Koroona-aasta Triinu Merese blogis “Maha äng”

Abstract

The history of the (we)blog shows that this online genre can be evaluated as an excellent source of data for qualitative research of various problems. Some authors (e.g. Hookway 2008) even consider the blog as a research technique for exploring certain questions which deal with people’s everyday practices. This article presents the results of a case study, which are based on content analysis of a personal blog (diary blog). The study grew out of the premise that the blog owners’ posts and their readers’ comments can shed some light on ground-breaking events and social processes at both the local and global levels, which in turn can influence the bloggers’ behaviour in various ways. The source of the current study was a personal blog titled “Maha äng” (“Down with angst”), the owner of which is poet and writer Triinu Meres a.k.a. väga väga naine (very very woman). The aim was to find out whether and, if yes, then how the corona crisis has changed the blogging behaviour as an integral part of everyday life of one particular blogger. The focus was on posts and comments entered in 2020, often called the year of corona due to the global pandemic. To illuminate possible changes in blogging behaviour, the 2020 posts were analysed in the context of earlier posts archived in 2008–2019. For comparison, the Health Board’s blog was used, which documented the course of the corona crisis chronologically with factual accuracy, as well as dailies in Estonian and English. The results of the study showed that in 2020 the number of posts and the activity of commenters in Triinu Meres’ personal blog did not increase and that the corona crisis did not become the dominant topic in comparison with the blogger’s personal crisis often covered in her blog. The posts revealed some signs that suggest boredom with the corona crisis as a topic of conversation which seemed to be over-exploited by various media channels.