Teoría de la Gestión

As I already explained, while the mainstream blogging community is unique and, to an extent, blogging differs from other digital media spaces used by girls, it exemplifies some of the more general trends in contemporary girls’ digital media culture such as the focus on the body (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009), competitiveness within judge- ment culture (Hirdman, 2007), commercialization (Schor, 2004), and celebrity culture (boyd, 2008). In this sense, my work provides some insights into the processes and girls’ experiences in contemporary digital media culture in the Nordic context, which has been, as mentioned already, scarcely documented.

The girls whom I interviewed frame the trend setters in the mainstream blogging community (top female bloggers) as promoting the technology-enabled body and con- sumerist lifestyles. I find such identity performances illustrative of the postfeminist sen- sibility typical of contemporary media culture. I have documented that the girls negoti- ate these norms of perfectibility promoted by the top bloggers and that they are judged by their readers according to these norms as well as according to the respectability norm.

documented by Lomborg (2012) and Rettberg (2008). The blogger-audience relation is built on interactivity; this is the intrinsic, key characteristic of the blogging practice (boyd, 2006). The blogs are produced to be consumed and responded to by others. The participants frame positive response from the audience as the biggest motivation to blog. Positive comments and stable readership statistics are uplifting, indicating that the blog- ger, as a participant put it, “did something right”, and this makes them feel good about themselves. Positive response is framed as an indicator that one fits into the peer group, a manifestation of one’s performances of self being validated by peers. My finding here is in line with previous studies (boyd, 2008; Chittenden, 2010; Stern, 2008). Still, in mainstream blogging, girls compete with each other for audiences and positions on the blog rankings. The top lists structure the blogg.no community in a way that frames the bloggers as competitors. All the participants aim, at least at one point, at being listed, although this changes depending on their goals and/or whether they are in their active or passive phase of blogging. In this competitive setting, positive response from the au- dience can make you a “winner” of the competition and give you status, just as the likes on Facebook or a large number of followers on Instagram or YouTube do. Competing for positive response implies being compared by the readers with other girls who blog and being judged based on these comparisons. In this sense, mainstream blogging is illustrative of the judgement culture that frames contemporary youthful social media practices.

Mainstream blogging is also contextualized by celebrity culture. Some top female bloggers gain not only micro-celebrity status in the blogging community but also main- stream popularity with traditional mass-media coverage and participation in TV shows. However, I suggest that celebrity culture also manifests itself in another way in the mainstream blogging community: even the participants with relatively small audiences experience fan behavior; they receive fan mail from readers, are recognized by some rea- ders on the streets, or are commonly asked to pose with a reader for a selfie. The relation to the audience is often described as hierarchical in its celebrity and fan setup. This is a point quite different from those made in earlier research that documents that young people are on social media mostly in order to socialize with peers they know from offline contacts (see, for example, Ito et al., 2010).

While validation among peers comes across as the biggest advantage of blogging, some participants frame receiving sponsored products or money as incentives to extend and maintain their blogging audiences. The participants associate having big audiences with material benefits such as sponsored gifts or income from advertising. Achieving material benefits from blogging seems to be normalized by the participants unless it is abused, for instance by a blogger not clearly marking the sponsored posts. While only some of the participants are actively seeking commercial cooperation, participation in

the mainstream blogging community is clearly framed by this norm.

While the mainstream blogging community is commercialized in the sense that it is heavily populated by irremovable advertisements that are continually consumed by the girls who blog, as has been documented (Schor, 2004), the girls who blog are not only consumers but also producers of content, including commercial content. In mainstream blogging, girls who have large enough audiences can start cooperation with commercial actors and receive material benefits in exchange for advertising products or services in their blogs. However, receiving material benefits is not typically the driving force of the participants’ blogging practices: they blog in their spare time rather than to earn a living and they frame blogging as a hobby. Thus, in contrast to professional top bloggers, I ar- gue that the girls in my study are not engaging in strategic self-branding (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Keller, 2015) in order to gain material benefits. Still, the girls position the acqu- isition of material benefits from blogging as a sign of success in their community and this undoubtedly influences their participation. As documented in Paper 2 and Paper 3, the commercialization norm frames their performances of their blogging selves and their meaning-making of digital competences.