In her post, Dot Blog Boom, Halley talks about the affective nature of blogging from its roots to its inherent passion:

It grew up in a culture (think 2000 – 2001 days) of economic disaster and was all about making something from nothing, or less than nothing.

It’s a bit like being the nerdy geek girl who never had a date in high school and then suddenly gets a make-over in college, is revealed to be a babe and the boys are knocking down her door. It all feels like a little TOO MUCH.

I guess we all wondered Monday night if these newly arrived MEN WITH MONEY will twist, divert or blow up the bridges on this natural path of innovation we have been walking in the blogosphere. We made editorial decisions and built blogs based on passion — because that’s all we had in the beginning — when there was no money and the need to amuse and entertain one another was the key motivator in blogging.

Look at that! She’s talking about the concept of affective labor–doing something for the ‘passion’ of it and she also speaks of the ‘need to amuse and entertain one another’ as the ‘key motivator’. Also, catch her analogy in describing the transformation of geek girl to babe/boy magnet. These comments really make me think more about the sex-affective production concepts we are reading about in the Ferguson and Bartky articles.

Blogging came up during the bust of the dot.com bubble at a time when a lot of people needed some nurturing. Blogging was a way to offer that support. It wasn’t just women who provided nurturing, but men too. I want to hunt for some specific examples. (hee. I bet off-line scholars wouldn’t think of work done in 2000 as ‘historical’ research! LOL)

I wonder how men’s and women’s affective production differed. Still, this is an example of the “affectionate attachments and friendships of the Platonic sort, … social blonding with work mates or with a community of identity… (which are) example(s) of sex/affective energy” (Ferguson 78). (note: i can’t do brackets in Greymatter so i have to be content with parens to signify that i’m changing slightly the form of the quote)

The articles we’re reading emphasize how women are disempowered because of unequal exchanges of nurturance. The idea that we do it to ourselves when we settle for “an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve” is particularly vexing (Bartky 116).

When I think about capitalism and patriarchy, I am skeptical that blogging can remain true to its roots as Halley and others desire:

All we want to do now is remember how we got here, keep true to the spirit of blogging, being weird and wild on the page when we want to, ignoring the deals flying by, and if they come after you with flowers and candy, only take it seriously if it can help you reach more people with your same truthful content and you can keep your good sense and soul in the process. Is that too much to ask?

In order for blogging to remain uncorrupted, it seems that equal numbers of men and women have to keep working at making it so. Bloggers need “to develop” (or maintain) “an effective politics of everyday life…to understand better than we do now…the ‘micropolitics’ of our most ordinary transactions…” (Bartky 119). We need to be able to anticipate the effects of our actions.