A Blog of Their Own
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter analyses both the theoretical and empirical research regarding the role of blogs, personal web pages, as venues which provide teenage girls with the tools to construct representations of self and express their identity. As Virginia Woolf stressed in her 1928 lectures, female authors were non-existent or invisible due to their lack of money and privacy, a “room of one’s own.” In some recent studies, blogs have been understood as an analogy for bedrooms, offering more than real bedrooms can. Thus, using up to date knowledge of the presence and behaviour of girls in cyberspace, we suggest that blogs are perceived by girls as a secure space where they can talk to other girls while sharing a sense of invisibility and therefore freedom from social and parental constraints. Focusing on identity, on answering the question of “who am I?” blogs offer an ideal space for viewing the continuity of self. They allow reflections and self-presentations to be kept long term and to become visible, not only to others, but most importantly to the individual. |
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