Introduction: In the Beginning was the Blog

A history of momfluencing is also a history of online culture. In 2004, dooce.com, a blog about motherhood, mental health, and mundane life struggles, reached its peak at about 8.5 million readers worldwide. For its founder, Heather Armstrong, what started as a hobby came to comprise her entire income stream thanks to banner ads. Mommyblogging can be seen as the precedent of contemporary influencing. With the advent of blogging, one didn’t need to code one’s own website to be able to share thoughts online. Taking this opportunity, moms wrote about the messy sides of parenting, their personal struggles, and offered tips and advice. At the time, this was the opposite of how mainstream media portrayed family life, with its romanticised and pressure-inducing images of motherhood. For many mothers, the blogosphere became a support network. But looking at the mom-o-sphere today, it seems that things have taken a turn for some. News reports that online channels catering to mothers can make them more anxious than reassured¹. What once started as raw and unfiltered spaces to make mistakes—where looking for help while not looking your best was encouraged and celebrated—has spawned feeds with perfect images of idyllic families, that cater to some desires and feed other anxieties. Have we really reverted to this nuclear cul-de-sac media landscape, and where do we go from here?

Why Momfluencing?

You might be wondering why The Hmm decided to explore what could be seen as a superfluous topic. Funnily enough, mommy bloggers were subjected to similar critique from the very beginning. Despite their success, these blogs were seen as inferior to their male-dominated counterparts, who chose to focus on “important stuff”. At this time, media outlets still relied heavily on separating private and public, as described by this 2009 article on blogging as a radical act: “The public sphere—a place that men inhabit and women desire to belong to —consists of the working world, politics, economics, the law and mainstream discourse”². Doing laundry or dealing with screaming babies wasn’t deemed on par. Therefore, you can see how the mommy blog was a transgressive “genre” in the early 2000s: mothers publishing their struggles and raising questions about workplace equity and childcare access, inhabiting the online space through women’s writing (diminished as melodramatic diaries since early Western publishing), and then monetising that very writing. Generating income and public influence from labor and practices often framed as inconsequential and unproductive³ is how momfluencing can be understood as subversion, and a key example of the shifts in how we publish ourselves online. But as our online spaces are dominated by algorithmic platforms, can momfluencers who upcycle toxic colonial standards still be seen as upending the status quo, or have they just become mainstream media figures of our time?

Since time immemorial, it takes a village to raise a child. Considering the shifts and turns that online “villages” have been through, and where we still go to find community and support, The Hmm aims to uncover and map the points of friction that arise in relation to momfluencing — for instance, where do we find parenthood healthily represented and can that ever be through momfluencing? Is criticism of momfluencer content helping to protect children, or another form of misogynistic pushback? Are tradwives actually traditional or a product of the content economy? And last but not least, in mapping out contemporary momfluencers, where do we find existing support networks and radical movements of collective care?

Mapping Momfluencers

For this dossier, we’re diving into our digital anthropologist role to investigate the momfluencing phenomenon, from viral American videos to broader perspectives on parent-fluencing that don’t fit the algorithm. We also aim to highlight the ever-blurring borders between online and offline, and the intertwining of online and in-person support networks raising today’s children.

In mapping these villages, we took a deep dive into both social media platforms and physical support networks around us, as can be seen in digital and accompanying community maps created in a workshop with a multiplicity of women and mothers at Vrouw aan het IJ (Amsterdam-Noord).

Vrouw aan het IJ also hosted the physical side of our hybrid focus event, Mommy or Foe? Mapping Momfluencers — which gathered different perspectives and audiences around this trend’s origins, lived experiences, and critiques.

And coming back to our initial question of how to foster networks of support and sense of community, Yu Zhang’s image contribution shows how mothers in China use streaming and publishing as ways to fight loneliness.

References

1. Hoorntje, Rolinde, and Isa Huizing. 2023. “Hoe beïnvloedt de ‘momfluencer’ ons moederbeeld?” 1
   NOS, May 14, 2023. https://nos.nl/artikel/2475033-hoe-beinvloedt-de-momfluencer-onsmoederbeeld.
2. Lopez, Lori Kido. 2009. “The Radical Act of ‘Mommy Blogging’: Redefining Motherhood through 2
   the Blogosphere.” New Media & Society 11 (5): 729–47. https://doi.org/
   10.1177/1461444809105349.
3. Abidin, Crystal. 2016. “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: 3
   Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity.” Social Media + Society 2 (2): 205630511664134.
   https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641342.