Performing the Self in the Mainstream

Blogging has become an integral part of girls’ media culture in Norway. This article investigates how teenage girls in the mainstream blogging community perform selves in their blogs over time. While studies of girls’ self-presentations online abound, most draw solely on analyses of online artefacts and lack a temporal perspective. To address these gaps, this investigation has employed a longitudinal design combining in-depth interviews with ethnographic content analyses of blogs, and has analysed girls’ online-based performances of self as integral to their offline experiences framed by the wider cultural context and gendered discourses. This approach is fruitful because it acknowledges girls’ changing experiences across time and contexts, thus making possible a contribution to the theorization of identity as performed across the online and the offline settings and interactions in an ongoing process.

I have identified that the girls performed blogging selves reflexively and strategically but they were held accountable according to the gendered norms and discourses manifested both within the online-based blogging community and beyond – in the offline settings. The blogging selves changed over time and the girls identified with them to different degrees.