London.
The post-lunch session at Transforming Audiences starts with a presentation by Mia Lövheim, whose study examines young (18-30 years) female A-List bloggers in Sweden. The interest here is not in link-blogging activities, but in the content created by the bloggers themselves, and the way they create identity and maintain personal relationships through these blogs; bloggers and readers in a way are co-creating the bloggers' identities here. How does this take place for A-List bloggers, though, whose popularity means that their posts are read by the established community of regular readers as well as by a much larger, more casual audience?
On these blogs, the majority of commenters are presenting themselves as women, and most comments express identification and support. Some posts elucidate more comments than others here: competitions, invitations for readers to ask questions, reactions to reader comments, posts discussing issues of concern to young women, and post addressing controversial issues and provocations.
In some of the discussions that ensue from such interchanges, the question of the blogs' purpose and ownership is highlighted: for example when bloggers discuss their reasons for responding (or not) to reader expectations that they should answer reader comments. Such discussions are about the perceived responsibility of the blogger to their community of readers; this sense of responsibility is especially heightened for successful, popular bloggers, of course, some of whom also try to generate an income of their 'celebrity blogger' status.
Blogging can be seen as a community practice centred around the performance of self - and readers play a part in this performance. Bloggers' strategies for handling such audiences must be in line with the performance of self in other aspects of the blog, but also with conventions and expectations of identity and authenticity, and of gender. Personal blogs, then, construct publics and spaces for a reflection on and negotiation of identities, values, and norms in contemporary society.
