Digital dressing up: modelling female teen identity in the discursive spaces of the fashion blogosphere

Abstract

Blogs, which resemble online diaries, represent a popular space for teenagers to write about their experiences and publish their thoughts on the Web. This ability offers a particularly valuable resource for teenagers in their formation and enactment of social identities. In this article, I examine how teen girls model their identity through the mediated spaces of fashion blogs. Given the broad choices in putting together fashion outfits and accessories for their blogs, I suggest that how teen girls conceptualise their online visual representation may offer a resource for how they come to realise their emerging offline identity. Through the processes of writing, reading and commenting on blogs, these teens engage in complex expressions of identity, using a range of multimodal resources. Via the perceptions and experiences of 10 female teen fashion bloggers, I question the importance of a dialogic interaction with other bloggers for how teens come to understand their own identity and cultural tastes. In so doing, I draw on the work of Bourdieu (1996) to demonstrate the discursive spaces of the blog as critical to the activity of trading cultural and social capital and, importantly, shaping expressions of emerging teen identity.

Keywords:

• youth culture
• young adulthood
• self-esteem
• media
• gender

Introduction

Participation in virtual communities and social network sites is now firmly embedded in the culture of young people growing up as ‘digital natives’ (Palfrey and Glasser 2008). These mediated interactions are reshaping processes of self-expression, identity-building and sociality. Blogs,1 which resemble online diaries, represent a popular space for teenagers to write about their experiences and instantly publish their thoughts to the web with minimal technical understanding (Kadjer and Bull 2003). This ability offers a particularly valuable resource for teenagers in their formation and enactment of social identities. According to Luman (2006), in 2006 there were approximately 27 million blogs in the world. Corcoran (2006) noted that some 2 million of these blogs were devoted to fashion and fashion/shopping-related themes. Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008 report suggests there are now 184 million blogs worldwide,2 with 26.4 million in the USA alone. Studies suggest that almost half of all blogs are created by teenagers (Huffaker and Calvert 2005). The fact that so many teens are engaged in writing and reading blogs suggests that this mode of expression fulfils an important need during adolescence.

The teen years remain a pivotal point of change in a young person's life. Nurmi (2004) suggests that this time can be seen as a period of selection, adjustment and reflection, as teens begin to explore their tastes and relationships with others. In this article, I examine how teen girls model their identity through the mediated spaces of fashion blogs. Fashion blogs typically include a mix of images – from personal photographs and professional photographs of runway shows or magazine shoots (taken from other websites), to images of products seen on websites, other blogs, or in the local neighbourhood of the blogger. Written entries discuss events in the blogger's day, their outfit choices, ‘things they like’, or fashion items encountered in other places or other media. Via the perceptions and experiences of 10 female teen fashion bloggers, I question the importance of a dialogic interaction with other bloggers for how teen girls come to understand their own identity and cultural tastes. An important part of this process is the exchange of cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1993, 1996). According to Bourdieu (1993), the genuine base of power does not come from the material or cultural wealth of its agents alone, but from their capacity to convert it into social and symbolic capital. The discursive spaces formed through the interaction of bloggers and their followers (i.e. the people who regularly read and post comments to a blog) facilitate a process of exchange, whereby teens can exploit their fashion tastes to increase the value of their social capital. To inform this discussion I utilise qualitative data from a research project3 conducted with fashion bloggers. The focus on female teens was determined by the bloggers who volunteered to participate in this study, as I explain in the Methodology section of this article, yet it is a focus which also brought its own considerations around gender. Teen fashion blogs offer a particularly promising window into understanding how the teen authors think about their representations of self in online space. Given the broad choices in putting together fashion outfits and accessories for their blogs, I suggest that how teens conceptualise their online visual representation may offer a resource for how they come to realise their emerging offline identity.

I should frame the following discussion with the notion that I come from a socio-constructionist standpoint, in that I take the body and its socialised and commoditised identities to be a thing of culture, rather than solely a biological entity. This is in contrast to approaches such as socio-biology which cite a ‘pre-social biological basis on which structures of self and society are founded' (Shilling 1993, p. 41). Coming from a socio-constructionist perspective, I consider teens’ identity modelling as a situated practice, specific to their socio-cultural context (Barton and Hamilton 1998). Such social constructions are not arbitrary, but emerge through social processes that are already shaped by influences such as power relationships and material resources, within their own cultural specificity. The different forms of capital articulated by Bourdieu both create possibilities for, and put constraints upon, the social constructions by and through which teens act in their daily lives. Hebdige (1988) noted that young people are defined predominantly by the commodities through which they express themselves publicly (p. 30). This article highlights sign systems and constructions which should not be assumed as ‘just there’ or left unproblematised in wider discussions of youth studies; in particular, the relationship between teen girls, fashion and identity. However, the scope of this article prevents a detailed detour into the literature surrounding each facet of this relationship. My priority remains to privilege the voices of the participant bloggers in guiding the discussion and I would therefore refer readers to, for example, Entwistle (2000), Thornton (1997) and Mazzarella and Pecora (1999) to begin to locate this article within a wider frame.

Adolescence is a time when socialising and personal expression is key, yet it is also a time when teens can feel vulnerable about not fitting in. Part of being a teen is figuring out what your tastes are and how you fit into society. In addition to looking at the ways a fashion blog can be seen to contain meaning (in itself) for a teen girl, it is important to consider the way these blogs fit into the more complex structures of the transition from young girl to woman. The study of female teen fashion blogging as situated practice requires moving between the discursive and representational aspects of the blog, the embodied experience of the teen, and the use of dress as a means by which teen girls orient themselves to a social world. Analysis of the fashion blogging practices of the participant teen girls begins to reveal the operation of power in social spaces (and in particular how this power is gendered).

The body serves as a critical site of identity performance, and having access to designer clothing affords some teen girls a ‘popularity’ which gives them social power and leverage over others in their school or neighbourhood. This is an example of how cultural capital (wearing a particular fashion label) can generate social capital (membership of the ‘in-crowd’) in face-to-face encounters, but how does such an exchange become manifest in the mediated spaces of the fashion blog?

I begin with a brief outline of the methodological approach used to capture the data presented in this article, describing the bloggers whose responses inform this discussion. I move on to outline Bourdieu's field theory, foregrounding forms of capital and discussing them in relation to teen identity and fashion. Following that, I examine the importance of bloggers ‘appearing’ to one another through images, the exchange of comments and links to other blogs, unpacking what the teen group know about their followers. My analysis reveals that participants use the online space of fashion blogs to develop creative strategies to exchange identity information with their peers. This discursive space is critical to the activity of trading cultural and social capital and, importantly, shaping expressions of emerging teen identity.

Methodology

Discussion in this article is not intended to portray a representational picture of fashion bloggers or to comment on the totality of fashion blogs as a mode of expression. My intention, instead, is to demonstrate the potential of such technologically mediated spaces as a resource for teens to develop identity. To illustrate the discussion, I draw on responses from a group of 10 female teen fashion bloggers (aged 14–18 years) who participated in a research project into modes of fashion writing (see note 3). Although I discuss this group of 14–18-year-olds collectively as ‘teens’, young people ‘receive’ and respond to media, in different and unpredictable ways (Atkinson and Nixon 2005, p. 391). Therefore, I caution against any attempts to generalise from these 10 to all teen fashion bloggers; instead, I orient this discussion towards the potential of such technologies to enhance identity formation for teen girls.

The participants were not randomly selected, but were found through a variant of the snowball sampling strategy. I contacted a range of bloggers via the email address on their blog. Because my interest was in the exchanges within these spaces, I followed the links from one blogger's site to the blogs they followed and also contacted those bloggers, and then repeated the process via links on their blogs. I hoped that at least some bloggers who responded would be followers of other participant bloggers, as well as authors in their own right, in order to be able to examine the spaces of interaction.

The resulting teen group were all girls. In fact, almost all of the fashion bloggers who participated in the larger project were female. Various reasons could be surmised for this: namely, the gendering of activities such as ‘dressing up’ and ‘diary keeping’, which are more often categorised as a female pursuit (this is not to say there are few male bloggers who have an interest in fashion). It may seem strange, but gender had not been a key consideration when I began this article. Save to acknowledge that the featured bloggers are female, I had not fully considered the implication of this until prompted to do so by reviewers’ comments. Not all bloggers reveal their first name and not all blog names are obviously gendered, and I made no assumption that respondents to my initial email would be male or female. Male designers (e.g. John Galliano, Giorgio Armani, Manolo Blahnik) and photographers (e.g. Patrick Demarchelier, Nick Knight) are prominent forces in the field of fashion, yet the significance of gender demarcation raises other factors when the focus of discussion is teen identity. Although gendered activities such as ‘diary-keeping’ and ‘dressing up’ are stereotypically female-oriented, males are stereotyped as more ‘techie’ and ‘computer-savvy’, and thus more likely to engage in complex blogging practices. While I attempt to expound on the significance of the participant group (as females), the scope of the article limits what is possible, and I invite readers to bring their own understandings of gender to this discussion.

The majority of the teen group were based in the USA; one came from Canada and one from New Zealand. All had freely accessible blogs which could be accessed and read by anyone online. They varied in the amount of personal information given. Those supplying the most comprehensive details gave full name, age, city, a photograph from which they could be identified, and an email address. Others withheld varying items from this list, most commonly giving only their first name and city, and some used photographs in which they were not identifiable. The presence of bloggers in their photographs suggests a certain identity stability between blogs and the physical world.4 In instances where bloggers were creating and presenting their own fashion ideas, it is not surprising that they would post photographs of themselves modelling the outfits. Some utilised devices which cropped or obscured facial features (e.g. hat, hairstyle, blurring the face), but the majority did not.

Participants answered questions about their blogging practices, and their modes of representation and expectations of social interaction and privacy when publishing online. Questions were open-ended and sent via email. I should note that none of the participating bloggers were known to me prior to this project, and all contact with them took place via email, away from their blog presence. I am not a fashion blogger myself and do not subscribe to any fashion blogs, nor do I frequently read any particular blogs. Hence, as much as possible, my perceptions of this field are shaped by the comments and explanations of the teen participants.

All of the bloggers featured in this article gave consent for me to quote them and to include their name and age. Although, in some cases, the first name and age can easily be found on the blog site and/or blog profile of these teens, (and thus participants are potentially linkable to their blogs), I have decided not to include the blog name in the quotation attribution. My decision was largely prompted by the fact that these are still teens, in one instance a very young teen and, in another case, a teen who has already been prompted, at one point, to quit her blog through negative attention. There are several other examples where teens have, through journalists' accounts, drawn negative reaction which has made them quit their blog temporarily or permanently (Coen 2008 5). I would not wish any discussion of my research to risk such an outcome.

Bourdieu, field theory and forms of capital

According to Bourdieu (1993), all human activity occurs within socially constructed fields. These fields are the framework through which resources are accrued and exchanged. As individuals enter the field, they become more aware of the ‘rules’ of the game and have a greater capacity to manipulate these rules through the appropriation of different types of capital. Forms of capital are the core factors defining the positions and possibilities of the various ‘players’. Bourdieu (1986) identifies the main forms of capital as economic,6 cultural and social, yet each only becomes meaningful and socially effective through the process of symbolic translation. Players try to distinguish themselves from others by exchanging and acquiring the capital which is deemed useful or valuable in that field. For example, as children enter the field of teen identity formation, they understand the value of cultural capital for making them look ‘cool’, thus increasing their social capital. Fashion blogs, in particular, littered with various images of fashion outfits, accessories, musicians, artwork and objects, are a visual display of the teen author's cultural capital. Here, the blog also serves as a catalogue of the teen's evolving tastes.

For Bourdieu (1984), ‘taste’ is a part of ‘habitus’ acquired through the social environments encountered during childhood conditioning. ‘Habitus’ refers to socially acquired, embodied systems of dispositions and/or predispositions (e.g. a person's unconscious inclination), manifested in opinions and embodied phenomena such as posture; ways of walking, talking, and dressing; and so on. These dispositions are learned predominantly in the family and school, and unavoidably reflect the material (and social) conditions experienced as the result of being located in a particular type of ‘capital space’. The majority of the participant bloggers were American and this brings a certain cultural specificity to the study – a particular type of ‘capital space’. The impact of American popular culture on teens, fashion and visual identity is considerable and in the last decade American teenagers have had one of the greatest disposable incomes of teenagers in history, to spend on ‘branding’ themselves. The habitus predisposes teens to certain tastes and shapes the cultural capital they have available to offer to other teens. This embodied cultural capital (taste) may be readily converted into particular forms of objectified cultural capital (e.g. handbags/shoes). Teens soon realise that having access to certain forms of cultural capital (e.g. fashion, music, festival tickets) can be a valuable commodity in winning them friends and popularity. Wearing particular fashion labels can make teens part of the ‘in-crowd’ in their school, as others are segregated or ridiculed for wearing ‘old’ or ‘uncool’ clothes. Here, cultural capital is utilised to generate a sense of belonging and to organise different social groups. ‘Popular’ teens, who already have large amounts of social capital, can set trends by liking a certain product and, thus, increasing the value of the cultural capital associated with its ownership. The complex interplay between individuality and connectedness comes to the fore in the field of the fashion blog as teens trade cultural and social capital through processes of posting, linking and commenting.

While Bourdieu did not fully address the place of popular media in his theory, Thornton (1997) argues that it is ‘impossible to understand the distinction of youth subcultures without some systematic investigation of their media consumption’ (p. 203). Theorists such as Sterne (2003) have demonstrated the relevancy of Bourdieu's ideas to an examination of technology, whereas, for Thornton, media is not just another symbolic resource, but ‘a network crucial to the definition and distribution of cultural knowledge’ (ibid.); others, such as Hesmondhalgh (2006), are more cautious in gauging the applicability of Bourdieu's work to this purpose. Media exists as systems of communication critical to a circulation of the ideas, images, sounds and ideologies that bind a culture together. Whereas, in the past, newspapers, radio and television have been tasked with this role, the Internet, in particular blogs and social networking sites, is increasingly taking up the reins. There is divided opinion on whether, as Thornton argues, the media is a key part of the apparatus, integral to the formation and perpetuation of particular subcultures, or whether, as others argue, media is an after-the-fact response which makes subcultures visible and ‘examinable’ (Redhead 1990). Thornton extends Bourdieu's theory to locate ‘subcultural capital’ (a subset of cultural capital based on notions of ‘hipness’). She demonstrates how DJs, clothes designers, and music and style journalists make a living from their subcultural capital by converting their ‘hipness’ into economic capital. In a similar way, I draw on the crucial place of a media network to support the exchange of cultural and social capital.

Social capital7 is used to describe the resources which accrue to people because of their social networks and ‘who they know’. Thus, social capital is associated with group membership, as Bourdieu (1986) describes: ‘The volume of social capital possessed by a given agent … depends on the size of the network of connections that [they] can effectively mobilise’ (p. 249). The acquisition of social capital is particularly important in adolescence as teens learn how an identity fostered in the home fits into the world. Peters (2002) describes a teen girl who left for school every morning in

a mom-approved outfit, but would change into a skimpy halter top and tight jean shorts as soon as she got to school. She felt guilty going against her mother's standards, but couldn't face the ridicule she believed would ensue if her outfit didn't fit the girl fashion code. (p. 1)

This choice of a ‘peer-approved’ outfit invokes issues of displayed sexuality and ‘age-appropriateness’ seldom visited upon the fashion choices of teen boys. For Peters, teen girls exercise an ‘exquisite peer radar’ whereby ‘anything done outside the home (seen as a safe place) is subject to becoming the centre of attention for anyone and everyone’ (p. 2), with all the associated risks of potential humiliation. Consequently, teens often look to popular media to smooth the transition. American teen dramas, from the original Beverley Hills 90210 to The O.C. and through to ‘reality’ shows, such as Laguna Beach and The Hills, showcase the popular, ‘Americanised’ teen girl. MTV's Laguna Beach and The Hills, in particular, play out for young girls not only a fashion show, but also the performance of ‘real’ people, offering teen girls the chance to see themselves or their peers represented on television.

Social capital acquired by teens in the physical environment is potentially bounded by the places they visit every day and the people they meet in their immediate neighbourhoods. Once that interaction is taken into the mediated spaces of the Internet, social capital becomes built out of massive publics in diverse global locations. Hence, the spaces of the fashion blog not only provide girls with a place to display their embodied and objectified cultural capital, but also garner them infinite social capital potential from the millions of Internet users worldwide.8

‘Symbolic capital’ describes the ways in which capitals are perceived in the social structure and the associated values attached to them (e.g. the status and reputation which accompanies the accumulation of other forms of capital). For example, some fashion bloggers are considered ‘famous’ and have a reputation for their style, popularity and number of followers. Therefore, receiving a comment from one of these bloggers is infinitely more valuable to a teen's social capital than receiving a comment from a family member or stranger. All forms of capital must be ‘authorised’; that is, they must be acknowledged and in some way ‘officially’ recognised as holding value in the field. Teens judge and are judged on their associations, whereby group identities form around, and are reinforced by, the collective tastes and attitudes of those who identify with the group. This is certainly true in the physical school environment, but no less so in the mediated spaces of social network sites such as Facebook, or blog communities. The difference in the latter is the distance between individuals and the ability to compose ‘face’ between receiving and responding to comments. The strategies of distancing facilitated by the blog enable teens to discuss their evolving tastes and identity with as much anonymity as they choose and without recourse to confessional modes or the intimacy of a physical context. These blogs function as ‘safe’ spaces in which teens can develop a discourse around who they are and negotiate exchange of capital in ways which build self-esteem that can be carried over to their physical encounters.

Teen identity and fashion blogging

Hall and Jefferson (1976) describe adolescence as ‘that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life and give expressive form to their social and material experience’ (cited in Hebdige 1979, p. 446). Tension between clothes as expressing or concealing identity is a consistent theme in fashion literature (Entwistle 2000). Entwistle argues that ‘dress is a necessary aspect of socialisation and from babyhood, individuals are called upon to turn to and act upon their bodies in particular ways’ (p. 77). Fashion is one of the most immediate and effective examples of the way in which bodies are gendered.

