From my essay at Babble today on Jon and Kate Gosselin, and the ways their TV show mirrors the online popularity of momblogs:
The “it could happen to me” factor means that, despite our protestations, we are now even more enthralled with the Gosselins’ ordinary lives writ large than we were back when all they had to entertain us was a demonstration of how they sorted their weekly recycling.
And I suspect we would have the same perversely heightened fascination combined with public condemnation if the world’s most popular mommy blogger, Heather Armstrong of Dooce suddenly stopped blogging about Leta’s favorite breakfast cereal, and instead starting publishing pictures of herself sunbathing in a bikini in her front yard, or writing about how she and her husband had decided to take up swinging.
You can read the whole essay RIGHT HERE.
One Response to “Jon & Kate Gosselin: TV stars tailor made for the age of mommyblogging”
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Interesting essay, it was great to finally get an explanation that made sense for the Jon and Kate Jeggernaut.
I commented thusly on the essay:
Thanks for at least explaining this phenomenon to those of us who Just. Don’t. Get. It. As opposed to a couple of months ago, I do actually know who Jon and Kate are, now that they are unavoidably splashed everywhere you look, but I can’t even imagine watching someone exploit their family in the way that they have. I just keep thinking “These are children’s real lives”. It is sad and pathetic and one only has to look at the lessons of exposed children like Michael Jackson and the lives they’ve led to know how wrong, wrong, wrong it is.
The sad thing: the viewers are 100% complicit in the hell that these children will go through for the rest of their lives. The only way to stop the madness and prevent such future madness: turn it off.