Ser joven: aspectos importantes de la Sociología de la juventud

Three categories of practices for community-building were observed in the blog posts that described interactions with other bloggers: 1) a sense of belonging to a group, 2) a sense of solidarity among plus-size fashion consumers, and 3) a sense of support. The bloggers portrayed their sense of belonging to a group as a novel experience – something they had been missing in their pre-blogging lives – and as

something that had particular significance to plus-size women because of their marginalized position in both society and fashion. As the author of Blog 6 put it, seeing women who looked similar to her walking on the catwalk at the Plus North fashion event “completely overwhelmed” her and “opened a whole world up to [her] that [she] didn’t really know existed”. For her, being able to relate to people in a fashion context had not been possible before she started blogging and interacting with other bloggers at events such as Plus North. Achieving this sense of belonging was, however, a gradual process. Several bloggers expressed feelings of initial nervousness and anxiety when interacting with other bloggers offline – in particular, novice bloggers were intimidated by more established bloggers that were higher up in the blogging hierarchy (see also Chittenden, 2010, p. 514). However, despite these mentions of initial apprehension, all references to other bloggers in the data sample were framed as positive; this was especially visible in the frequent use of positive adjectives such as “lovely” and “wonderful” in connection to other bloggers’ names.

In blog posts describing events organized by fashion brands, the bloggers expressed demands for the same treatment and options as thinner women. The need for visibility and acceptance as consumers of fashion was highlighted both on a personal level, and in terms of the larger plus-size community. While representatives of fashion brands were included in the community in some of the posts, the brands were also openly criticized if they failed to meet the demands of the consumers – by contrast, such criticisms were not directed at fellow bloggers in any of the posts. Solidarity towards other bloggers was also apparent in linking practices, crediting others for their work (e.g. when borrowing photographs), as well as in the use of positive speech acts such as complimenting and congratulating. The author of Blog 9, for example, congratulated three other community members for being nominated for a blogging award, referring to them with affectionate nicknames such as “uber babes” and “sister from another mister”

– despite not being nominated herself. The presence of such supportive practices in blog texts is particularly interesting when contrasted with the questionnaire data from 2017 (see section 6.3 and Article 4), where competitiveness within the blogosphere was highlighted.

Several characteristic features of a community of practice could be observed in the blog posts where other bloggers were mentioned. There were boundary markers, such as the use of the inclusive pronouns we/us/our when referring to community members, as well as in-group linguistic and discursive features, such as vocabulary related to plus-size fashion and routinized ways of referring to other

bloggers. Evidence of roles, hierarchies and established norms could also be observed in, for example, the practices of linking to others’ blogs and crediting others.

The results of Article 1 challenge the theoretical concept of the virtual community, and I argue that when discussing modern, online-based aggregations of people, the community of practice approach is a better theoretical starting point.

Moreover, my findings highlight how the term virtual community in itself is outdated, since digital communication is now a part of everyday life, and the line between offline and online friendships has become blurred. Although the bloggers in my data expressed a sense of community, many of them explicitly describing feelings of belonging to a community, their interactions were not restricted to the virtual world. Rather, their blogs appear to have acted as a stepping-stone into a network of relationships with multiple actors ranging from other bloggers to representatives of plus-size fashion brands. Interactions based on mutual engagement through blogs – regular reading, commenting and linking – have resulted in other types of interactions, including face-to-face meetings and commercial collaborations.

Thus, alternatives for the concept of the virtual community are needed. In her work on workplace email communication, Hössjer (2013, p. 618) presents the term digitally-based community of practice as an online-based alternative for what she refers to as physically-based communities of practice. While the term in itself appears to be a suitable replacement for virtual community, Hössjer’s (2013, p. 618) definition is too narrow for two reasons. First, Hössjer considers digitally- and physically-based communities of practice as separate entities instead of interwoven and overlapping. Second, she states that a digitally-based community of practice is

“typically (although not necessarily) […] realized through one medium (email, a chat room, etc.)” (Hössjer, 2013, p. 618). As these two aspects of Hössjer’s framework are problematic in the context of both the present study and modern online interaction on a more general level, I suggest the term digitally-driven community of practice as an alternative.

