Compositional Strategies of Conflict Management in Personal Mommy Blogs

Abstract

Personal mommy bloggers create deliberately small-scale, emotionally reciprocal intimate publics through their authoring and commenting practices. This paper employs literary close reading of two individual personal mommy blogging posts, and the comments generated in response to these posts, to demonstrate the compositional strategies by which both bloggers and commenters mitigate the potential conflict arising from the articulation of controversial or taboo ideas and feelings. Members of these publics employ deliberate social strategies to achieve a balance between perfectly honest self-expression and the need for compromise and moderation of views required for fruitful social interaction and the maintenance or extension of relationships. Using phatic statements of general well-wishing, diversion or deflection, humour, and reciprocal emotional disclosure, the bloggers and commenters examined here put into practice the ideals of community, self-expression, and support earlier research has demonstrated they have expressed as core values.