Lately I've had some mails from perfect strangers, both men and women, sharing why they blog and how writing has helped them especially through difficult relationships and personal turmoil. I'd like to study why women, in particular, blog. To look at whether creating virtual communities around their anonymous selves replaces such communities in real-life. So I wrote out a sort of proposal for a grant to study this and here are some excerpts:
Young women bloggers in India tend to be urban and highly educated, but don't necessarily belong to progressive or liberal families and don't necessarily have full control over their lives. It is important to understand and acknowledge the disconnect between liberal and progressive values and attitudes and the level of education. Many of them have turned to the Internet and to blogging with confidence and honesty often concealed or subdued in real life through a rigorous social conditioning or their particular individual predicament.
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Thus blogs form an entire alternative world, an optional community to which bloggers belong by choice, by exercising their own individual power of decision, and not due to any prescription or dictate of social leaders, including members of their family.
Blogging is not known, widely, yet; those who use it are thought to be using computer and Internet to further their socially acceptable formal 'education', a desirable thing, and not inconsistent with normative, restrictive, social and cultural values which otherwise govern every aspect of the bloggers' lives.
By virtue of their nature – free to set up and easy to use – blogs welcome anyone who is reasonably technology-friendly. Their barrier-free domains have historically assisted and provided space for the disempowered, just as mainstream media routinely provides space for majority opinions and powerful voices. Anti war protests, indymedia networks, World Social Forum information – all of these and so many countless thousand others have used blogs and the Internet to communicate en masse. In India, this media is being used by disempowered women to interface with a world in other ways than allowed by traditional norms.
As the medium stabilises, and as thought leaders in Indian society and culture become aware of its subversive power, there will inevitably be attacks on it. These attacks are likely to divide into two, attacks on the free nature of the medium, and attacks on the educational milieu which brings knowledge of these mountain paths over which these modern day cultural guerrillas avoid the customs posts and check points of regulated society. I believe that blogs will overcome these, and other problems, and will be increasingly influential counter-cultural organs.
It is an emerging media, and one that is rapidly becoming popular. I would like the opportunity to study how young women are coming to it, and mastering and manipulating it, and how it is supporting them and also how it might be changing their perceptions of themselves and their own attitudes as they sustain a dual identity – an empowered one, through their blog, and a more vulnerable one in real life.
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I could be completely wrong of course. And there may be not more than four bloggers in India using the medium in this way. But I've had some mails from Indians living abroad, so maybe it is a possibility. And it still would be interesting to study.
