Digital pioneers: Mormon mommy bloggers and building the “Bloggernacle”
Article / Journal
Author(s):
Emily Lynell Edwards
Year: 2024
Language(s): English
Abstract:
This article examines the influence of Mormon mommy bloggers (MMBs), as key web architects and content creators starting in the early 2010s. MMBs, referring here to Mormon content creators whose blogs focused on topics such as childrearing, domesticity, and lifestyle themes, were significant players during Web 2.0 through their usage of the longform blog. MMBs transformed the invisibilized domestic labor of mothering and housekeeping into monetizable content within the Mormon blogosphere or “Bloggernacle.” The aspirational monetization and professionalization of the blog offered a tangible occupation for Mormon stay-at-home mothers in a religious culture where working outside the home was discouraged. MMBs, through blogging, attempted to situate themselves not simply as caretakers but enterprising, digital cultural creators aligning themselves with a (neo)liberal feminist ethos of entrepreneurialism and individualistic influencing. Using a corpus of web archives from Brigham Young University’s digital collections, this article enlists the Archives Research Compute Hub (ARCH) to process archival data into derivatives to illuminate this underexplored period of web history, employing the methods of feminist thematic and social network analysis. By combining cultural and quantitative analysis of MMBs, this article highlights how MMBs were crucial creators who paved the way for contemporary trends of feminized influencing and the uneasy blending of feminist and commercial content which has increasingly defined contemporary mother-influencers.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2024.2438464
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein