Theories of Engaging, Immersing, Linking & Networking....

Mom Blogging: Issues of Identity,
Relations and Play

note: This is the third in a series of the MotherPie Blog Study, following the Introduction, and Mom Bloggers: Intensively Engaged in the Blogosphere.

Theories of Engaging and Immersing, Linking and Networking...

This study was also interested in the study of textual reading through links and the hypertextuality of the blogging format and online information seeking.  The results imply that the time spent exploring and learning online is engaging and is a trend of the future and is also perhaps captivating and engaging to the point of escape or immersion where time becomes irrelevant.  The low level of frustration encountered by this audience correlates to the amount of tech experience self-reported (average or high) and the amount of time spent participating in the blogosphere.  It could also have implications for the need for distraction, identity, community, or as an escape from social isolation.

In responding to this survey, respondents reported that when reading online and following links, they appreciate the incidental learning most and appreciate being able to go further to the source.  They also report losing track of time. Very few get frustrated with losing their way back and forth and they report feeling more engaged and active in the reading process.

Some of the theories that would be relevant to hypertexting and links and the immersion of this female blogging genre is the movement to online reading and the ability to move back forth through hypertexting.  The ability to navigate textually in this environment and the hours of immersion spent by the respondents in a virtual text environment creates a greater propensity to oscillate between information via links and to wayfind intellectually through reading text in a non-linear fashion.  George Landow, professor of English and art history at Brown University, wrote about the development of the narrative in hypertext.  A paradigm shift has occurred in textual and literary theory that, he writes, has “profound implications for literature, economics and politics.” Going even further, he elaborates that electronic writing, as he refers to it, with the ability to link to information, marks a revolution in human thought and that literary theorists/thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Adries van Dam argue that we must “abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center,  margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them by ones of multilinearity, nodes, links and networks.

I would surmise – and it is worthy of further study – that the fundamental physical change that women endure and experience in giving birth and taking on a new role of mother has allowed them, especially women who have acquired a high literacy capability, to adapt more quickly to the narrative environment of hypertext and the fluidity concepts that are involved in understanding and playing and communicating within the virtual textual literacy environment.   Additionally, this survey addressed an audience that has been able to afford access into connectivity and to the network that has a plurality of connections and one that has an appeal of a non-hierachical community without a “top” or “bottom.”

Additionally, the amount of time spent in the hypertextual, non-linear environment online that this study group experiences has allowed for a development of navigational expertise that not only changes the nature of the text and how it is read, but allows for the wayfinding through links to others in this community.  An interesting concept with this survey audience that should be analyzed is the implication of the time spent by mothers reading blogs and non-linear texts online.  Jacques Derrida, realizing the importance of free-form information based on digital information, and the retrieval of digital information, extends the possibilities of the message and the ability to read/write narratives online and to become literate in online literacy is perhaps a sign of the end of the book and the end of linear writing, according to Derrida.

If mothers are primarily responsible for the cultural and literal education of their progeny, as feminist theorists and others have concluded, Landow raises the interesting point from works of Alvin Kerman and other historians of the relations among reading practice, information technology and culture that the transformations of hyptertextuality/online literacy capabilities have political contexts and political implications, what Jameson and others conclude that it is not social and historical, but ‘in the last analysis’ political.

Although the theory of social power can be discussed elsewhere, the concepts of virtual framework/structure/environment as outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 3- 24)  have implications that are just now being understood and studied.  The online literacy levels and time spent navigationally structuring personal narratives and reading/seeking information and creating relations with others online is a non-linear mapping and framework.  Any point can be connected to any other and entry and exit is from multiple points and links into the blogosphere.  The barriers for social-racial-class and literate readings physically of others are completely removed and the basis of creating and relating becomes one of literate hypertext skills of creating, relating and navigating that are limitless and will become a digital language and mother tongue all to itself.  The deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the framework of a rhizome world (connected by endless nodes and  spaces that link the nodes to one another as plant bulbs do, rather than the idea of a tree with roots and branches and a hierarchy) makes social ties endless and reconstructions part of the on-going structure of the female blogs and mom blogs in particular.

While blogging tools have become more simple for non-tech people to use, the amateur can now work with digital media in unprecendented ways.  Female bloggers have used the digital image tools and hypertext environment to create the digital textual content, narrative and design aspects of their online spaces and personas linked and networked in a community of relations.   As the experience of navigating physical body and self-identity changes in real life through the shift from single person to mother repeats itself with online identity construction but in a virtual context and framework, there are implications generated for female communities and social engagement in alternative linked spaces.

Next: Blogging Motivations
 

Comments

[allison]

This is like an epiphany! I have wondered if I was odd because I can spend seeming hours following links and getting lost in the "virtual textual literacy environment", and my spouse gets frustrated even checking email on our home computer. I never knew I was part of a sisterhood. I am truly an online information seeker, thanks to graduate school, and I love researching every aspect of a topic. Very interesting study, well done!

[naomi dagen bloom]

much to consider in your study and directions you point to needing further research. connection between women giving birth and faster adaptation to textual environment seems too big a stretch--believe this is called "essentialist feminism."

issue of losing track of time has many ramifications. will it appear in #3 on commercialization? hope you will place all this in a separate category--or maybe you have and i missed it!

[Rashenbo]

I'm reading through your results now.... and this is fantastic! I'm definitely going to write up something on this - for now I've just linked to you in a post today.

[MistressOfTheDorkness]

The Hyperlink has certainly changed the world and the way we gather information. I can't say I lose track of time following them, but, you do end up in quite unexpected and enlightening places at time (that's why I loved moving to firefox with all of the multiple tabs, etc, so you don't have to lose your place of where you started or can save interesting side-trips for later).

Good good stuff here!