Teens are going through bodily changes, and learning about who they are and how they fit into the world. As they move from parental guidance to a peer-led environment, social groups/relationships become significant in shaping how teens see themselves; any kind of perceived physical deviation (e.g. being too short, too fat) can be of great concern. Merskin (2004) investigated the impact of advertising on girls' body image and identity. She found that teen magazines played a central role in the formation of a young girl's identity, including how to ‘look’, ‘live’, and ‘be liked by boys’.9 Most teens are concerned with reconciling how they perceive themselves with how they are perceived. By trying out different expressions of identity, receiving feedback from peers, and figuring out how to modify fashion, posture and language, teens gain self-esteem in the impression they make. These practices are critical to socialisation, particularly for teens beginning to engage with the broader social world. Fashion provides a key source of empowerment for teens, offering a range of material and symbolic resources from which they can create identities. According to Kawamura (2006),

[fashion] performs an increasingly important role in the construction of personal identity, and the variety of lifestyles available today liberates individuals, especially youngsters, from tradition and enables them to make choices that create a meaningful self-identity. (p. 785)

Crane (2000) provides extensive information gathered from surveys and interviews that relates to the role of fashion in the social construction of identity. For teen girls, fashion can be used to generate a sense of conformity and belonging through an ‘official’ school uniform, or the ‘unofficial’ uniform worn by groups of friends (e.g. particular styles/labels). In Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk, Polhemus (1994) argues that every piece of clothing worn comes as part of a complete semiological ‘package deal’ that emits codes to others with shared cultural backgrounds. Teen girls have long used fashion as a social weapon. Deviating from the ‘norm’ to express personal style can make teens vulnerable to ridicule or bullying – particularly in face-to-face encounters. According to O'Connell (2007), guidance counsellors and psychologists say that fashion bullying is reaching a new level of intensity as more designers launch collections targeted at young teens. As a result, an increasing number of school programmes are beginning to address peer pressure and the sizable role clothing plays in teen girls' identity.

The relationship between fashion and social capital means that teens are constantly monitoring how they look for anything which might contradict their perceived ‘fit’ into teen culture (this can be as much true for teen boys as for girls). Self-esteem is, thereby, in many ways dependent not on what a teen does or achieves, but rather on what others think of them. Teens with poor social capital might seek to devalue the specific relationship of social to cultural capital established by the ‘popular’ set, by defining new values for the legitimation of cultural capital; for example, presenting another fashion style or look as desirable. One blogger revealed that her social capital at school is poor: ‘Sadly, I don't have many friends (I'm almost pathetically reserved)’ (Brooke, aged 18 years), yet she has found strategies to overcome her ‘reserved-ness’ through her blog. The mediated spaces of the fashion blog enable teens to try out wacky or risqué outfits without compromising any social capital they have garnered in physical encounters, and to gauge the reactions of followers – albeit those with shared fashion interests. In offline contexts, outfits might be regulated by parents or teachers; therefore, the blog's social dimensions of experimentation and play are important, as peers are able to scaffold experiences for one another based upon shared understanding and the results of previous experimentation. The opportunity to try out different looks, and to ‘fail’ with minimal consequence, provides teens with opportunities to play with the impression they make and learn to use resources creatively.

The teens expressed a number of reasons for the fashion choices and ‘looks’ they presented in their blogs, the pure aesthetics of the look being the main reason for most bloggers. For some teens, poses served a functional purpose to mask their facial features; others claimed they wore particular pieces to affiliate with something or someone, or to align themselves for or against a popular trend (e.g. a celebrity, video game character, relative, hip hop, Japanese street style, etc.). This aesthetic socialisation is the capacity to understand and identify with a cultural image or object, whereby the disposition (habitus) of the teen is fundamentally characterised by the pre-possession of the right codes and instruments of appropriation. The objectification in cultural forms of the homologies which Bourdieu believes exist between consumers, producers and products is broken down through digital spaces where ‘prosumers’ (producer plus consumer) post their own fashion designs and commentary. In accounting for the dispersed and diffuse nature of contexts of production and consumption in the blogosphere, the distributive and connective functions of fashion blogs fracture the historically hierarchical ‘us-and-them’ of the producer–consumer relationship; this is not specific to blogs, but a trait of many youth subcultures which seek to subvert or mark their individuality on dominant cultural institutions. Although the producer–consumer hierarchy is broken down in the ‘prosumer’, the blogosphere is not without its own mechanisms of control or, as Bourdieu would put it, players act within certain rules specific to the field and in so doing act as gatekeepers to other players' access to the field and their performance within the field.

The teen bloggers

Some teens collaged images on their blog to play out a look that they could not have in their offline life due to parental restrictions. The bloggers openly shared their opinions on ‘how to look good’ and where to shop. They were less forthcoming in making critical statements about other bloggers’ attempts. Many bloggers shared tips about designing, encouraging originality instead of popularity. Adding different accessories or mood elements to the images, including choice of background, suggested that the older girls were moving beyond ‘the look’ as clothes to ‘the look’ as staged performance. Considering the fashion blog as a space for play, these nuanced changes indicate that blogs support a fluid notion of identity, as bloggers experiment with various looks, play with representations of themselves, and use various affinities with followers to build social capital.

