Abstract
This study investigates the blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. Based on a quantitative approach, a snowballing survey method is conducted, to explore the spaces within which women seek “self-realization,” “self-formation” and “publicity” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. There are two main questions that undergird this project: “Do women, performing in social media, unintentionally become subjugated to a form of exploitation and alienation, as the literature on digital labor suggests?” “Is hope labor is influential in female bloggers’ blog usage and content writing? Research findings demonstrate that these women, while constructing their identities as bloggers, incorporate to the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey via articulation of blogging with the global market system. Although blogs provide employment opportunities and economic gains, main motivation behind women’s blogging practices remain to be self-realization and self-fulfillment, leaving hope labor less influential in blog writing. Traditional views like unemployed women participate to public sphere via blogging activities wriggling out of their inherited gender roles also remain to be an over determination since employed women feel more emancipated through blogging.
Highlights
Web 2.0 and its impacts on socialization processes have been an issue of interest among digital labor scholars
As the total number is divided into two categories: bloggers who have economic benefits from blogs and those who don’t have, the results show that 28.57% of women who answered as they are fulfilled by blogging practices, do not earn any money/presents/products from blogging. 26% of women on the other hand, feel fulfilled and have economic gains by the help of their blogging activities (Figure 9)
This study investigates the blogging practices in Turkey from a gendered and digital labor perspective, focusing on how female bloggers locate and represent their self-consciousness in the blogosphere
Summary
Web 2.0 and its impacts on socialization processes have been an issue of interest among digital labor scholars. The infrastructure of Web 2.0 has enabled Internet users to interact and collaborate with each other, allowing social media to become one of the most powerful tools with a major impact on our communication styles, socialization and self-formation processes. As Mark Deuze (2007, p.77) suggests, “people seem to be increasingly willing to participate voluntarily in the media making process to achieve what can be called a networked reputation” This is because of the desire to better position oneself for future employment opportunities (Brabham, 2008). This networked reputation is closely related to what Marwick calls as “micro-celebrities”- a term used to address being famous within a niche group, either via self-promotion or through the recognition of others (2013a). Blogs are effective in many respects and there is a remarkable blogger power in the marketing
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