This Thursday I want to come back to blogging.

I was struck in class one day by how intimately tied for me life narratives are with the genre of blogging. More than the different forms of personal accounts I perform through poetry (which I might also do at a reading with a small group of peers), and even more than the actual memoirs I try to write, blogging is the  currency – so to speak – with which I write about my life. I blog all the time: on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and occasionally Twitter. When I visited my family in Shanghai, I even made myself a Weibo account, upon which I was disappointed (though not surprised) that most of my audience only blogged in Chinese, which I couldn’t read.

(A note for those who don’t know: UBC students returning to mainland China are able to access VPN, which gives them access to Facebook, Youtube, and other Western social media sites that China blocks. I wasn’t able to do that on my phone, so I still had to download mobile apps like WeChat to communicate with my relatives. WeChat was pretty accessible as a ‘foreigner’ to China for me because it easily translated Chinese characters into English, and vice versa. As an interesting aside, one cell phone network – China Unicom – does not block Instagram, so I was able to see Ai Weiwei’s account and hear of some of his conflicts with Beijing museums that were censoring him.)

I hate to use myself as an example here too much, but the personal “I” is almost impossible for me to forget as I write in WordPress, the medium that nurtured my early blogging experiences (though I was mainly blogging poetry). I don’t think that exigence to speak about myself, here, in a class blog addressed to the class and the public, is coincidental, and I will discuss more of that here.

The other night I found this blog post, which I must introduce by giving a strong content warning for graphic descriptions of child abuse, titled “I watched a mom hit her kid in a thrift store tonight.”

This heart-wrenching piece aside, though, I was struck by the blog’s title, “I Am Begging My Mother Not To Read This Blog.” For me, this title reminded me of what Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd discusses in their essay “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” about how blogs “can be both public and intensely personal in possibly contradictory ways. They are addressed to everyone and at the same time to no one. They seem to serve no immediate practical purpose, yet increasing numbers of both writers and readers are devoting increasing amounts of time to them.” To address one’s mother in one’s blog title, specifically to insist that she’s not allowed to read it, speaks of blogging as a form of post coming-to-age genre – of establishing oneself in the world, among community members, and of self-expression, as Miller and Shepherd observe.

“When bloggers talk about blogging, two themes relevant to these questions are ubiquitous: self-expression and community development. These two themes match very well the intrinsic and extrinsic functions of self-disclosure discussed earlier. Disclosure, however, should not be understood as the simple unveiling of a pre-existent or perdurable self, but rather as a constitutive effort.”

One of the consequences of living in an era of mass voyeurism, I would argue, is that rhetors like myself–who grew up in an age where the concept of celebrity and social media are inter-mixed and interlinked, both for ‘real’ celebrities and individuals whose aspirations involve becoming Internet Famous–are grappling with establishing ourselves as “millenials,” a generation that needs to re-negotiate community in a world where the public is increasingly eroding into the private.

That’s why a sex-positive 20-year-old woman in the 21st Century might draw attention, perhaps humorously, to how she’s “begging” her mother not to read her blog: her exploration of identity through her blog is self-consciously post coming-of-age, only private to her mother because it could potentially destroy the polite, innocent reputation she conceivably only has with one person in the world….

What this implies, though, is that all other mothers do constitute audiences for her blog. That contradiction to me is fascinating, because it speak to how ‘millennials’ might experience exigence to speak to the older generation while simultaneously stabilizing their identity with the current one.

This blog post that also comments on Miller and Shepherd observes that,  “And for people who have grown up in extremely rigid, authoritarian homes, the blog could be an avenue to the freedom they were never allowed and can experience through their exhibitionist expressions and voyeurism on blogs, without anyone knowing the therapeutic purpose blogging might have for them.” 

I certainly feel that the cultivation of “Tumblr Famous” (content warning: a lot of swearing and disrespectful language!) and the kind of blogging world that Tumblr involves allows a certain kind of sub-genre of life narration, one that comes with extremely specific rules for appropriate constructions of the self and its interaction with the wider rhetorical community. It’s incredibly rude not to write about sexual assault on tumblr without tagging it, and it’s even important to tag all food posts to accommodate those with eating disorders, as an example.

Curious about readers’ thoughts about what I’ve discussed in this post!