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Bloggers and digital labor: An interview with my friends

Looking at Norwegian lifestyle bloggers such as eirinkristiansen.blogg.no and fotballfrue.no: how far is your everyday life from the way they present theirs?

 

“The way she (eirinkristiansen.blogg.no) presents herself and her everyday life is far from what my everyday life looks like. She lives a perfectly structured life, and apparently has a lot of time on her hands, or just gets up three hours before going somewhere. I could never get up in the morning looking as fresh as she does and make homemade juice and avocado-toast before going to school. She writes about juice-detoxes and her newest training clothes before she goes off to the gym. I tend to question how realistic all of this is, and if her life actually looks the way she depicts it on her blog. I definitely think that this “perfect-life presentation” will fade after a while, as the readers, especially young readers, eventually will get bored and realize that most people don’t live their lives in a “blogger-esque” way.”

 

“I agree. I think that they have time to do all these things because these bloggers – all they do is blog. They take it very seriously and treat it as a full-time job, even though it seems like an easy but still such a well-paid job. For most people, writing three blog-posts a day about fashion and food seems like play rather than work. When these bloggers are asked what their job actually consist of, their answers are vague and ambiguous.”  

 

As mentioned before, my generation (at least in Norway) is very opinionated about bloggers even though we read blogs all the time. People don’t like the idea of bloggers calling their blogs their job, as people see it as leisure rather than challenging. I think this comes down to what we have talked about in class: digital labor. How do we distinguish between what should be paid and what should be unpaid labor in the digital world?  

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 DISCUSSION
#1 POSTED BY Wade Wallerstein, 04/23 4:52 PM

In my own project, this idea of blogging as full-time employment is one of my favorites to explore. Not only does blogging blur the lines between play and labor, as we discussed, but has transformed in a way that autobiographical content creation online is becoming a means of maintaining a livelihood. When we go online, we often forget that everything that we see has been created by a human. In my conference work for my other media class, a huge focus of mine is the inherently "human" quality of the internet. Though is seems cold, robotic, and totally separate from non-digital life, online content is inextricably non-virtual in that it took real life labor hours and energy to create. This is gonna sound kinda whacky, but this exploration has given me a deep appreciation of the human energy present in virtual media. 

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