Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The Discourse of Diet Blogs (22 Dec 2004) I began to study diet blogs in early 2004 when, in the midst of a diet of my own, I wondered whether the Web had affected this largely private practice as it had affected other formerly private pursuits, like diary-keeping. With this question in mind, I studied diet blogs for eight months, during which I regularly read approximately two dozen diet blogs and occasionally corresponded with their authors. During that time, the bloggers I studied produced a huge discourse on dieting and weight loss. They posted hundreds of entries, from mundane records of food and exercise to extended meditations on weight loss and the meanings of thinness and fatness in their lives. By my own rough estimate, each blogger wrote about 50,000 words during that time, or the equivalent, in wordcount, of a short novel. Two diet bloggers even parlayed their blogs into book contracts, extending the reach of diet-blog discourse from the echo-chamber of the Web to the circuits and flows of print distribution. If nothing else, diet bloggers make what was once a mostly private, non-writerly enterprise - losing weight - a matter of searching and voluminous written discourse. Article URL: http://tekka.net/07/?Diet Read 64 more articles from Tekka sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: The Wrong Fight     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy