Becoming ‘I’: ‘Orientation’ interactions with online blogs

This article draws upon the orientation ‘blog’ posts from a current PhD study focusing on identity formation in young people undertaking their final year of secondary schooling within the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). It critically investigates how participants define the ‘purpose’ of their engagement with the study and the subjectivities they employ in those interactions. The online blogs designed for this study are intended to create a space in which participants are able to act a-synchronously and discuss their ‘day-to-day’ experiences of the VCE. A key focus of this paper is to explicate the nature of this activity as performative, that is, participants contributing to blogs actively consider the nature of their engagement and construct an implicit ‘Other’ — a relationship that is informed by the purpose for participating in the research. Utilising Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’ (1987) along with a narrative methods framework (Riessman, 2008), it investigates the concept of ‘Other’ and will trace the process of ‘becoming storyteller’ as an active performance in Blog participation.