Zero Comments

Blogging and Critical Internet Culture

Geert Lovink

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135872144
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Informatica
• Categoria: Sviluppo web

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink revitalizes worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' He unpacks the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'.

Zero Comments also explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence and looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

Chapter 1

Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

An der rationalen Tiefe erkennt man den Radikalen; im Verlust der rationalen Methode kündigt sich der Nihilismus an. Der Radikale besizt immer eine Theorie; aber der Nihilist setzt an ihre Stelle die Stimmung.

—Max Bense (1949)

This chapter proposes a general theory of blogging in which an analysis of user cultures is blended with a cultural critique of contemporary Web applications. I will first look into the merits of blog culture, then deal with the question of net cynicism, and finally, the nihilist condition of blogging. I circumvent both techno-determinism and cultural analysis Žižek-style. The aim here is neither to promote nor to deconstruct citizen journalism or to downplay the significance of participatory media. The empowering aspects of the hyped-up Web 2.0 applications are self-evident. Blogs have changed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to interpret them. What I am after is the nihilist structure of blogs as software and culture. The explicit aim is not to classify bloggers as digital nihilists. Instead, I am searching for a creative nihilism that openly questions the hegemony of mass media. Blogs zero out centralized meaning structures and focus on personal experiences, not, primarily, news media.¹

So far, blogs have been discussed mainly in oppositional terms, as being a counter-voice to the dominant news industry. The leading blog culture, made from those who co-developed the technology and created early adaptor communities around these applications² is a mix of angry, confused, cynical, and engaged voices. The identity circus called the “blogosphere” is not exactly the place where progressive types set the tone. As a sign of the times, the blogging majority is conservative, and this was already noticeable in the responses to 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Leaving the enabling rhetoric and democratization potential aside, blog culture is not, by definition, progressive and cannot be heralded as “anti-establishment.”

Following Santa Barbara theorist Alan Liu, we could say: “I blog, but I am cool.”³ Blogs record our lives and prove to what extent people are formed by the media events into which they are drawn. Far from what most pioneers preach, blogs fit perfectly well into the concert of big media. Michael Massing, writing in the New York Review of Books in late 2005, states that the majority of U.S. blogs lean right and seamlessly fit into the talk radio and cable news landscape. Eight of the top ten blogs in the United States are conservative.

A list of the most visited blogs includes the following:

• InstaPundit, run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds
• Power Line (three lawyers)
• michellemalkin.com, a syndicated columnist who defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II
• Free Republic (conservative activists)
• Captain’s Quarters (run by a call-center manager)
• the Volokh Conspiracy (a UCLA law professor)
• Little Green Footballs, a commentary on foreign policy with a pro-Israel bias

The U.S. Army is giving “exclusive content” to pro-war bloggers.⁴ Mitigating this, somewhat, is the number one center-left political blog, the Daily Kos, which owes its popularity in part to its community-style approach, where registered readers post their own comments as well as comment on the posts of others.⁵

Blogs fix the social in a specific manner. These techno-fixes are not neutral; they reflect the broader cultural atmosphere of our time. One could credibly say that early, e-mail–centered Internet culture was dominated by a counter-culture (from hippies to hackers), and the Web decadence of the 1990s was owned by second-generation yuppies and built by slackers and Generation X types. What they all had in common was, at least, a nominally libertarian mindset: conspiratorially anti-state and pro-market. Blog culture, on the other hand, is a post-9/11 beast. Blogs do not operate in some wild, open Internet out there (as one imagines newsgroups and lists do), but clearly create their own secluded social networks that consolidate their affiliations through link lists, blogchalking, RSS feeds, and the like. Blogs are always both private and public and are characterized by a culture of desired affiliation. The path to understanding blogs lies somewhere between an analysis of software functionalities and the early adopter culture that invented and shaped the blogosphere.

Some advice: Don’t just think of the American pantheon of blog heroes, or the trashy, frivolous, and studiously non-serious MySpace.com if you want to get an insight into the specifics of this particular technology. Instead, you need to mix Clay Shirky and his powerlaws (which explain how the most influential bloggers—the so-called A-list—became so powerful) with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory, which states that the true potential of blogs lies in the millions of blogs that only get a few page views per day.⁶

It is dangerous to “vitalize” Internet applications and their user cultures. There is a tendency to overcode. Because of the endless variety of the tens of millions of blogs out there, it is tempting to indulge the carnival of difference and ignore underlying communalities. My thesis here is that one must study undercurrents in techno-culture and avoid the seduction to just keep on surfing and kicking. We should not simply reduce blogs to their problematic relationship with the news industry. Mere empowerment does not automatically lead to worthy content. Blogging appeals to a wide register of emotions and affects as it mobilizes and legitimizes the personal. And to what effect are these affects mobilized?