By controlling their information disclosure, bloggers are able to decide where to draw the boundary between themselves and others, gatekeeping access to their personal field of identity formation. Thus, managing the shifting public/private continuum is also an important part of a blogger's experience. Without having cues about who will view a post, an imagined audience provides a necessary way of envisioning who should be present, and this informs teens’ impression-management strategies. Who actually is present is another matter. In the following section, I examine what the bloggers know about their followers. I then proceed to look at capital exchange in the discursive spaces formed by the giving and receiving of comments.

Knowing your audience

As part of the blogging community, teens form links with other bloggers and acquire followers who subscribe to and comment on their blog. When ‘follower’ is used to describe a person, it has performative qualities. It is meant to signal a certain kind of relationship, regardless of the blogger's actual feelings. The notion of ‘followers’ is in itself an interesting one. On other social network sites, the term ‘friend’ denotes someone the individual has linked with, and whom they may know offline or only via mediated contact. The term ‘follower’ suggests a hierarchy, almost a religiosity, in the relationship. In reality, this structure breaks down, as many bloggers are themselves followers of other bloggers. A hierarchy does remain, however, as some bloggers are considered more ‘famous’ than others (this may be for their cultural capital in the style they display, or social capital for those who have been featured in publications such as Teen Vogue).

I asked the teens what they knew about the people who followed their blog. A few accessed Web statistics to monitor the flow of traffic to their blog, but, more likely, the teens had formed a perception based on the people who regularly posted comments and whose blogs they read. The teens made the following comments:

I know most of my followers are American and in my age range. Most are 13–16 year old girls. Of course I can relate to their blogs, and they to mine. Some of my followers are bloggers that I follow. (Hazel, aged 14)

They range from ages 12–50 and most likely have a voyeuristic peripheral interest in fashion, much like myself. (Isabel, aged 18)

The perception that followers would share many characteristics in common with the teen author indicates a social capital built around the habitus and, perhaps, a need for the teens to attract followers who reflect or validate their cultural capital.

Overall, the data distinguish two kinds of audience: the bloggers’ known social networks (e.g. family members, school friends) and a ‘public’ audience, largely unknown, whose presence is only discernible through the comments they post. While it is possible visually to detect most people who can overhear discussions in physical places, it is virtually impossible to ascertain all those who might find and start reading a teen's blog in the networked arena. Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht (2004) stated that ‘in theory, about 900 million people (if current estimates of Internet connectivity are correct) could read any blog that is not password protected’ (p. 7). It is often only through comments that teens realise how vast their potential audience is.

Occasionally I get a stream of comments out of nowhere or a comment from some famous blog... and then I wonder ‘how did you find me?!’ (Brooke, aged 18)

This blogger expressed her poor social capital in offline relationships. Here her low self-esteem expects that ‘famous’ blogs would not be interested in what she posts, and there is an evident boost to her self-esteem to realise that not only has a ‘famous’ blog been reading her posts, but they have been prompted to send her a comment. In this way, cultural capital attracts desirable social capital and can be an affirming influence on teen identity. Yet, the opposite was true for one teen who had been the recipient of negative attention:

A very nasty hate blog about me popped up in June 2008. They said vicious, hurtful things without any basis for it whatsoever. I was very upset and stopped blogging for a while, but picked it back up when I was feeling better in a few weeks. I wasn't literally stalked, but I feel like that blog was an online predator. (Isabel, aged 18)

Despite this teen's experience, almost all of the bloggers described the exchange of comments as a positive event and one of the main reasons behind their continued blogging. The incidence of negative posts was virtually nil. On the whole, the bloggers seemed to conform to the etiquette that, ‘if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all’; yet, for some of the bloggers, a lack of comments proved a source of concern.

The exchange of comments

Research by Subrahmanyam (2007) found a low frequency of comment posting on the blogs she examined, leading her to suggest that audience feedback may not be crucial for blog authors, but instead that blogs signal the emergence of a culture of online monologues. This was not true in the community of fashion bloggers I examined; instead, receiving comments and feedback was of paramount importance:

Every single person who leaves a comment gets a comment back from me. It's reciprocity. And commenting is the cornerstone of fashion blogging. (Anna, aged 16)

I view them as presents I open throughout they day. They are so important to me in terms of feedback and connecting with people. (Becky, aged 15)

Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1984) argue that ‘one must learn to give oneself feedback, as well as to use feedback from others’ (p. 196). Bloggers described a discursive connectivity:

Blogging is like a spider web, everyone is connected. (Lucy, aged 15)

Commenting on other people's blogs is very important. If you want the blogging community to acknowledge you, you have to let people know you actually exist! (Hazel, aged 14)

