Welcome to Me-Mart

Abstract

This article uses a discursive analysis of personal blogging handbooks and personal blogs to reflect on the politics of user-generated content (UGC) as it is created, circulated, valuated, quantified, and monetized by different social media platforms. In doing so, this article traces the contours of an increasingly commercialized blogosphere and the tensions and perceived trade-offs that ensue for professional and quotidian bloggers. By reconstructing the ecology of platforms that form the sociotechnical machinery of the blogosphere, the rifts between the empowerment rhetoric of Web 2.0 and the statistical and experiential realities faced by quotidian bloggers become palpable. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a surefire ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering structural reality of obscurity and tedium, bloggers are recalibrating their collective delusions of grandeur by constructing alternative economies of exchange. Instead of valuating their self-professed labor monetarily or quantitatively, bloggers are reverting to more attainable small-scale social exchanges that are qualitative in form. More than hits, links, and votes, bloggers appear to value a virtual pat on the back, a reassuring remark, a sincere conversation. However, as the machinery of the blogosphere chugs on, the sociotechnical biases of its architectures of participation will be increasingly unable to cater to these bloggers’ needs. This article demonstrates how the politics of UGC can illuminate the infectious rhetoric of Web 2.0, situate the enterprise of blogging within the socioeconomic logic of prosumption, and pave the way toward a better understanding of our communal media futures.