Let’s first try to answer the question of what blogging is. A Weblog or blog is commonly defined as a frequently updated Web-based chronological publication, a log of personal thoughts and Web links, a mixture of diary forms around what is happening in a person’s life, and reports and comments on what is happening on the Web and the world out there. The blog allows for the easy creation of new pages: text and pictures are entered into an online template within the Web browser (usually tagged by title, category, and the body of the article) and this data is then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (called a permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. Because of the tags that the author puts onto each posting, blogs let us filter by date, category, author, or other attributes. It (usually) allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permissions and access are easily managed.⁷

To Blog with Quality and Distinction

Laughin’ and clownin’, just to keep from crying.

—Sam Cooke

What makes a blog good, according to Glenn Reynolds, is a personal voice and a rapid response time. Microsoft’s former in-house blogger Robert Scoble lists five elements that made blogs hot. The first is “ease of publishing,” the second he calls “discoverability,” the third is “cross-site conversations,” the fourth is perm linking (giving the entry a unique and stable URL), and the last is syndication (replication of content elsewhere).⁸ Lyndon from Flockblog gives a few tips that help blog writing, showing how ideas, feelings, and experiences are compressed into the news format, and how dominant Microsoft PowerPoint has become: “Make your opinion known, link like crazy, write less, 250 words is enough, make headlines snappy, write with passion, include bullet point lists, edit your post, make your posts easy to scan, be consistent with your style, litter the post with keywords.”⁹ Whereas the e-mail–based list culture echoes a postal culture of writing letters and occasionally essays, the ideal blog post is defined by zippy public relations techniques.

Web services like blogs cannot be separated from their output. The politics and aesthetics defined by first users will characterize the medium for decades to come. Blogs appeared during the late 1990s, in the shadow of dotcom mania.¹⁰ Blog culture was not developed enough to be dominated by venture capital with its hysterical demo-or-die, now-or-never mentality. Blogs first appeared as casual conversations that could not easily be commodified. Building a laidback parallel world made it possible for blogs to form the crystals (a term developed by Elias Canetti) from which millions of blogs grew year by year, until around 2003 they reached critical mass.

Blogging in the post 9/11 period closed the gap between Internet and society. Whereas the dotcom suits dreamt of mobbed customers flooding their e-commerce portals, blogs were the actual catalysts that realized democratization, worldwide, of the Internet. As much as democratization means engaged citizens, it also implies normalization (as in the 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, as Baudrillard says, “the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption.”¹¹ If you can’t cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won’t be your cup of tea.

The blogosphere has been shaped neither by dotcom entrepreneurs nor by techno-geeks. Basic computer knowledge does the job. Not even html skills are required. For business types there is no immediate money in it. The open character of blogs even forms a risk for those who are into branding and PR. The geeks feel protected in their Slashdot community and prefer the cleanliness of ASCII in e-mail versus the glossy personality-driven approach of blogs. For most academics, blogs are irrelevant as they don’t count as publications. The same could be said of Internet activists who have not moved beyond the use of e-mail and their own content management system. A massive uptake of blogs, wikis, and podcasts among civil society organizations has yet to happen. Radical leftists and anti-globalists have their hands full with projects like Indymedia and usually do not look beyond their niche. We don’t need to mention the new media arts scene here, as they are miraculously absent. The contemporary arts scene is not familiar with blogging. However, this is not the case with bands, their fans, and labels.

Are Blogs Vague? So Is Tuesday

The motor behind the expansion of the blogosphere is the move away from code toward content. There is no more need for empty demo design. Blogs are not a test or proposition. They actually exist. Early 2006 rough counts estimate approximately 100 million blogs worldwide.¹² From early on, blog culture has been the home of creative and social content producers. I hesitate to say journalists and academics because despite the fact that many have such a professional background, it would be false to locate pioneer bloggers inside institutional setups. Yet blog culture wasn’t anti-institutional either. Much like the cyberculture of the 1990s, the first generation of bloggers possesses colorful biographies. However, a dominant culture, like the Californian techno-hippies, failed to emerge and if it exists, it is tricky to label. Blogging comes close to what Adilkno once described as “vague media.”¹³ The lack of direction is not a failure but its core asset. Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event. If anything, it is a special effect of software, as constitutional to it is the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue.

