I’m thinking that my thesis about blogs being expressions of a persons efforts toward emancipation, and I’m blaming the Washingtonienne.
Jessica Cutler, blogging as the Washingtonienne, described in reasonably graphic details her alleged sexual encounters with a number of people in and around Washinton DC. She was fired for the misuse of government property (computers) as she kept her private blog updated during working hours and using work computers. But reading through the archive of her blog (the blog was removed on the day of her sacking) I could find little that would support an assertion that she was blogging as a means to achieve enlightenment, self awareness, or emancipation. To the contrary, the blog posts are non-reflexive and merely descriptive of her sex life. On a couple of occasions she justifies receiving money for sex on the basis of her meager salary.
Clearly Cutler’s blog was a personal blog and she blogged about her work. These two facts place the blog in the domain of investigation for my research. But I would be hard pressed to support an argument that it was even a site of contestation in a power relationship in that she appears to be driven by little more than the achievement of self-gratification. I wonder though about her motives in providing an obfuscated description of each of the people she claims to have been involved with. Was it attention seeking? Was she developing a means by which she had leverage over one or more of her partners?
These questions bring me to the question: What of all the work-related personal blogs that don’t lead to a person being sacked? Are these sites of contestation in a power relationship? If an employee blogs with the knowledge and approval of their boss have they already submitted themselves as subjects of an existing power relationship?