Lena Karlsson
Docent | Senior lecturer | Deputy head of department
Desperately seeking sameness: the processes and pleasures of identification in women’s diary blog reading
Author
Summary, in English
personal websites, blogs. There is much research on self-representation online, whereas very
little research has focused on the consumption of online self-representation. This article
focuses on the act of reading diary blogs. Who are the actual readers of a specific blog and
what values do they place on the event of reading? What draws them to the diary site in the
first place and what mechanisms make them return? To attempt to uncover the reading
practices involved for readers of diary weblogs I have conducted an explorative web survey on
“how/when/why we read weblogs” on four independent diary blog sites kept by women in
their 30s. The consumption of these blogs seem to be severely circumscribed by notions of
sameness: based on gender, age, place of living, race/ethnicity, educational level. Readers
report being drawn to the diary blog for the rhythm of serial autobiographical consumption
and the possibilities of identification. They report looking for “likeness” in the first place. The
lure of identification might always have led readers to autobiographical writing. Yet, these
diary weblog readers, who in the main self-identify as female, report feeling heightened senses
of identification by the proximity in time between the scenes of production and the scenes of
consumption and by the deferral of the notion of an ending. This article explores the discursive
connections made between the serial, the longitudinal, the consistent, and the construction
and consumption of recognizable female selves.
Department/s
- Department of Gender Studies
Publishing year
2007
Language
English
Pages
137-153
Publication/Series
Feminist Media Studies
Volume
7
Issue
2
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Topic
- Gender Studies
Keywords
- online self-representation
- reception studies
- diary blog reading
- identification
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1471-5902