Digital Dads: The Culture of Fatherhood 2.0

Abstract

This dissertation examines a community of men who write online parenting blogs—known as “dad bloggers.” The emergence of dad bloggers in North America is nascent, under-researched, and a result of recent shifts in work-family arrangements, gender expectations, and the proliferation of social media technologies. Accordingly, this dissertation is designed to provide three distinct, yet interrelated, contributions to the literature on: families and parenthood; gender and masculinities; and media communications and communities. Taking a cyber-ethnographic approach, this is the first study of dad bloggers to collect online and offline data in order to investigate personal, interpersonal, and public meaning-making practices. The entire dataset consists of 1,430 blog posts written by 45 bloggers, approximately 50 hours of fieldwork conducted at The Dad 2.0 Summit conferences from 2016 to 2018, and 5 in-depth interviews. In three substantive chapters, I address: (1) the collective actions and goals that shape dad bloggers’ group culture and public engagement; (2) the creation and dissemination of meanings for fatherhood in an online context; and (3) the negotiation of gendered family roles and articulation of masculinity discourses by fathers. Collectively, this research provides new empirical and theoretical insights about the social construction of fatherhood in the contemporary digital age.