Blogsphere: a study of bloggers starting from the most widely accessed blogs of the country

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the Brazilian blog reader’s image. To do so, it is necessary to analyze the writer of the pages first, for as the image of the text producer is built, the image of the addressee is also projected. The research will be guided by French semiotics, or the school of Paris, focusing on the enunciation. Therefore we will make use of the concepts enunciator and enunciatee, linguistic instances that correspond to what Rhetoric calls, respectively, éthos and páthos: images of both the addresser and the addressee of the enunciation built throughout the text. Among the several possibilities and choice of criteria of the data to be analyzed we established as investigation parameter those blogs which are the most widely accessed, because in theory they hold the representation of the large majority of readers. This study starts from the presupposition that the most visited blogs are where most bloggers are found and therefore they represent a portrait of their constitution. In order to reach a corpus that held the most accessed blogs of the country we used two different methodologies, gathering data from the whole year of 2006, the year upon which this study is based. The first step was to do a survey to find out the top rated blogs by Internet users themselves. Secondly we collected a corpus from two lists published in the media. The results reveal that, besides the heterogeneity of themes that impels them to read, the bloggers are characterized by three factors: narcissism, pseudo liberty and ludic behavior.