ethics and blogging and relational identity
ethics and blogging and relational identity
SUS here – been away awhile, but am all in now: time to look at mom blogs and see how art / sociability / education and commerce all come together. Rich mix.
How to talk about the self when to do so implicates others?. How to talk about family when to do so violates their right to privacy? I imagine all mommy bloggers think long and return often to this troublesome matter. When we speak about children, the need for ethical guardianship is even stronger. When I wrote an article about daughters, including mine, I read that this was relatively infrequent – that daughters often write about mothers and children write about parents. For moms to write about children is at the heart of mothering studies, but I wonder if there is resitance to it on many fronts because it is conceptually transgressive ie., moms are not supposed to "tell on" children (I borrowed the phrase to "tell on" from Maxine Hong Kingston’s daughter-writer, telling on her ghost aunt).
The issue of privacy is explored in 3 contexts in John Paul Eakin’s book How Our Lives Become Stories. He is looking at storying as auobio, but without much of a shift we can see blogging as our virtual storying. He says that viewed from anthropological, sociological, and legal roots, we can trace a concept of individual privacy. It is embodied and can be violated. Interesting. This gives a way to start thinking about privacy as spatial, as individual space. When figures are related, he says – daughter to father, son to father, daughter to mother–there is a relational bond, so the boundaries are not so sharp. In these cases, the young violate – tell on or about – the old. There is some backlash–some criticize the unseemliness, especially when the parent has requested privacy–but usually telling is understood as part of a two-fold burden of growing up and being a writer.
A parent, a mom, talking about her child / children can claim the second motive, but not the first. What else? To enrich the community of mothers, to break silence, to build bonds. I want to see the reasons that moms give, the ethical rhetorics.
I am also struck by the question of the standard of judgment used. I had noted it tends to be about what is good–a relational pragmatism–not abstractions about what is right. Maybe I’ll see this as I read more in this blogworld.
AND about Ira Basin’s CBC piece about mommy blogging–I want to listen again. He was a skeptic. He found (and edited to make voices) that were not attractive. The conference was a scene of "girls gone wild". But was it really that way? Unlikely. Any one else find him dropping heavy hints that the mommy bloggers were up to no good?
SUS here – been away awhile, but am all in now: time to look at mom blogs and see how art / sociability / education and commerce all come together. Rich mix.
How to talk about the self when to do so implicates others?. How to talk about family when to do so violates their right to privacy? I imagine all mommy bloggers think long and return often to this troublesome matter. When we speak about children, the need for ethical guardianship is even stronger. When I wrote an article about daughters, including mine, I read that this was relatively infrequent – that daughters often write about mothers and children write about parents. For moms to write about children is at the heart of mothering studies, but I wonder if there is resitance to it on many fronts because it is conceptually transgressive ie., moms are not supposed to "tell on" children (I borrowed the phrase to "tell on" from Maxine Hong Kingston’s daughter-writer, telling on her ghost aunt).
The issue of privacy is explored in 3 contexts in John Paul Eakin’s book How Our Lives Become Stories. He is looking at storying as auobio, but without much of a shift we can see blogging as our virtual storying. He says that viewed from anthropological, sociological, and legal roots, we can trace a concept of individual privacy. It is embodied and can be violated. Interesting. This gives a way to start thinking about privacy as spatial, as individual space. When figures are related, he says – daughter to father, son to father, daughter to mother–there is a relational bond, so the boundaries are not so sharp. In these cases, the young violate – tell on or about – the old. There is some backlash–some criticize the unseemliness, especially when the parent has requested privacy–but usually telling is understood as part of a two-fold burden of growing up and being a writer.
A parent, a mom, talking about her child / children can claim the second motive, but not the first. What else? To enrich the community of mothers, to break silence, to build bonds. I want to see the reasons that moms give, the ethical rhetorics.
I am also struck by the question of the standard of judgment used. I had noted it tends to be about what is good–a relational pragmatism–not abstractions about what is right. Maybe I’ll see this as I read more in this blogworld.
AND about Ira Basin’s CBC piece about mommy blogging–I want to listen again. He was a skeptic. He found (and edited to make voices) that were not attractive. The conference was a scene of "girls gone wild". But was it really that way? Unlikely. Any one else find him dropping heavy hints that the mommy bloggers were up to no good?
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