This link has been bookmarked by 62 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Jan 2007, by Peter Giger.
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07 Jun 12
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07 Mar 12
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me. Blogs appeared during the late 1990s, in the shadow of dot-com mania.[6] 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.
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Blogging comes close to what Adilkno once described as "vague media".[8] The lack of direction is not a failure but the core asset. Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event. If anything, it is a special effect of software, constituted especially by the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue.
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s the discourse and circumstances, let alone checks the facts on the ground. To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few
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sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting or remarkable, or is disagrees with it.
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Blogs will tell you if your audience is still awake and receptive. Blogs test. They allow you to see whether your audience is still awake and receptive.
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e an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.
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There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities.
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No matter how much talk there is of "community" and "mobs", the fact remains that blogs are primarily used as a tool to manage the self. With management I refer here as much to the need to structure one's life, to clear up the mess, to master the immense flows of information, as to PR and promotion of Ich AG, as it is called in crisis-ridden Germany. Blogs are part of a wider culture that fabricates celebrity on every possible level. Some complain that blogs are too personal, even egocentric, whereas most blog readers indulge in exhibitionist insights and can't get enough of it. Claire E. Write advises blog writers not to offer the possibility to leave -
Because of the vastness of the blog plain, it is not a contested space. First of all, differences of opinion have to exist already and do not fall out of sky. Manufacturing opinion is a fine art of ideology creation. Debating should not be mixed up with a netwar style of campaigning in which existing (political) flights are being played out on the Net. The pushy tone is what makes blogs so rhetorically poor. What lacks in the software architecture is the very existence of an equal dialogue partner. The result of this is a militarization, expressed in a term such as "blog swarm", defined by Christian rightwing blogger Hugh Hewitt
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, I see blogs as part of an unfolding process of "massification" of this still new medium. What the Internet lost after 2000 was the "illusion of change".
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The motor behind the expansion of the blogosphere is the move away from code towards content. There is no more need for empty demo design. Blogs are not a test or proposition. They actually exist. From early on, blog culture has been the home of creative and social content producers.
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Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event. If anything, it is a special effect of software, constituted especially by the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue
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The boundaries between the mediasphere and the blogsphere are fluid
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Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports
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A weblog is the "voice of a person" (Dave Winer). It is a digital extension of oral traditions more than a new form of writing.[10] Through blogging, news is being transformed from a lecture into a conversation. Blogs echo rumours and gossip, conversations in cafes and bars, on squares and in corridors. They record "the events of the day" (Jay Rosen).
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There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities. In lieu of a common defini
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tion, we could say that cynicism is the unpleasant way of performing the truth
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In the Internet context, it is not evil, as Rüdiger Safranski suggested, but instead triviality which is the "drama of freedom"
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. As Baudrillard states: "All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car?
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And to follow Baudrillard, we could say that blogs are a gift to humankind that no one needs. This is the true shock. Did anyone order the development of blogs? There is no possibility to simply ignore blogs and live the comfortable lifestyle of a twentieth-century "public intellectual". Like Michel Houellebecq, bloggers are trapped by their own inner contradictions in the Land of No Choice.
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The panic and obsession around the professional status of the critic has been such that the created void has now been filled by passionate amateur bloggers. One thing is sure: blogs do not shut down thought
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A modern cynic typically has a highly contemptuous attitude towards social norms, especially those which serve more of a ritualistic purpose than a practical one, and will tend to dismiss a substantial proportion of popular beliefs, conventional morality, and accepted wisdom as irrelevant or obsolete nonsense." In a networked environment, such a definition becomes problematic as it portrays the user as an isolated subject, opposed to groups or society as a whole. Net cynicism is not a gateway to drugs or anything nasty. To talk about "evil" as an abstract category is irrelevant in this context. There is no immediate danger. It's all fine. The idea is not to create a dialectical situation. There is only a feeling of stagnation amidst constant change. We could call it "romanticism of the open eyes". According to Peter Sloterdijk, cynicism is "enlightened false consciousness
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We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurrences can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis, and gender perspectives. However, blogging arises against this kind of political analysis, through which a lot can no longer be said.
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Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts.
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Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal but a condition whose existence one must recognize. "We blog," as Kline and Bernstein say. It's today's a priori. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: "Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago.
