Before I set myself up as the voice of anti-consumerism (pause for a moment to let the UPS guy in with my latest shipment from J.Crew and to allow the laughter from frequent readers to subside), I just want to clarify my position on the commercialization of the blogosphere -- something that a lot of the bloggers I read (Kate, Miche, Dani, Andrea, Ann) are discussing right now (I think it's because the ARM conference is fast approaching and "what is this thing called the blogosphere" is on the brain).
For me, the issue is not do you have ads or do you not have ads. If ads work for you and you don't mind what they do to your design, I say go for it. As far as I know the ads do not have a two-way reach. It's like deciding to put an advertisement on your car -- people can choose to look or not to look, end of story. You're the one who has to drive the car.
What I object to is when there is a hidden agenda (and some might argue that there always is -- given that we are human beings and all.) When I read a blog, my assumption has always been that the blogger is writing for a few key reasons because, well, they are the same reasons I write and I guess I'm just not super-imaginative.
1) Cheap therapy. There is something that is very cathartic about writing something and then sending it "out there" even if one suspects no-one else is reading it. It is far more satisfying that, say, keeping a journal under lock and key although I'm not exactly sure why.
2) Desire for Feedback. Most bloggers have been told at some point in the lives by someone that they are decent writers. But, writing, like having a good sense of humour or being a good driver, is one of those things that I think most people assume they do well. We never really know until we put our words out there for review. So we do.
3) Validation. This is why I think a lot of mothers blog. I think that we want to make sure that what we are doing for so many hours of our week is not invisible, because as the Suave (or is it Dove?) ad says, we often feel invisible. It's sort of an I blog, therefore I am thing.
4) Building community. It can be lonely out there as a mama. My initiation to the web as support came when I was undergoing some fertility treatments. I haunted the Resolve boards and Caroline's boards and it was really a tremendous source of comfort to discover other women going through the same thing. We helped each other through the two week wait, blowing baby dust each other's way and urging each other to eat lots of pineapple. When, as a new mother, I felt that there must be something wrong with me since what I was experiencing was in no way a Hallmark Moment, the web and the blogosphere connected me to women like Andi and Marrit and Ella who were writing what I needed to read. I wanted to share my experiences with other women who might be going through the same thing as a way of saying thank you to those who had helped me.
5) A Book Deal. Make no mistake, I would love a book deal. I am working on a book (a couple of them in fact). And when they are written, I will shop and then market the heck out of them. Although it was not my original intention, there is no denying that blogging has helped me to build a "brand" (T.O. Mama, MUBAR) I can hopefully leverage at some point in the future.
6) Remuneration. Financially, I am very comfortable (even by bloated NOrth American standards) and I realize what a luxury it is to be able to say "I'm not in it for the money." It's an option a lot of women do not have and I say if they can make some income while doing something they love, power to them. That is not to say that I do not see some of my writing as a commercial endeavour, however. When I want to review a book, I tend to get a review (read: free) copy from the publisher. I received a small honorarium for taking the time to read and review the Tracy Thompson book (a book that, for the record, I would have bought and read anyway and which I have subsequently bought with my own money for a friend) and there was no editorial pressure whatsoever. I will be receiving a small (and when I say small, people, I mean small -- like I can maybe buy a shirt at J.Crew if I kick in a few bucks of my own) honorarium since it looks like an essay I write will be included in a to-be published anthology. I will be doing some editorial consulting for which I will be compensated. I think that women ought to be paid fairly for the work they do (it's one of the underpinnings of feminism) and believe you me, writing is hard work.
So what has been bugging me of late about the blogosphere is not blog ads because they are what they are. What has been bugging me is what I am calling "community building with ulterior motives". Recently, I began to get a number of emails from "new readers" saying "wow, your writing really spoke to me" and then there would be a link to their blog which I almost always check out. If I do not provide a link to them right away, they tended to email me and/or comment frequently until I felt that the polite thing to do was to link to them. Then, more often than not, they would disappear and I'd end up feeling a little used.
More and more I was discovering the "blog as soap opera/reality tv". The author's voice seemed a little shaky, a little inauthentic. There subject matter tended to be sensational and I think that readers were reading them in anticipation of witnessing a train wreck. And I began to wonder, are they writing this because it is really happening or are they writing about this because, like in soap operas, ever few weeks you had better have a wedding or a funeral so that people stay tuned?
And maybe it shouldn't matter if it is truth or if it is fiction -- most writers tend to employ a pretty healthy use of poetic license and who ever really knows where the truth lies. But whenever I have written a post about something painful like PPD, I receive emails (never comments) from women (rarely bloggers) who have stumbled upon my site via google and who tell me how much reading my story meant to them because they thought they were the only ones suffering. I can't imagine the betrayal they would feel -- I know only the betrayal that I would feel -- if
they were to learn that there was a commercial motivation behind it all.
So when I see things like GreenStone's "[we have] an approach that
creates community: the best possible environment for female-targeted
brands," it makes me feel sad.
I do think that blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to building community and can be a way for women to do the feminist work of consciousness raising in a day when we are simply too exhausted at night to sit in one another's living rooms and jam. And I think that it can be that tool even if there are blogads running down the sidebar. What I don't want blogging to become, however, is just another guerilla marketing technique where, at the end of the day, the true intention is to sell. I don't want to be invited to a consciousness raising section in someone's virtual living room, only to discover that what I was really invited to was a Tupperware party.