While the origins of a digitally-driven community of practice are rooted in online communication, the interactions between participants are not restricted to a particular medium, nor do they necessarily remain separate from offline relationships. As the findings of Article 4 illustrate, in addition to meeting offline, bloggers also use a variety of online media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) other than their blogs to interact with each other (see section 6.3). Thus, the key difference between a digitally-based (Hössjer, 2013) and a digitally-driven

community of practice is that in the case of the latter, the practices the community members engage in on a specific online platform (such as blogs) are, in most cases, merely a starting point. The rules, values, and in-group behaviors that are established within an online community are the driving force behind a (potentially) more widespread network of participants, as well as ways of participating. Such networks have the potential to evolve both in terms of their membership – in addition to bloggers, blog readers and representatives of the fashion industry, for example, can become members – and in terms of platforms (other social media, offline meetings). When a community spreads to other platforms outside of its starting point, its boundaries become less clear than those of a community that is situated only on one particular platform. For this reason, the role of group-specific linguistic and discursive features is even more emphasized in constructing membership in a digitally-driven community of practice.

The results of Article 1 also demonstrate that Herring’s (2004) CMDA model needs revising as a response to the rapidly changing world of digital media. Public social media platforms that are popular in contemporary Western society, such as blogs, Instagram and YouTube, are mostly built around asynchronous communication.³⁶ Moreover, this communication can take place simultaneously on multiple sites; for example, an Instagram comment can reference a blog post, or a blogger can embed a link to a YouTube video that includes comments from viewers on her blog. Herring’s model is lacking particularly when it comes to its interactional aspects (e.g. patterns of turn-taking), as it was designed for studying online communication with more traditionally conversational (and often synchronous) features, such as chat room and discussion forum interactions. The level of social behavior in Herring’s model can also be critiqued, as there are phenomena on all levels of language use, including the levels of structure, meaning and interaction, that construct social relations and hierarchies. For example, “us vs.

them” pronoun use is classified as a structural feature in Herring’s (2004, p. 361) model, but in my data, it is also used for drawing boundaries between social groups, such as plus-size women and thin women, or bloggers and non-bloggers (see also section 6.2 and Article 2).

Herring herself (2018) has addressed the fact that, in its original form, the CMDA approach works best on textual – as opposed to multimodal – discourse, and for studies of communication that takes place through one semiotic mode. As

36 With the exception of live streams where commenters can communicate directly with the person producing content. Both YouTube and Instagram currently have a live-streaming function.

a response to the constantly evolving CMC technologies, Herring (2013; 2018) has proposed changes to the CMDA model, as well as encouraging other researchers to move forward in developing new methods for analyzing CMD. However, much of this discussion focuses on multimodal online communication in particular. My work in Article 1, however, illustrates that there are aspects of CMDA that can be challenging even when studying purely textual communication.

An interesting finding regarding the relationships between different members of the blogging community is the fact that all mentions of other bloggers in the dataset for Article 1 were decidedly positive and supportive. As no community is completely harmonious and conflict-free, an analysis such as the one I carried out in Article 1 most likely does not reveal the whole truth about the blogging community’s in-group relations. The bloggers may want to avoid “open” conflict with other bloggers on their blogs for multiple reasons. First of all, a blog with an overall positive tone may appear more attractive to clothing brands and other potential commercial collaborators. Second of all, the bloggers’ avoidance of publicly criticizing other bloggers on their blogs can also be an effort to maintain harmony within the community. However, conflicts can still take place on other channels that are less directly connected to the personal brands the bloggers have created on their blogs, such as on other social media platforms or in behind the scenes conversations. Regardless of the reasoning behind only discussing other bloggers in positive contexts in public blog texts, it is important to be aware of these possible factors and to use other research methods to supplement the analysis of blog material when possible. Methods such as interviews and questionnaires are well-suited for this purpose (see also Androutsopoulos, 2008).