So over Thanksgiving break while at home without my DVD collection, I was forced to raid my mother’s movie collection to get some entertainment.  I ended up watching Julie & Julia, which I had never seen.  Although I found the film entertaining, this post is not just a movie review…

The film is about a struggling writer, Julie, who begins writing a blog about her attempt to make her way through the Julia Child’s cook book.  Throughout the movie we see her blogging and hear what she is writing in her blog.  I could not help but think about how relevant this was to our class where we have been talking about audiences of online content such as blogs.

In the early days (or maybe weeks) or the character’s blog, she keeps writing things like “… but I’m pretty sure nobody is reading this…” or “…maybe I am just writing this for me…”   I found this representation of blogging culture very interesting because it brings up an idea that I have always pondered when it came to blogging or tweeting or whatever.  Who is the audience?  In the movie her blog ends up becoming popular enough that it builds a large fanbase and is eventually turned into a book  and a movie.  But what about the blogs that don’t get mainstream followers like this?  Is anyone reading my twitter?  Is anyone actually reading this blog?  Probably not many.  It just made me think about how this new online culture that we live in has created an environment where very small, specific audiences are formed.  Blogs about certain topics or about certain people where the only audience that would follow must be filled with people who know about that topic or know that person.  This is a new practice that did not exist in the early years of cinema.