Publishing personal life online aims at audience discovery, not record-keeping

Evidence

I mean, if I just wanted to record the moments of my life, I would write a private diary or keep my twitter private or keep my blog totally private … you start to write these things because you want people to read them. And why do you want people to read them? Well, maybe sometimes you want your mom to read them and maybe sometimes you want your friends that you’ve been out of touch with to read this stuff, but … mostly you want people to read them because you want people to know who you are and get discovered. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: A crisp operational definition of the micro-celebrity impulse: public sharing is oriented toward being discovered by an audience, not personal documentary.
• CANDY: Tara Hunt’s put-down ‘external validation junkies’ is a pithy, quotable reframe of self-promotional blogging.
• XREF: connects to: Lifestreaming without an audience is merely tracking, not sharing. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 548