Mommy Blog Lines: Tal(k)ing Care

Jaque and I are waiting in the San Francisco Airport to catch our flight back to Winnipeg. We’re feeling inspired by the co-presenters and feminists we met in the audience of our session “Birthing Rhetoric, Mommy Blogs and What Mommies Want” with Lori Beth De Hertogh (Washington State U) and Dawn Opel (Arizona State U). Our discussion about the surveillance and censorship experienced when posting on line (whether on Face Book or on Blogs) drew discussion and analysis about the differences between self-censorship (which we all practice on a daily basis of what we tell to whom and under what conditions) and being censored by employers, government, business, and corporations (censorship by Face Book was the focus of discussion around the Birthing Without Fear online Community). We questioned the role of responsibility that authors have/should have in being aware of what they are posting. We reflected upon the permanence of posts once uploaded to the internet and the long-term repercus...

In our culture, the lines between private and public life are eroded by social media–we have been learning variants of this lesson for so long that it has become forgettable by its familiarity. How can we expect modesty and self control from bloggers in a culture that increasingly celebrates self exposure? Tell and show all isn’t new. There has long been a strand of celebrity culture devoted to self-drama and -revelation, but in the days when modernists made such judgments, most forms of self exposure were linked to low culture. Now we call it popular culture. People say anything. People live their lives on camera. People want to share. Blogging is part of this wave that lets the inside out, that does away with boundaries. Yet there is a tension. Many of us still want to preserve some sense of inviolate self–of there being more to us than meets the eye, of having an inner life or core. Our blog has focused on privacy ethics–how we owe it to others to protect them for exposure an...