Connected parents: combining online and off-line parenthood in vlogs and blogs

Abstract

This article explores evaluative discourse in a corpus sample of parents' vlogs (video blogs) and blogs (henceforth v/ blogs) dealing with family tasks and responsibilities, as a reflection of underlying values concerning parenthood. It pays special attention to the important role played by the expression of attitude, understood as "ways of feeling" and including the meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation, together with positive politeness in the social practices of the discursive construction of online and off-line parenthood. Analysis and description of the data show two main patterns in parents' practices, either aiming at perfection through juggling and multi-tasking or building resistance to the demands of families and society. Results show that parents frequently exploit the system of affect for building positive face and rapport, while indirectly expressing judgement of social esteem and social sanction, which construct their identities as mothers and fathers and those of the members of their communities of practice. The corpus for the study consists of a random sample of 400 evaluative units in posts and comments on v/ blogs dealing with family tasks and responsibilities (200 in English and 200 in Spanish, with half the sample being drawn from fathers' and the other half from mothers' v/ blogs). I will approach the analysis of the data from appraisal (Martin and White 2005, Bednarek 2008) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) in order to explore the features of evaluative discourse and the management of face. The methodology for processing the data borrows quantitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics, including the coding and statistical treatment of the sample with UAM Corpus Tools (O'Donnell 2011), together with Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis (DA), as done in some previous research (Santamaría-García 2011, 2014).