Blog culture

Chinese footprint,
originally uploaded by waggajake.

I've just read Geert Lovink's essay in Eurozine - Blogging, the nihilst impulse. Good stuff, great analysis and not couched in confusing cultural studies-speak or new media jargon.

Geert draws together an analysis of the meaning (or lack of) of the blog culture that has grown out of affordable internet access and usable publishing interfaces. This deafening chorus of self-expression and comment points to a declinging belief in "the message". For me it's interesting to comapre this with McLuhan's ideas on the global village and the shaping the medium has on communication. What Geert's piece highlights for me personally is a need to draw on the cultural theories of Baudrillard. Nietzsche also comes into the picture again and I'm aware that his influence will need to be explored in my research.

Some highlights memes and quotes from Geert's paper......

On the democratization of the Net -

As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits. According to Jean Baudrillard, we're living in the "Universe of Integral Reality". "If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption." If you can't cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won't be your cup of tea.

The blog itself, on blogging as social practice, as custom even (is this the overlap with McLuhan's medium as message?) -

It is a digital extension of oral traditions more than a new form of writing......blogs fit into the wider trend in which all our movements and activities are being monitored and stored. In the case of blogs, this is carried out not by some invisible and abstract authority but the subjects themselves, who record their everyday lives.

On the Knowledge Society -

how much truth can a medium bear? Knowledge is sorrow, and the "knowledge society" propagators have not yet taken this into account.

On self-expression and culture of confession -

Exhibitionism equals empowerment. Saying aloud what you think or feel, in the legacy of De Sade, is not only an option – in the liberal sense of "choice" – but an obligation, an immediate impulse to respond in order to be out there, with everybody else.

Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here.

On media, truth power and nihilism -

blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative.

....there is a sense that the Network is the alternative...Blogging is a nihilistic venture precisely because the ownership structure of mass media is questioned and then attacked.

According to the utopian blog philosophy, mass media are doomed. Their role will be taken over by "participatory media".

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century......declining is the Belief in the Message......The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of lamenting the ideological color of the news, as previous generations have done, we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit. As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pyjama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.

Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise.

nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of the plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms, with blogging being one of them.....Questioning the message is no longer a subversive act of engaged citizens but the a priori attitude, even before the TV or PC has been switched on.

In the media context this would be the moment in which mass media lost their claim on the Truth and could no longer operate as authority.....It is the move from the festive McLuhan to the nihilist Baudrillard that every media user is going through, found in the ungroundedness of networked discourse that users fool around with.

On the individual -

blogs are "technologies of the self"

Blogging is the answer to "individualization of social inequality"...This is the network paradox: there is simultaneous construction and destruction of the social at hand.

"digital self-fashioning"

Against this commonly held view that diversity is a good thing, we can hold the loss that comes with the disappearance of familiarity and common references......."Networking begins and ends with pure self-referentiality," Friedrich Kittler writes, and this autopoeisis is nowhere as clear as in the blogosphere. Social protocols of opinion, deception, and belief cannot be separated from the technical reality of the networks

the internet as "ego chamber"

It is communality of bias, or let's say conviction, that drives the growth of blogging power and its visibility in other media.