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To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. "There is no other world" could be read as a response to the anti-globalization slogan, "Another world is possible".
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Instead of complaining and arguing, the blogger puts him or herself in the perversely pleasurable position of media observer.
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According to the utopian blog philosophy, mass media are doomed. Their role will be taken over by "participatory media".
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Blogs bring on decay
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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.
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Gianni Vattimo argues that 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. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism would be an ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws and that "truth" is inescapably subjective.
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In media terms, we see this attitude translated into a growing distrust of the output of large commercial news organizations and the spin that politicians and their advisers produce. 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.
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Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition
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Translating Karen Carr's insight to today's condition, we could say that the blogger is an individual "who lives in self-conscious confrontation with a meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power."[28] Yet this does not result in a heroic gesture. Blogging does not grow out of boredom, nor out of some existential void. Carr rightly remarks that "for many postmodernists, the presence of nihilism evokes not terror but a yawn".[29] Compared to previous centuries, its crisis value has diminished. If bloggers are classified nihilists, it merely means that they stopped believing in the media.
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With Dominic Pettman we could say that blogging is a relentless pursuit in the age of exhaustion.[34] Blogs explore what happens once you've smashed the illusion that there is a "persona" behind the avalanche of similar lifestyle choices and pop identities within online social networks.
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. Blogs are not even primarily a form of individual expression. They are better
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understood
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Bloggers disrupt the disrupters. They override the constant talk about "change". It is remarkably easy to attack the post-modern corporation as it solely depends on a hollow public image, developed by third-party consultants. Online diaries, rants, and comments so easily defy the manufactured harmony that community engineering aims at.
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This tendency to remain on the surface, touch a topic, point to an article without even giving a proper opinion about it apart from it being worth mentioning, is widespread and is foundational to blogging.
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How to overcome meaninglessness without falling back into centralized meaning structures is the challenge that the blogging millions pose.
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According to Berk, "online people constitute themselves as assemblies of documents and other data designed for people to read and establish some relationship. The more structure in and between this content, the greater is its action potential."[42] The self is defined in a normative way as the capacity to craft links between content chunks.
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Once upon a time, back in February 2004, the meme of the Internet being an "ego chamber" showed up
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The goal wasn't to solidify or to diversity, but to feel validated. Suggesting solidification/diversification implies that the primary motivation behind engaging online is to participate in purposeful dialogue, to be educated and educate
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It is communality of bias, or let's say conviction, that drives the growth of blogging power and its visibility in other media.
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04 Mar 12
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Web services like blogs cannot be separated from the output they generate. The politics and aesthetics defined by first users will characterize the medium for decades to come. -
The motor behind the expansion of the blogosphere is the move away from code towards content. There is no more need for empty demo design. Blogs are not a test or proposition. They actually exist. -
To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting or remarkable, or is disagrees with it.
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Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.
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"An Army of Davids"
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re taught that their liberation requires them to "tell the truth", to confess it to someone (a priest, psychoanalyst, or weblog), and this truth telling will somehow set them free
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There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities. In lieu of a common definition, we could say that cynicism is the unpleasant way of performing the truth
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medical problem
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Forty years from now when the Internet collapses in a giant implosion of stupidity I want to be able to say, 'I was there'."
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s cynical media culture a critical practice?
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One thing is sure: blogs do not shut down thought.
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Wikipedia amateur encyclopedians describe cynics as "those inclined to disbelieve in human sincerity, in virtue, or in altruism: individuals who maintain that only self-interest motivates human behaviour. A modern cynic typically has a highly contemptuous attitude towards social norms, especially those which serve more of a ritualistic purpose than a practical one, and will tend to dismiss a substantial proportion of popular beliefs, conventional morality, and accepted wisdom as irrelevant or obsolete nonsense.
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et cynicism is not a gateway to drugs or anything nasty. To talk about "evil" as an abstract category is irrelevant in this context. There is no immediate danger. It's all fine.
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The only knowledge left for a cynic is trust in reason, which, however, cannot provide him (or her) with a firm basis for action, yet another reason for being miserable
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Blogging is a bleed-to-death strategy. Implosion is not the right word. Implosion implies a tragedy and spectacle that is not present here. Blogging is the opposite of the spectacle. It is flat (and yet meaningful). Blogging is not a digital clone of the "letter to the editor". Instead of complaining and arguing, the blogger puts him or herself in the perversely pleasurable position of media observer.
