This scenario has made the companies more alert to listen to their customers demands through the blogosphere. Enterprises now have the opportunity to gain new knowledge from the customer and to gain an idea about what the customers are saying about them (Tremayne, 2007). Observations have been done on why internet users connect to blogs. Blogs seem to encourage a sense of community, especially for those who seek more in-depth information than what is available through traditional media. Blog content generally reflects the bias of the blogger, who tends to take one side of an issue. Furthermore it contains a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals. Information seeking is also a reason for accessing blogs. Bloggers provide the latest news and analysis by experts and other with inside knowledge, some of which is glossed over or omitted by the traditional channels. Blog users can also frequently use one certain blog due to they follow a story for a longer period of time than that they would be able to do if the story came from traditional media (Tremayne, 2007). Blog as mode of Communication In business, companies are required to communicate with their customer and have a strategy for the implementation of the chosen approach (Kotler et al. 2005). Communication with customer can take many forms, such as advertising, mailed brochures, sales promotion and personal selling etc. The marketers are often those who conduct this communication. They are often perceived as people with something to sell; they express what is good, great and irresistible with the product/service (Varey 2002). Blog enjoys characteristics of different types of flow of communication like: It enjoys characteristics of One-step flow of communication as: Flow of information from company to the target audience (Fill 1999, Harrell et al 1999, Ottesen 2001). It is non-personal communication since the message is carried without personal involvement by Kotler et al. (2005). All consumers are exposed to the same message at the very same time. It follows the principle of Mass Communication (Fill 1999). It enjoys characteristics of Two-step flow of communication as: In this information goes from the sender to certain receivers, that in turn reach the target audience through interpersonal networks (Fill 1999). Mass communication reaches the target audience, opinion leaders and opinion formers are there to strengthen the influence of the message (Blackwell 2001). Blogs helps the opinion formers and leaders in reaching targets that were missed by the traditional mass communication. It enjoys characteristics of Multiple-step flow of communication as: It overcomes the problem of two-step flow of information that neither allow the information to flow between individuals in the target audience, nor it includes the communication between the original senders, via a consumer, to the opinion leader and then passed on to other consumers. It adds the function of gatekeepers, who are people in a position able to decide whether or not the target audience will be able to take part of the message. Relationship between Blog and Word of mouth (WOM) WOM is defined by (Blackwell et al 2001 p.404) as â€Å"the informal transmission of ideas, comments, opinions, and information between two people, neither one of which is a marketer†. According to them, both the sender and the receiver gains from WOM, which is supported by Fill (1999), who also argues for the above. The benefits for the receiver are rather straight-forward; as they gain lots of information they would not be able to obtain otherwise. The benefits for the sender can be a little vaguer at first glance, but according to both Blackwell et al (2001) and Fill (1999) people like to talk about the purchases for a number of reasons, such as confirmation, satisfaction, status etc; which is what the purpose of blogs. According to Blackwell et al (2001) the affect of WOM has increased rapidly due to Internet. Consumers of today are able to spread the word of something faster and further than ever before. Schindler and Bickart (2005) discuss that the traditional WOM and online WOM differs in the strength of ties between consumers when they are exchanging information between each other. Granovetter (1973) previously argued that the strength of ties between two individuals is a function of the amount of time spent together, the emotional intensity and degree of intimacy in the relationship. Following this discussion, online WOM is characterized by weak ties. Weak ties then provide three possible benefits for the consumer. Friedkin (1982) argues that it first provides a potential input for a decision. Second, consumer information should be more diverse then that coming from stronger ties. Thirdly, it also gives consumers the opportunity to gain access to expertise which they normally would not get access to (Constant, Sproull and Kiesler, 1997). One downside is however, that consumers do not know the motives of the person that provides the online WOM. It can be difficult to access the in formants background and expertise in the topic (Schindler and Bickart, 2005). Consumer Decision Making Process The consumer decision making process provides a general description on how a purchase decision is made. Consumers does not necessarily go through all the stages for all the kinds of decisions they make, and neither do they always go through the stages in the very specific order that is presented below (Blackwell et al 2001). The process consists of mainly five steps (need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase and the post-purchase process) according to most researchers within the field (Blackwell et al. 2001, Statt 1997, Kotler et al. 2005), but there are number of factors that affects the consumer in their purchasing process. Consumer are affected by individual determinants (Blackwell et al., 2001) and physical factors (Harell Frazier, 1999) because they are different, have different experiences and motivations, therefore, they will interpret things differently. Also consumers differ in available resources and knowledge which will further affect thei r decision. Another aspect that affects the consumers is the environmental influences (Blackwell et al., 2001) and societal and social factors (Harell et al., 1999). Here