Hi folks. I’ve been reading the blog of my friend Larry Cheng who’s got great insights and diplomacy, and is a good Christian brother. It struck me that as a new blogger, he gets many comments. Not that I am jealous, but as I recently returned from a conference on Asian North Americans, I noticed that many Asians, especially Chinese Americans, are less vocal in group settings. That got me to wondering how many of them were Chinese. After counting, saw about 3 (not including Larry’s) out of say, dozen.
Then that got me thinking, “Maybe that’s why we don’t get many comments… many of our readers may be the kind to simply ‘lurk’ on our blog.” It’s totally fine to not comment, really. But it got me thinking about that.
Do you think Asians are less likely to post comments compared to others? Are Chinese less likely to post comments compared to other Asians?
Of course, to the degree that these musings describe reality, we’ll probably never know by how many comments are made! But if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
27/05/2009 at 2:20 pm Permalink
Hey Enoch,
Blogging, twittering, etc.- have u fully embraced social media now?
Do Asians comment less? Maybe the answer is they comment less to pastoral bloggers. You’re such an authority figure :).
Larry
27/05/2009 at 2:46 pm Permalink
lurk lurk lurk
27/05/2009 at 9:12 pm Permalink
Hey Larry,
Well, we’ve had a blog for quite a while now, but lately I’ve been more inclined to start blogging. Actually, my pre-writing blog is for writing down some of my bigger ideas for articles and books and such. But I post their infrequently. Thanks for commenting. Did you recently find our blog?
27/05/2009 at 9:14 pm Permalink
so… have you switched writing posts from your blog to your church blog? I noticed you hadn’t posted since December. Oh, I just checked and saw that you posted today. Welcome back!
28/05/2009 at 7:04 pm Permalink
i think in general i don’t have a lot of interesting things to say, so my poor bertphan blog sits on the corner of the shelf gathering dust. as for the bcec blog. yeah, that gets written on more frequently, but that’s a growing conglomerate of contributors, and there’s more impetus to write for it.
that said, the drifty spindly thoughts in my brain occaisionally surface on bertphan. and if not, at least i’ll change the theme every now and then.
that and twitter.
29/05/2009 at 12:46 pm Permalink
I think that its possible that chinese folks are afraid to comment for the same reason that theyre afraid to say ask questions in the middle of class (to use a previous analogy of yours.) maybe its fear of sounding foolish or seeming unintelligent. but i have heard people mention your blog in the past in person…. that i guess is like going up to your professor after class.
or i think it could even be fear of being recognized as a reader of someone’s blog. it might seem like theyre too nosy or if they have a thought that contradicts with your thought, they might think its disrespectful to enter your personal blogosphere to disagree. the anonymity is helped with things like google reader where people wont even register on the IP tracking system.
just my thoughts.
05/06/2009 at 2:25 am Permalink
Thanks, Calvin, for your comments. It’s funny that you’ve heard people mention our blog before. I never have any idea. Although during this past Trellis, I think I made a reference to a recent blog entry (I can’t remember what it was–maybe about a turkey) and a surprising number of people laughed. Their laughter seems to suggest they knew I was referring to a blog post, which means they read the blog.
I wonder if people are afraid of being recognized as a reader of a blog. Good thoughts, all around, though. Thanks!