Abstract
Contemporary mom blogging is a digital practice that relies on telling everyday stories of one’s personal and family life. The increasing commercialisation of the lifestyle blogosphere means that blogging can be recognised as a form of freelance work and an option especially for those mothers of small children who strive to combine at-home mothering with different forms of micro-entrepreneurship. This chapter investigates practices of mom blogging in Finland. To address the ‘new normal’ of blogging, the chapter investigates how the complexities of blogging, such as the monetisation of everyday life, the construction of public displays of subjectivity, and the dissolving of parenting into work and vice versa, are negotiated by the bloggers themselves as an everyday part of living, working, and parenting.
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Notes
- 1.
These blogs are usually called ‘mommy blogs’, but it is a contested concept (Friedman 2013, pp. 9–10; Rogers & Green 2015, p. 34). I think ‘mom blogs’ best captures the common characteristics of the blogs that I am researching. Many of the bloggers themselves also embrace the terms mom or mommy (‘mamma’ in Finnish), often with some irony. This, however, does not mean that the blogs would be solely concerned with mothering and family issues, but rather that the bloggers themselves are claiming and reflecting on the identity of ‘mother’ as a more or less significant part of their blogging. Many of the blogs’ names bear some reference to either mothers or babies.
- 2.
These agencies take care of the practical aspects of making marketing agreements with commercial companies while allowing the bloggers independence in deciding which companies to work with, but they of course also charge a certain percentage for their work (e.g., 50%). Moreover, the agencies also indirectly affect the ways in which the bloggers perceive themselves and others. For example, one of the bloggers I interviewed described how the agency’s practices of openly sharing statistical information reflecting the popularity of the blog means that she could not help comparing her site’s statistics to those of other mom blogs. For her, the agency’s practices have led to a heightened sense of being in a ‘popularity’ competition with others.
- 3.
Finnish law has provided home care allowance for the care of children under three years of age since 1985. In 2013, the proportion of children aged nine to 24 months taken care of at home and supported by the home care allowance was 49% (Salmi & Lammi-Taskula 2015). Home care allowance, though also available for men, has for its whole existence been used almost entirely by women, especially women in precarious labour-market positions (Anttonen 2003; Salmi & Lammi-Taskula 2015). Subsidised at-home mothering (and also at-home grand-mothering) until the child is three years old differentiates Finland from other European countries (Anttonen 2003). It is, however, important to note that home care allowance is not tied to the mother’s labour-market position, and thus it is possible to combine part-time or freelance work with receiving home care subsidy.
- 4.
I conducted these eight interviews in 2015 and 2016 as a part of a still ongoing research project. They were semi-structured and each lasted approximately an hour. The interviewees were bloggers who themselves viewed blogging as work and who had received some monetary compensation for their blog. The quotations from interviews were translated from Finnish to English by me.
- 5.
Transcription style: … indicates words have been omitted in a sentence, often just the repetition or a word or two; […] indicates a sentence or an aside has been omitted; [words in brackets] are inserted to clarify meaning.
- 6.
In some of the interviews, the bloggers noted that they were not really doing as well as they could—for instance, they could be posting more often or putting more hours towards the blog if they just had the time. This feeling of inadequacy was nothing dramatic, but rather, an everyday experience (Purokuru & Paakkari 2015), accepted as part of the job. Although I cannot here reflect properly on this, it is worth mentioning as an everyday, unnoticeable part of the type of professionalism in which success is measured by numbers, as it is in blogging.
- 7.
Recently a complaint was made to the Council of Ethics in Advertising concerning a marketing campaign involving several lifestyle and mom blogs in Finland.
- 8.
Like ‘mommy blogging’, ‘mumpreneur’ is a contested concept (Ekinsmyth 2014). In discussing the politics of using this concept, Carol Ekinsmyth highlights the need to investigate ‘mumpreneurship’ in terms of the meanings that individuals attach to their identities as well as to their everyday lived experience, which I find critical also in relation to mom bloggers.
- 9.
Hochschild (1983) uses the term ‘emotional labour’ to refer to emotion management that has exchange value. In the case of blogging, it could be said that emotional labour has both use value and exchange value, as it is aimed to maintain a supportive and good community but in the context of monetisation and micro-entrepreneurship.
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Mäkinen, K. (2018). Negotiating the Intimate and the Professional in Mom Blogging. In: Taylor, S., Luckman, S. (eds) The New Normal of Working Lives. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66038-7_7
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