Indicadores utilizados para modelar el desempeño empresarial

Based on the critical discourse analysis of the Norwegian press coverage mentioned in section 5.1.1, I identified the hegemonic discourses conveyed by the pink blogger iden- tity label, which is well established and commonly used in the Norwegian public sphere. Pink bloggers are discursively construed as visible but insignificant, as irresponsible role models, and as savvy but vulnerable. This label positions mainstream female bloggers as being homogenously trivial and superficial. They are discursively construed as being exhibitionistic in bringing what have been called their “secret conversations” to the pub- lic sphere. This is also being associated with making oneself vulnerable to bullying. The earlier press articles in the sample tend to associate pink bloggers with teenage girls and

pink blogs with the girls’ online diaries. This is close to the original meaning of the pink blogger term dating back to 2009, that defined a pink blogger as “a relatively young girl who uses her blog to tell the world what she is wearing, what her favorite cosmetics are and how boring school is, nothing else” (http://thomasmoen.com/rosabloggere). The girls who blogged were positioned as being too trivial to be worthy of visibility and attention in the public sphere. Another significant element of the hegemonic discourses identified in the press commentary is that the most popular bloggers are framed as being unsuitable role models for the members of their young massive audiences because they promote unrealistic body-ideals and the product consumption of expensive clothes and accessories. Moreover, especially in the most recent press articles in the sample, the blog- gers are being positioned as commercialized and they are criticized for not marking the product placement in their blogs but are also framed as vulnerable girls who risk being cheated by the companies that want them to advertise their products.

The pink blogger label clearly subscribes to the tendency to disparage feminized me- dia genres documented in media studies (Bell, 2007; Gray, 1992). For Marwick (2014), the mere fact that personal blogs authored by women are called online diaries degrades these blogs as being less important in comparison to political and filter blogs autho- red by men. She argues that any online practice that breaks out of the male Internet norm is positioned as being of lesser value10_{. While the pink blogger label originally}

emphasized the alleged triviality and superficiality of teenage girls’ blogs, at present this label conveys additional connotations of the commercialization of blogging, the promotion of unrealistic body ideals, and consumerism. At the same time, the changing connotations of the pink blogger label do, in some respects, mirror the gradual shift towards professionalization and commercialization of mainstream blogging in Norway and the problematic sides of these aspects, as the girls brought up during the interviews.

As I document in Paper 2, the participants clearly negotiated the pink blogger iden- tity label as homogenizing and trivializing. They refused to be put into what they called “one box” and to thus be positioned as a “separate species” as bloggers. On the one hand, the implication of the pink blogger term that the style- and clothes-related content is superficial and trivial was rejected. However, on the other, the participants also framed such content as “superficial” themselves at times and clearly tried to justify focusing on such content if they emphasized this in their blogs. Still, none of the participants seemed to claim back and own the term pink blogger in the spirit of third-wave feminism as “a recognition of femininity as a constructive force to be used against patriarchy ‘from within’” (Sundén & Sveningsson Elm, 2007, 8). Most participants actively distanced themselves from the pink blogger label. This was the case with both the subversive per- 10 In contrast, Rettberg (2008) has pointed to the connection between women writing diaries and calling personal blogs online

formances of self in the contestation strategy, and when the blogging self was performed in a way that aimed at adjusting to the norms of the mainstream blogging community. Even if some of the girls said they would not mind being called a pink blogger, or iden- tified as pink bloggers to some extent, or at some point, this tended to change over time, and was accompanied by discomfort with the negative connotations of this label.

Whereas the participants tended to reject the trivializing discourses about pink blog- gers, they tended to frame top bloggers as promoting singular, narrow, and unrealistic beauty ideals and this partly overlapped with the discursive construal of top bloggers in the Norwegian press presented in Paper 1. Still, the participants’ reflections about top bloggers come across as rather nuanced. On the one hand, they viewed top female bloggers as promoting consumerism and what they called the unrealistically “perfect” self-presentations and this aligned with the discourses on the most popular pink blog- gers in the press commentary. The participants described the blogging community as becoming increasingly competitive and commercialized over time and the top bloggers as becoming increasingly “provocative” in posing in sexualized ways, blogging about be- auty treatments, plastic surgery, or getting tattoos. They also talked about having a hard time comparing themselves to these seemingly perfect top bloggers. On the other hand, I identified voices that presented the body-focused self-presentations of top bloggers in ways that indicated a degree of understanding towards the top bloggers as being subject, and succumbing, to the body-image obsession in contemporary culture. This did not however alleviate the struggles with their own body-hatred that the participants positi- oned as being reinforced by the “perfect” self-presentations of some of the top bloggers. Even if the participants said they knew that the photos in some blogs were manipulated, partly thanks to their own blogging practices that made them aware of the selectivity in one’s own self-presentations, they still compared themselves to the unrealistic images of perfect bodies. Bordo (2003) documented that we tend to compare ourselves with the manipulated advert models even though we are aware that these images of the female body are exactly that—manipulated. Still, my findings indicate that the models in fas- hion magazines and Hollywood celebrities seem to be perceived somewhat differently from how top bloggers are. One of the participants said,

[W]hen you watch Hanna Montana, she’s a celebrity and lives in the USA, of course I can’t be like her. I just have to try to be as good as I can. And then you see (the name of a popular blogger), oh she’s my age, she lives in Norway … She has exactly the same premises as I, why can’t I be like her?

Hollywood celebrities are positioned here as very distant in that they have their image created by a team of personal trainers and beauty experts so it is not realistic to even try to be like them. In contrast, top bloggers are framed as rather close, living in the same country, being the same age, having the same premises and thus possible to catch up

with. In her study of Swedish top bloggers, Lövheim (2011a) documents that top blog- gers strategically perform as ordinary girls to create a sense of sameness or closeness with their readers. This feeling of being like the top blogger is echoed in the words of one of my participants and this feeling seems to reinforce the disappointment with her own life and/or appearance. Apart from this effect of comparing oneself with the top bloggers, I suggest that this is also a good illustration of how celebrity culture manifests itself in mainstream blogging: it implies a presumption, or even an expectation that anyone can become a top blogger if only one tries hard enough, looks the right way, and has enough readers.