Getting a comment on a post was not so random where followers were made up of close friends and family, and where a response was almost expected. Positive comments from ‘famous’ blogs or strangers not only could motivate teens, but also increase their confidence and self-esteem. The occasional positive comment posted by a stranger was satisfying and motivating, as it reminded the bloggers that a whole community of publics could be reading their blog. The potential to amass this type of social capital, and not knowing exactly who could find their blog (e.g. bloggers, journalists, designers, celebrities, etc.) and comment, prevented teens from guarding access to the blog too fiercely. All of the teen bloggers expressed the importance of receiving feedback on their posts, if only to confirm that they were not ‘talking to myself’. Comments varied from a brief connection: ‘ooh I love him too!’ or ‘That's so funny! Cool blog. Visit mine if you want’ to more detailed feedback:

Wow, you have great style. And the pics have really improved since the time you drew dots in your face, congrats for that, now the images tell more about the outfit and the mood of it. Sometimes wish i could zoom in the pic so i could appreciate the texture of the fabric, like that in your sheer blouse. (on the blog of Brooke, aged 18)

Comments frequently provided specific feedback on photographs of outfits. According to Josselson (1994), ‘the adolescent on the brink of identity, looks to others to provide models for how and what to be’ (p. 96). Validation is important for teens. Seeing the self mirrored by the Other, through the Other's emphatic response is affirming. Friend and peers provide mirrors (Kroger 2000) which play a role in the teen's exploration and identity formation (Flum and Porton 1995). Teens described comments as a ‘validation’ of their blog and, in turn, their self-representation:

[Comments] are key in terms of connecting with people. When I don't hit a certain number of daily average comments per day, I feel as if I've failed to connect somehow. (Anna, aged 16)

It's very important to me. I suppose comments validate my work. (Isabel, aged 18)

I like to know people's reactions and thoughts to the things that I write. It's also a form of validation, for sure. (Jules, aged 16)

An emphasis upon visibility and mutual recognition points to the complex relationship between a teen's internal dialogue and dialogue with others, both of which interact in the context of the individual's identity formation. Through the exchange of comments, teens can develop camaraderie or even a sense of belonging to a community of readers or writers (Murray and Hourigan 2006). This sense of community, achieved through the reciprocal nature of commenting, was described by a blogger:

I think it's important to respond to the people who have commented on my posts. Some of the more popular bloggers don't – I guess they don't have to because they already have garnered a solid amount of followers – but that seems a bit detached to me. (Francesca, aged 17)

For these 10 teen bloggers, it was not only the importance of interaction which shone through:

You have to have a conversation and be interested in what they are doing too. (Jules, aged 16)

But the confidence the teens took from this dialogic interaction was also evident:

I have grown more confident. I am influenced more and more by other bloggers, I create and come up with better ideas for myself as well as pulling from fashion icons and well-dressed models. (Becky, aged 15)

I've definitely started reading a lot more blogs, and from them I absorb their styles, the ways they write, everything and incorporate it into my own, somehow. I've also picked up a few skills in order to improve my style and my blog, like novice sewing and the ability to fearlessly hop on the Metro to some strange, seedy location in order to seek out a shop. (Brooke, aged 18)

By creating, modifying, and sharing visual media, youth are developing visual and media literacy in ways that are driven by their desire to participate in friendship-driven practices. These practices give teens, particularly the more reserved ones, the confidence to pursue and express their interests with others in ways which build self-esteem and positively shape their emerging identities.

Discussion

Blogs have become an important medium through which teens learn about themselves and their relationship to others. The ability to display oneself through textual and visual means in a digital space draws on a postmodern aesthetic which Creeber (2009) describes as ‘indulging in increased levels of intertextuality, generic hybridity, self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, recycling and sampling’ (p. 17). The teen girls in this study are developing new kinds of sociality and literacy through these practices, as well as learning to participate in technology-mediated publics. These sites of peer-based exchange and validation structure social and communicative practices in ways which differ significantly from past practices – to the extent that Manovich (2002) suggests we may now need a completely new theory of authorship to understand the current relationship between media and audience.

McKenna, Green and Gleason (2002) propose that the anonymity provided by new technologies encourages people who have difficulty in establishing face-to-face relationships to express themselves more easily and gain enough confidence to increase their social connections. Ward (2004) found that writing a blog is communicative, reduces anxiety, and provides teens with an audience for their texts. As teens begin to develop their expertise in creative production, they also develop a unique voice and identity. Turner (1982) states that intra-group relations are strengthened by the perceived similarity of members, and the mutual esteem, emotional empathy and attitudinal uniformity of members. He recognises that being part of an ‘in-group’ is equated with high social capital, which in turn leads to a positive self-identity. Although Turner was writing in the early 1980s, before blogs, the teen fashion bloggers expressed the value of social capital in promoting positive self-image and high self-esteem. The relationships that teens foster in the fashion blogosphere can become a source of social capital that is an alternative to the social capital afforded value in schools. Therefore, through their fashion blog, teens are empowered to play with the ways they represent themselves to others, learning from how people respond to their posts.

