In October, I presented a paper to the Cultural Rhetorics Conference at MSU titled, “She Blogs Like Bedroom Culture: A Cultural History of Teenage Girlhood & Web 2.0.” In that paper, I interviewed participants about the ways in which they formed their identities during the early “adolescent” period of the Internet. What did your LiveJournal reveal to you about your feminism, your femininity?, I asked. What did your LiveJournal tell you about the person you would be today?
My LiveJournal taught me that I loved and will always love Brian Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire”. Remember the What are you listening to?/Where are you?/How are you feeling? mechanisms for posting? How our listening habits, affective responses, and geolocation were not technologies of control, how we could choose how we filled in the blank? That was a cool time.
It was also a time that I look back on and realize how I am and always was a person uncomfortable with public writing. A poem is a kind of public response, but it’s a mediating interface in the same sense. The audience is always a fiction, sure, but its fiction-ness is constituted by that separation between you, the reader, and me, the moody teenage girl working through her adolescence with an adolescent technology.
This is my first blog since the summer of 2008, my summer of tragedy, heartbreak, and really obscure punk rock that you wouldn’t even know about probably. Here are some things I want to accomplish that don’t have anything to do with my “feelings” (trick, they all have things to do with my feelings):
- Talk about my research on the intersection of gender, labor, and the digital. I study maker communities and spaces, so this will involve a little bit of craft journaling for both my digital and traditional craftwork.
- Develop an archive of myself as an academic that reflects on those early blogging practices centered on identity formation, feminism, and emergent relation to technologies.
- Hang out.
- Post gifs.
It me, performing clicks and waving gestures.
Stitches: Many
Making: A Christmas sweater and a short game about manic depression
Location: Curled up next to Woody the Dog on the floor like a normal person
Media: Minecraft, Drive-By Truckers
Feeling: Brand new
krystin gollihue 