the authors talk about external factors that affect consumer, such as culture, social class and reference groups, but also the influence of the family and other individuals by whom the consumer is affected because every individual strive to some extent â€Å"fit in† heavily affect consumers. Also the information provided by these groups tend to have high credibility, depending on the consumers need to belong. Lastly, consumers are also affected by their degree of involvement (Harell et al. 1999). Involvement is the degree to which the consumers perceive the purchase to be of importance to them, and how complex they find the purchase situation (Blackwell et al 2001). The more complex the purchase, the more effort will be needed from the consumer in order to make a good decision. The involvement in turn affects the way in which consumes will learn about the products. Since a low involvement purchase is fairly routine consumers do not engage in a very extensive information search on the product, they mainly gather their information passively. A high-involvement purchase will demand more from the consumer and they will be more motivated to actively search for information. LITERATURE REVIEW Bickart Schindler (2001) investigated the WOM in online forums on the Internet. They assigned students to look at either corporate web pages or consumer forums about specific products. They found that after one semester, there was a higher interest in the product category for those who used the online discussion forum. They then suggested that a reason for this was because the content posts in the online discussion forums are thought to be more credible and more relevant but also having more empathy among its readers. In another study, Bickart Schindler (2005) tried to explore the consumer use of online WOM. They found three motives for using online WOM a) To gain information on purchase decisions, in which consumer reviews and negative information was of most interest; b) To get support from decision already made in which positive was used most for confirmation of that the right choice have been made; and c) Whether information was searched for fun or not. Another theme they discovered was the evaluation of the content of information in online WOM. They identified, corporate web pages are more biased and untrustworthy. Independent web pages free from corporate marketing, in which detailed information and authentic first person experience was viewed more credible and reliable. A consensus of agreement among consumers in the online WOM also tended to increase the credibility. Finally, they found online WOM disperse more information in all stages of consumer decision-making process. During the nee d recognition, when product was mentioned, it sometimes stimulated interest or problem recognition for the consumer. Other consumers sometimes provide ideas that lead for alternative product to be included, or removed, in the consumer consideration set. Online WOM also suggested important attributes that could influence the criteria of which alternatives are compared. Information from consumers on how alternative rate on those criteria was also of importance when comparing alternatives. After purchase was done, online WOM information could increase the consumers satisfaction of the purchase through positive information. They also discovered that their informants were selective in their information gathering process. This was done to simplify the information but also to help them absorb the information with amount of consumer information about a large area of different products. They continue and suggest that future research should look deeper into what characterise the content in those online WOM consumers choose to read. Bernhad, Bjurling and Ã…hrà ©n (2006) did another study on un-addressed consumer complaints through blogs. They found that the blog is used as a way to express dissatisfaction on companies and their products and services. It is used when the consumer do not get enough amendments from the companies. Blogs then works as a complement to complaints through friends and family, and it is an easy way to ease the consumers experiences and reduce the stress of a distasteful treatment from companies. The consumers have then used blog to warn other consumers on products and companies but also to tell their own story regarding the complaint. Bernhad et al. (2006) discuss that the technical development has reduced the barriers to complain and this had led to increased likelihood to present complains for products of less value. Wallstà ©n (2005) then comes to the conclusion that the collaborative blogs increase the learning process in which people can learn from each other by reading blog pos t. It also gives a shared knowledge base for the participants. In another study by Constant, et al. (1997) weak-tie sources were found to make it harder for consumers to assess the quality of the WOM information they received. Schindler and Bickart (2005) then discuss that the reason for this may be that the consumer do not know the motives of the informant and it may also sometimes be hard to assess the background and expertise in the topic of the informant. RESEARCH METHOD Research approach As the purpose of study is to understand how consumers perceive their own experiences and behaviour which can be best analysed through inductive approach. As this approach allows researcher to have more flexible structure that will permit alternative explanations of the phenomena. This approach is qualitative in nature that begins with data. It develops an empirical generalisation that describes patterns of that data and it seeks to identify or develop a theoretical proposition that is consistent with those patterns (Schutt, 1996). Research Strategy Putting emphasis on the inductive approach, research strategy of the paper is built on an exploratory study, though it also includes a cross-sectional study as interviews were held over a short period of time (Saunders et al. 2003). As the paper does not allow for sufficient time for conducting a longitudinal study and it is not intended to study the effects of change and development of the blogging phenomena on the consumers decision making process, a cross-sectional study is more appropriate. As the purpose of paper