Web Technologies of the Self: The Arising of the "Blogger" Identity

Abstract Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of subjectivity, this paper conceptualizes early blogging and online diary writing as “technologies of the self,” that is, procedures through which practitioners enacted certain identities as Internet users. This study combines archival research, close analysis of websites, and interviews with their creators. It analyzes how the most defining practices associated with the emergence of these websites in the second half of the 1990s enabled the performance of specific modes of identification for their users, expressed by concepts such as the “online diarist” and the “blogger.” The study broadens our understanding of technologies of the self by considering the role of websites as artifacts in processes of self-formation on the Internet.