Baumer (2007) emphasises a fluidity of identity achieved through forms of semiotic action and through practices such as ‘self-presentation, differentiation and integration, self-evaluation, and cultural commentary’ (p. 8). Responses from the teen bloggers suggest that the ways in which their cultural capital is displayed in the virtual space acts as a means of differentiating their personal style, while also integrating them as part of a group context that increases their social capital. The layering of cultural and social capital in the fashion blog is indicative of the changing media ecology that teens inhabit, where they are in touch with bloggers and followers through networked communication. The social desire to share space and experiences with friends is supported by a networked and digital media ecology that enables fluid shifts in attention and co-presence between online and offline contexts. According to Pascoe (2008), the asynchronous nature of these technologies allows teens to carefully compose messages that exude a ‘controlled casualness’. Blogs, then, are a studied interaction, as bloggers consider audience attention, feedback, and feelings as they write. Success and recognition in these blogs can be tremendously validating for teens as they mark a pathway towards adulthood and a more participatory stance to public life.

Conclusion

In this article, I have looked at the exchange of cultural and social capital, in the experiences of 10 female teen fashion bloggers. The discursive community of bloggers and their followers creates important space for teens to play with their identity and get reactions to their efforts. Through the processes of writing, reading and commenting on blogs, teens engage in complex expressions of identity to work through impression management using a range of multimodal resources (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). The choice of images and expression of personal thoughts allow individuals to signal meaningful cues about themselves. Levin (2004) maintains that the Internet provides virtual spaces which ‘facilitate new social patterns: multi-scale social spaces, conversation discovery and group forming’. ‘Belonging’ is important within adolescence. By ‘collecting’ other bloggers and hosting links to their blogs, teens render their social capital (those whom they ‘know’) visible to readers. This visibility produces a sense of ‘intercorporeality’, as Crossley (1994) describes: ‘We belong to each other by belonging to a common visible world’ (p. 27). Visibility in the teen fashion blogosphere is about visibility in relation to one another, and to one's followers through the exchange of gaze and comments provoked by that gaze. Where teens are reserved or have poor social capital in their offline relationships, the mediation of the blog creates a distanced space where they can build confidence by exploring their identity with like-minded others.

Notes

1. ‘Blog’ is a contraction of ‘Web log’; it is an online personal journal which is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

2. Although the exact number of blogs varies depending on the counting organisation or mechanism, figures in the tens to hundreds of millions suggest a phenomenon which has captured the public imagination; blogging is, at least for now, firmly embedded in the culture of Internet authoring and social networking.

3. The research project was formulated to examine fashion blogging as a mode of fashion writing and to determine the relationship of blogs to other forms of fashion journalism. Online interviews, conducted with a group of fashion bloggers, probed topics such as time spent reading/writing blogs; perceptions of their followers and immediate blogging circle; thoughts about fashion writing and ways of presenting fashion; and the de-professionalisation of fashion media. Analysis of the data is still under way and will form the basis for future articles.

4. Unlike instances where the anonymity of the Internet facilitates the exploration of multiple identities, beyond the gender, age, race, etc., of the physical body (Turkle 1997, Markham 1998).

5. For example, the thread which followed this article, discussing a 12-year-old fashion blogger http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2008/07/meet_tavi_the_12yearold_fashio.html. The blogger herself was badly affected by some of the posts and quit her blog, later taking it up again, but refusing to take part in any more interviews or media requests; see post http://tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com/2008/12/lot-of-talking-and-run-on-sentences.html.

6. There is not scope in this article to examine the economic capital of participants in any depth. Access to the technology to participate in blogs is no longer an accurate indicator of economic capital, as teens can now access the Web via their school, library or community centre. However, many teen participants claimed to ‘read’ French Vogue and Vogue Nippon – both imported magazines, as substantially reflected in the price.

7. There are other views of social capital proffered by, for example, Coleman (1998) and Putnam (1993). Bourdieu's conceptualisation is the most useful here because of its attention to social reproduction and symbolic power in the exchange of capital.

8. There are also certain dangers in being so accessible. Teen bloggers are susceptible to two main dangers: sexual predation by adult strangers and cyberbullying by peers. Most of the teen participants believed that security through obscurity was enough protection online; few felt people would be interested enough to bother to stalk them. The reaction of this group was that if you wanted privacy then you would not be using this type of media; instead social interaction and exchange of comments were key reasons why the teen maintained a blog. While all were aware of the dangers of stalkers/predators from media reports, few saw it as a genuine threat to themselves, and the scope of this article precludes me from entering into any detailed discussion of this theme here.

9. There is a heteronormative assumption here, which, again, might explain the role of blogs in helping teens to explore identities which are not catered for in these publications.