It was Brisbane Queensland University of Technology scholar Axel Bruns who came up with the theory of blogging as “gatewatching.” At first, the term seemed too rigid and indifferent, too docile. It lacked sovereignty. Gatewatching implicitly positions blogs as passive and secondary compared to news sources (if we follow the analogy, the news gates on the East and West Coast of the United States, monitored from the Midwest). I warmed to the term when I saw that it was an accurate description of what blogs do, namely monitor the news media gatekeepers and colleague bloggers who are involved in what Bruns calls “participatory journalism.”¹⁴ Gatewatchers comment on the choices of those who control the news gates. Yet, this is no longer an activity of bystanders. Through, for instance, automated news syndications (RSS feeds) the process of annotation becomes news itself. Watching is incorporated into a system of notation and is then fit to be fed. Even though news agencies such as Reuters do not consider blog entries worth mentioning, opinion makers might take notice (at least, that’s what some bloggers hope). In this way, the gatewatcher is placed inside a hermeneutic circle, in which news is taken as a given and then interpreted. Personal diary entries are complementary to news, yet do not change the exegetic nature of blogging. I blog, therefore I watch.

There is a widespread presumption that blogs have a symbiotic relationship with the news industry. This presumption is not uncontested. Hypertext scholars track blogs back to the 1980s and HyperCard and the 1990s online literature wave in which clicking from one document to the next was the central activity of the reader. For some reason, the hypertext sub-current lost out in mainstream explanations of what blogging is all about. What remains is an almost self-evident equation between blogs and the news industry. To counter this, it would be important to dig into the rich history of literary criticism and see how blogging relates to diary keeping. It could be useful to formulate a theory of blogging as a “technology of the self,” a concept developed by Michel Foucault. Blogs experiment with the public diary format, a term that expresses the productive contradiction between public and private in which bloggers find themselves. Until recently, most diaries have been private. They may have been written to be published at a later stage, often after the author passed away, but were nonetheless “offline” in the sense of not being accessible. Despite obvious differences, there are also communalities, as we can read in Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own, People and Their Diaries. Bloggers will recognize themselves in what Mallon writes: “I’m always behind. I try to write each night, but I often don’t get around to writing up a day until several more days have gone by. But I manage to keep them all separate. I suppose it’s a compulsion, but I hesitate to call it that, because it’s gotten pretty easy. There comes a point when, like a marathon runner, you get through some sort of ‘wall’ and start running on automatic. Of course, there are days when I hate writing the thing. Who needs it? I’ll ask myself; but I’ll do it anyway.”¹⁵

After reading hundreds of diaries, Mallon concludes that no one ever kept a diary for just himself. “In fact, I don’t believe one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator, saying, ‘buy bread’.”¹⁶ Keeping a diary provokes reflection about the activity itself. For Mallon, Virginia Woolf is the greatest critic of the genre: “The activity is, after all, so queer, so ad hoc, and supposedly so private, that it doesn’t seem amiss for the diarist to stop every so often and ask himself just what he think he’s doing.” Woolf’s fundamental motive is to “hold on to it all, to cheat the clock and death of all the things that she had lived.” What intrigues me here are the “time folds” that we so often find in blogs as well. Many of Virginia Woolf’s entries, says Mallon, are provoked by her neglect of regular dairy writing. “The journals are frequently interrupted by physical illness, madness, the press of work or social life. And sheer disinclination.”¹⁷ Sound familiar?

Situating blogging between online publishing and the intimate sphere of diary keeping brings into question the already disturbed separation between what is public and what is left of privacy. It is remarkable that many participants do not perceive blogs and social networking sites such as Orkut or MySpace as a part of public life. Online conversations between friends are so intense that the (mainly young and often naive) users do not realize, or care, that they are under constant observation. Yahoo! researcher Danah Boyd explains:

Teens are growing up in a constant state of surveillance because parents, teachers, school administrators and others who hold direct power over youth are surveilling them. Governments and corporations are beyond their consideration because the people who...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Pride and Glory of Web 2.0
• 1. Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse
• 2. The Cool Obscure: Crisis of New Media Arts
• 3. Whereabouts of German Media Theory
• 4. Blogging and Building: The Netherlands after Digitization
• 5. Indifference of the Networked Presence: On Internet Time
• 6. Revisiting Sarai: Five Years of New Media Culture in India
• 7. ICT after Development: The Incommunicado Agenda
• 8. Updating Tactical Media: Strategies for Media Activism
• 9. Axioms of Free Cooperation: Contesting Online Collaboration
• 10. Theses on Distributed Aesthetics
• 11. Introducing Organized Networks: The Quest for Sustainable Concepts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index