Blogging as ‘therapy’? Exploring personal technologies for smoking cessation

Abstract

This article presents some early, design-oriented research findings from a study that introduced mobile blogging technologies to four people who wished to make a health-related life change — giving up smoking. We wanted to establish the nature of the relationship between blogging and quitting smoking (if any), inspired by some earlier work in the domain showing that social technologies may help with the quit process. We present an account of three participants, documenting details of how blogging technologies fitted into their (changing) lives and examples of digital content they produced. We describe, using examples from participant blogs, instances of self-expression, replacement and self-awareness. We suggest, despite all participants failing in their quit attempts, that there are possible provisional, therapeutic characteristics to such social technologies. Finally, we suggest this therapeutic process can be understood better through a concept of personal translucence.