The growth of interactive online communication is often associated with an opening up and extending of communicative options and possibilities, and a key aspect or example of this is the sort of communication that focuses on topics of a personal or intimate nature. In this kind of communication, people are encouraged and enabled to go public with personal feelings or experiences and this, in turn, can tap into, shape and potentially transform public understanding and debate – what was termed ‘personalising publics’ in the introduction to this volume.

This optimistic reading suggests that interactive online communication has the power to enable personal feelings, concerns and experiences to become more publicly known, recognised and taken up in public and political contexts. Yet it is worth reflecting on what of the personal might be closed off in relation to the public or political, or how the personal and political might be rearticulated in these processes in more troubling kinds of ways. This is considered here with reference to Mumsnet.com, an interactive parenting website that has exploded in fame and popularity in the UK in recent years. This chapter reflects on what is made public through Mumsnet and considers, in the process, how it might work to produce new articulations of the personal and political and what might be at stake through these new articulations.

In exploring Mumsnet, I draw on the work of Shani Orgad (2005), who has looked at interactive websites for people experiencing breast cancer. Orgad argues that interactive websites that focus on the discussion of deeply personal issues offer important spaces to ‘go public’ with personal feelings and experiences. Yet, she suggests, such sites encourage people to rely on personalised and privatised strategies for making sense of and working through their experiences, rather than encouraging them to speak to or call up the public-political realm. In reflecting on Mumsnet, I argue that dynamics between the public, political, personal and private are rather more blurred, and indeed mutually constitutive, than Orgad's analysis would suggest. With attention to this blurring and mutual constitution, I consider how the personal and political is articulated on Mumsnet and think about how this relates more generally to the public, political and personal of contemporary understandings and experiences of parenting.