Blogger Josi Denise and Jodi Dean
Back in
May a hot topic in the mommy blogosphere was a post by blogger Josi Denise explaining why she was shutting down her mom blog “The American Mama”
(currently offline). Many found the post inflammatory as Denise explained her
reasons for quitting from the perspective of exposing the faults and fallacies
of the mom blogging industry with a highly critical and harsh tone. Without
delving into the gossip side of things or the resulting spectacle as her post
was circulated across the web and picked up by several online news platforms (
such as Time and the NY Post) and responded to by other bloggers who strongly disagree with her, in this
post I’ll be discussing how a few of her points relate to some of the concerns
within critical media theory as presented by political theorist Jodi Dean in “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”.
Leaving
behind as much of the “ranting” from the post as possible, in my opinion
Denise’s negative position towards mommy blogging boils down to issues
surrounding the authenticity of online identities, the saturization of
ethically questionable/unoriginal monetized content within this market, and a
false sense of engagement or community in the relationships between blogger and
readers, blogger to blogger, and blogger to brands.
Interestingly, I found one of
Denise’s posts on Blogher.com
from 2014, nine months after she began her blog, sharing her decision to enter
into this industry that portrays her initial enthusiasm and optimism upon
starting her blogging career.
What better way to spend my days than
sharing with others what we eat, and buy, and how I feel - and more
importantly, listening to how they live also? Partnering with brands and
services that I believe in and sharing them with people I know will appreciate
them is just a natural extension of what I do in my life anyway. I love to help
others.
Apparently a lot has changed
since then.
In “Communicative Capitalism:
Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics” Jodi Dean claims that in today’s
digital age, “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to
democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (Dean,
56). The value of our interactions with others (particularly online) lies in
the exchange process or circulation rather than in the content, which has become
devoid of meaning. Dean further explains her point by illustrating three
“fantasies” that allow the capitalisation of communication to take place; the
fantasy of abundance, activity/participation, and wholeness (Dean, 51). I found
the first two (abundance and participation) reflected in some of blogger Josi
Denise’s commentary regarding her gripes with the mom blogging world.
The Fantasy of Abundance:
-
Josi
Denise
In Dean’s
words, “The fantasy of abundance covers over the way facts and opinions, images
and reactions circulate in a massive stream of content, losing their specificity
and merging with and into the data flow. Any given message is thus a
contribution to this ever-circulating content… not actions to elicit responses”
(Dean, 58).
Josie Denise
describes the mom blogging industry as unsustainable because of the
cookie-cutter, formulaic content being produced in order to satisfy the brands
and sponsors bloggers wish to work with. As bloggers see others gaining success
in this manner they follow suit, also laying out a format that readers come to
recognize and expect. She mentions “day in the life” posts in particular which
is when a blogger takes record of certain moments in their day, sometimes
masking the underlying influences on the events they chose to highlight. For
example, being paid by a company like Tide or Downy leading to a paragraph on
how they spent a portion of their day getting grass stains out of their child’s
clothing using that product. “Day in the life” has become a tagline and a
format that anyone else can easily use, copying the main elements but swapping
in their own details. But what use is it for the reader to comb through
thousands of “day in the life” posts that don’t even necessarily offer a
perspective on the bloggers average daily activities but a heavily curated glimpse
of how they want their lives to come off to an audience. As stated by Dean,
with communicative capitalism “…a contribution need not be understood; it need
only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded” (Dean, 59).
Here is one example of what the “day in the life” posts tend to be like from
keeperofthehome.org.
The Fantasy of Participation:
Even
the people you think are reading your shit? They aren’t really reading it...
They are scanning it for keywords that they can use in the comments. “So cute!
Yum! I have to try this!”... The people clicking on it from Pinterest aren’t
reading it. They are looking for your recipe, or helpful tip promised in the
clickbait, or before and after photo, then they might re-pin the image, then
they are done. The people sharing it on Facebook? They aren’t reading it
either. They just want to say whatever it is your headline says, but can’t find
the words themselves. Your family? Nope. They are checking to make sure they
don’t have double chins in the photos you post of them, and zoning in on
paragraphs where their names are mentioned.
-
Josi
Denise
With this
fallacy, Dean explains that people habitually express themselves online
trusting that others are listening, leading to what she calls “a subjective
registration effect” (Dean, 60). And due to this effect they “believe that
their contribution to circulating content is a kind of communicative action.
They believe that they are active, maybe even that they are making a difference
simply by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition or commenting
on a blog (Dean, 60).
How Josi
describes “interaction” within her sector of the mom blogging world exemplifies
this as she is talking about bloggers putting out content that they believe is
significant but it is not actually being digested by their “readers” only
recirculated in various forms (pinning on Pinterest, sharing on Facebook, etc.)
and then forgotten about without leaving any lasting impact.
While looking
into the different types of mommy blogging networks as a potential future topic
of mine, I did notice that on several different platforms there are discussion threads
for bloggers to “connect” with each other, however the agreed means of
connecting is through reciprocal commenting or subscribing. So a blogger can
add their name to an ongoing list if they are interested in leaving a comment,
following, or subscribing to someone’s blog and in exchange receive a
comment/follow/subscribe from that blogger. You can see an example of this at
Mombloggersclub.com here .
This type of activity could possibly lead to a relationship with other bloggers
and significant interaction in the future…but the intent seems to be purely
based on increasing their blog stats and exposure. I have yet to find a similar
thread that is focused on the content rather than the numbers, for example
“read one of my posts and in exchange I will read one of yours”.
--------------------------
Nobody cares about anything you are saying
because you aren’t telling an engaging story. You are not giving your readers
anything they haven’t already heard. You are not being helpful, and you are not
being interesting…You’re writing in an inauthentic voice about an unoriginal
subject… and you are contributing nothing to the world but static noise.
-
Josi
Denise
It’s not hard to see why so many were offended by Josi
Denise’s words (and I plan to take up some of the opposing responses in a
subsequent post) but she does make a few points I felt warranted some further
discussion, whether or not her intentions were to warn other bloggers about
repeating her mistakes or to incite others to circulate the controversial post
for personal exposure.
Source: Dean,
Jodi. "Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of
Politics." Cultural Politics: an International Journal. 1.1 (2005):
51-74. Print.
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