Blogging Homelessness: Technology of the Self or Practice of Freedom?

Abstract

This article analyzes a blog written by a man who describes himself as having been in and out of homelessness and addictions over a long period of time. I use Foucault’s ideas about governmentality and technologies of the self to explore the material on this blog and to suggest that the blog is not only a technology of the self through which power is exercised but also a practice of freedom and a means to ethical of care of the self. I propose a complex dialectic between domination and liberation as the writer transforms a disciplinary practice through which power is exerted into a call for the construction of an ethical self by writing regularly for his audience of readers and followers.