Blogging the Recovery from Anorexia: A New Platform for the Voice of ED

ANN COCHRAN

Cochran, Ann. “Blogging the Recovery from Anorexia: A New Platform for the Voice of ED.” Young Scholars in Writing 7 (2009): 122–28. Print.

Framing the Reading

Sometimes researchers come to startling realizations, as Ann Cochran did in her research on “recovery blogs” written by people battling eating disorders. Cochran wondered whether these blogs, created in order to develop a support community, might actually reinforce the very messages that those suffering from eating disorders are trying to counter by creating the blogs to begin with. So she followed a number of anorexia recovery blogs in order to analyze what their actual focuses were and what messages they might send to—or how they might be read by—other anorexics.

In doing her study, Cochran engaged in a kind of research still in relative infancy, studying the social effects of public/personal writing in electronic modalities—in this case, computer-mediated communication (CMC) via blogging. The advent of public writing in online environments really has added a never-seen wrinkle to the purview of Writing Studies. Whereas sufferers of eating disorders just twenty years ago would have had only limited outlets for public writing, and done most of their therapy-writing in diaries and other private journals, the amazing combination of self-pubishing and networking that blogs and similar CMC offer means that stories can be written, public, and shared—and thus responded to in ways truly never before available. Because of this quality of true novelty, much of what we in Writing Studies thought we knew about writing needs to be rechecked, redone, or expanded by research done for the first time.

Cochran wrote this piece as a freshman at St. Edward’s University in Texas, as a student of Dr. Jodi Egerton’s. When it was published in Young Scholars in Writing, Cochran was working on her degree at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, from which she went on to complete a Master of Library Science degree. Currently she works as a writer/researcher in a law firm specializing in immigration law.