The politics of blogging: identity, access, and composition

Abstract

This dissertation titled “The Politics of Blogging: Identity, Access, and Composition” explores the findings of six IRB-approved case studies on the blogging practices of millennial women between the ages of 20-27. The purpose of this research is to identify how digital literacy practices and access to computer technology influence identity construction and community formation on the microblogging platform and social networking website Tumblr. My project provides a genre study of Tumblr blogs and investigates how different rhetorical appeals classify a blog as being part of a specific blogging community or type of blog. Through this IRB-approved study, I identify the relationship between literacy, identity, access, and multimodal composition. In chapter 1, I locate my study within current digital writing research that addresses identity construction, digital literacy practices, and access to computer technology. Although early research on Tumblr has focused on identity construction, little attention has been paid to how such virtual identity construction has been influenced by bloggers’ digital literacy practices and their access to computer technology, a gap in the literature this project addresses. Chapter 2 outlines the project’s procedures and methodology. I explain the method of data collection, and I describe the participants. In chapter 3, my discussion focuses on the composition choices my participants make. These choices create an ethos for each blogger that situates her blog into a specific genre. I analyze some of the visual and verbal markers of each woman’s blog and use Rettberg’s theory of self-representation to theorize identity construction. I explore how this representation both challenges and reinforces the status quo. Chapter 4 analyzes how participants’ composition choices reflect differing degrees of digital literacy and access to computer technology. I discuss how to define digital literacy and why our definition must include social media. I further explain the importance of access to computer technology. In chapter 5, I investigate the impact Tumblr has on human relationships. I explore the ways online and offline composing practices are interwoven in terms of political coalition formation. My goal for this chapter is to problematize understandings of the internet as a utopic-dystopic binary.