Internet and the New Landscape of Fatherhood

Abstract

The tremendous development and expanded use of social media during recent decades have offered new opportunities for people to explore their personal lives and to turn their subjective experiences into media representations. In this chapter, we will use international blogs as our empirical material to investigate and give an in-depth picture of fatherhood as it is expressed and narrated by a number of men telling stories about their everyday life with children. In the analysis, both the written accounts and predominant imagery found on the blogs will be examined. In particular, we will focus on how these bloggers portray and put forward their identities as fathers, but we are also interested in how the relationship between the father and the child is narrated and constructed, and in what ways these narratives can be read and understood in relation to dominant conceptions of masculinity and to notions of a caring and more present fatherhood. Part of the analysis will also focus on how the children are portrayed and constructed as actors on the blogs and in relation to their parents. The selected blogs will be viewed and analyzed as representations of fundamental changes in the global representation of fatherhood and gender. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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