The Personal is Political:
Feminist Blogging and Virtual Consciousness-Raising

Surveying the Blogosphere

Weblogs evolved from early Web sites that functioned as early online journals or diaries, reporting and keeping running commentaries on people’s daily activities and interests. In the late 1990s, there were only a small number of these sites, which would later be called “weblogs” by Jorn Barger. ¹ The tragedy of September 11, 2001, seems to have been a turning point in the blogging boom. Blogs proved especially useful in relaying information and communicating with others at a time when traditional media outlets were failing the general public. People wanted to hear firsthand what was happening in New York and to know whether their friends, coworkers, and family were safe. This horrible moment in American history, was a revolutionary one for blogging as means to communicate information.

The blogosphere has changed considerably since the beginning of the decade. According to Technorati, ² the blogosphere continues to double about every six months; a new blog is created every second of every day. ³ People all over the world have caught on to blogs and are using the medium in several ways, from the political blogs that have received so much media attention, to online diaries and venues to discuss hobbies or specific interests. While there have been no recent, thorough studies detailing the demographics of the blogosphere, data from Perseus in September 2005 show that 68 percent of blogs in their sample were created by women and 58 percent by people under 19. ⁴

While it may be difficult to determine how many of the 51.6 million ⁵ blogs Technorati tracks actually belong to women, their findings do show that there are a substantial number of women blogging. But what does this really mean? Looking back to the early days of the Internet, when only 20 percent of women were online, I discussed the negativity and the hostile terrain of masculine cyberspace, ⁶ where Web sites created by women or devoted to “women’s issues” were few and far between. ⁷ Today the Internet is less hostile in some respects. Women and men are represented online in both the United States and Canada in more or less equal numbers. And in contrast to just a few years ago, there is a plethora of material related to women online. For example, a quick Google search of “domestic violence” provides over 75 million Web sites, with the first 100 hits from Google linking to information from academics, nonprofit and community organizations, and legal and government resources. When I conducted the same search in 1995, it provided only a handful of results, none of which was useful to me at that time.

In a perfect world, the “digital divide”—i.e., the inequities of income, gender, skills, access, etc.—that has been a key concern of many Internet scholars would have ceased to exist. But while the number of women who have access to the Internet has increased substantially, there are still those who lack access—for example, many women in rural areas. We also cannot ignore the digital divide in developing countries, where many women continue to be excluded from the Internet.

Early feminist Internet researchers speculated that, as more women gained access to the Internet and learned the skills to use it effectively, women would be less likely to experience harassment and negativity in the virtual world. ⁸ Other feminist researchers felt that such a broad and generalized approach to women and the Internet ignored the underlying ideologies concerning women and technology that are pervasive in our culture. ⁹ For these scholars, more women online would not necessarily mean equity or a reduction in the virtual resistance encountered by women. While the prevalence of overt hostility toward women online may have decreased substantially, women are still faced with barriers and obstacles in the virtual world, some of which can be seen in the blogosphere.

1. Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective” (2000). Available at http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html.[↑]
2. See Technorati.com, a Web site that tracks blogs and allows people to search for them through topics, author, and so forth.[↑]
3. See http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000419.html. [↑]
4. Most of the demographic data from Perseus comes from LiveJournal and Xanga, so it is not inclusive of other blogging software. For example, a Pew “Internet and American Life” report in January of 2005 noted that 57 percent of bloggers are men and 48 percent are under the age of 30. Report available at http://www.pewInternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp.[↑]
5. As of August 19, 2006.[↑]
6. See T. Kennedy, “An Exploratory Study of Feminist Experiences in Cyberspace,” Cyber Psychology and Behaviour 3, no. 5 (2000): 707-719.[↑]
7.  In 1996, I was one of Chatelaine Magazine‘s Digital Women of the Year for a Web site I created in 1995 that addressed issues of women and violence. I started this Web site because of the lack of online content targeted to women.[↑]
8. D. Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (Toronto: Garmond Press, 1995).[↑]
9. J. Wajcman, “Patriarchy, Technology and Conceptions of Skill,” Work and Occupations 18, no. 1 (1991):29 45.[↑]