is from the consumers perspective, qualitative research method will enable us to get information from the informants and will allow us to understand the meaning that the informants attach to their experiences of blogging. Description is based on the meanings that informants express through words. A qualitative approach will allow getting this non-standardised data without being locked into a standardised set of questions. This is because the nature of the questions will need to be flexible and open-ended in order to explore what emerges during the interview. Furthermore, to get a rich description of this non-standardised data and to get into the thoughts of our informants, the interviews will need to allow a long length of time. Sample selection The sample selection consists of young educated adults; as previous research suggests they use blogs the most. The sample size consisted of nine people within the ages of 21 to 28. Of those nine people, three are females and six are males. Judgement sampling technique was used for identifying the informants who had rich experiences of blogging. The low number of informants can be justified by this as it allows getting a richer description of the phenomena studied. Data collection This primary data has been collected through interviews which are qualitative (semi-structured and in-depth) in nature. Limited research that exists and relates to our study has been used as secondary data. To check the effectiveness of semi-structured interview, two pilot studies were conducted. First semi-structured interview uses too much theoretical jargons that fail in retrieving the information. The second test then avoided the theoretical jargon and explanations. To get a rich description, informants were briefed two days prior on the themes to be covered in the interview. It was ensured that each informant had read the information letter before the interview took place. The informants were interviewed in two different ways -a) 6 informants were interviewed face-to-face in quiet rooms and conversations were recorded; and b) remaining 3 informants were interviewed through Skype because of distance and conversations were again recorded. However, attempt was made to conduct all interviews face-to-face as it enables to establish personal contact which is also important as Saunders et al (2003) argue; qualitative data favours the establishment of personal contact. It was also judged that the face-to-face contact would increase the likelihood of describing and identifying our informants accurately. In all cases, focus was on recording the findings from the interview as the findings emerged naturally. To really understand the informants meanings to their experiences and actions, flexible approach was used within the semi-structured interview. Although questions were bound to the themes, questions were flexible to allow an understanding of the participant. DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS Data is presented through sectioning each interview individually. Collected raw data was put into categories and themes that emerged from the interview as need is to have a close understanding to our informants. Information collected and compiled under each category will be compared with other categories. This helps in identifying relationships; in discovering key themes, and recognising patterns and trends. Later on, theoretical framework will be applied on those patterns in order to understand it in a new way. Quotes will be made to simplify the meaning and in drawing conclusions. Empirical Findings a) Interview with Reema Sharma: Reema, 25 years old, was interviewed at her office in Jammu and studying at Jammu University. She uses blogs when she wants to buy something new or wants to find out different type of products available. She also uses blogs for reading travel diaries for fun and to be in touch with people she knows. When it comes to blogging about a future purchase, she reads blogs by people who are in the same situation as her and that have experience from the things she is interested in. She blogs travels but sometimes for electronics products and hiking. She has never used blogs actively, she only reads them. The kind of blogs she uses is mainly product blogs, and collaborative blogs, where she can read and learn more. She does not really read the blogs from companies. Rarely she reads a blog and completely changes her mind. The blog can instead make her choose a different brand. Relationship with bloggers: For her, the blogger is just someone whose blog she happens to find. Reema trusts all the information that is written in the blogs, but she explains that the more detailed description on how the product has been used, the more she relies on the inlay. People whose blogs she reads most often posses greater knowledge then her, within the subject. Need and awareness discovered with blogs:Reema agrees that she discovers a lot of new kinds of products, but this has never actually evolved to a need. This has occurred, for example, when she has blogged about hiking gear, she has learned about many new products and the advantaged with those products, but as she is not very experienced in the area, many of those products are just too complicated. However, the blogs she reads regarding travels could actually create a need sometimes. From these blogs she learns more about possible places to travel to which she might visit later in her life she explains. Blogging for information and evaluation of potential purchase: Reema searches for information about experience from others consumers and their opinions. She looks for new things and assesses which of the product will give most value for her money. For her, price is often one of the most important factors affecting her decision. The reason to why she chooses to collect the information from blogs is because she feels that this is the only place where she can learn about peoples experiences and opinions, and also since this information is more neutral then if it would be from a company. When it comes to evaluating products, she mainly uses collaborative blogs in where many people can express their opinions on things. While evaluating the products she mainly stick within one price category that will offer her maximum value of her money. Bloggi