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Their role will be taken over by "participatory media".
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they are "good for nothing".
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but the default postmodern condition.
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"technologies of the self"
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ommunity", "swarms", and "mobs" that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?
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27 Jan 12
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04 Oct 11
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the hypertext subcurrent lost out and what remains is an almost self-evident equation between blogs and the news industry
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According to Landman, blogging is changing the existing formats of information. "People are getting bored with the given formats; they don't catch up with the news anymore, it no longer sticks to their cervical memory stick. It is like a song that you have listened to too often, or a commercial advertisement; you hear it, you can even sing the words, but they are without meaning. Mainstream media is starting to grasp this. They have to search for new formats in order to attract readers (read: advertisers)" – and blogs are but a small chapter in this transformation.
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A weblog is the "voice of a person"
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Virno sees cynicism as connected to the "chronic instability of forms of life and linguistic games"
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Wikipedia amateur encyclopedians describe cynics as "those inclined to disbelieve in human sincerity, in virtue, or in altruism: individuals who maintain that only self-interest motivates human behaviour. A modern cynic typically has a highly contemp
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uous attitude towards social norms, especially those which serve more of a ritualistic purpose than a practical one, and will tend to dismiss a substantial proportion of popular beliefs, conventional morality, and accepted wisdom as irrelevant or obsolete nonsense."
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Sloterdijk
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Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage, and back to everyday boredom.
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we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit
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decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.
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Most bloggers don't follow that line of thinking and believe that reader comments turn a blog into a message board.
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01 Oct 11
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A blog is commonly defined as a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links, a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web and in the world out there
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Whereas the email-based list culture echoes a postal culture of writing letters and occasionally essays, the ideal blog post is defined by snappy public relations techniques
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If you can't cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won't be your cup of tea
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Blogging comes close to what Adilkno once described as "vague media".[8] The lack of direction is not a failure but the core asset. Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event
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What CNN, newspapers, and radio stations the world over have failed to do – namely to integrate open, interactive messages from their constituencies – blogs do for them.
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Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports
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A weblog is the "voice of a person" (Dave Winer). It is a digital extension of oral traditions more than a new form of writing.[10] Through blogging, news is being transformed from a lecture into a conversation -
There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark
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The question is therefore: how much truth can a medium bear? Knowledge is sorrow, and the "knowledge society" propagators have not yet taken this into account.
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Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like.
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Blogging is a nihilistic venture precisely because the ownership structure of mass media is questioned and then attacked.
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According to the utopian blog philosophy, mass media are doomed. Their role will be taken over by "participatory media".
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However, despite continuous warning signs, the system successfully continues to (dys)function
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The "problem of nihilism", as Clemens notes, is the complex, subtle, and self-reflexive nature of the term. To historicize the concept is one way out, though I will leave that to the historians. Another way could be to occupy the term and reload it with surprising energies: creative nihilism.
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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
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Kline and Burnstein disagree here (they ain't no nihilists). "Rather than seeing the proliferation of specialty blogs as an indicator of the fragmentation of our society, we should see this trend as providing a way for citizen-experts to emerge and to bring together global constituencies in many disparate fields."[30]
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However, they can just as easily be dismissed the next day as "pyjama journalists" and ignored as noise.
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"The truth is that these are not just the tiresome ramblings of the boring written to the bored. Though for the most part not professional writers, bloggers are often eloquent in the way that those who are not self-consciously polished often are – raw, uncensored, and energized by the sound of their newly awakened voices. And by keeping a daily record of their rites of passage, bloggers often give a shape and meaning to the stages and cycles of their lives that would otherwise be missed in the helter-skelter of modern existence."[32
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Isn't it interesting that blogging services offer the possibility to swich off comments after all?
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"blogs are not a new form of journalism nor do they primarily consist of teenagers whining about their teachers. Blogs are not even primarily a form of individual expression. They are better understood as conversations."[36]
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Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur."
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19 Dec 09
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It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture, and social networking into account.
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Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event. If anything, it is a special effect of software, constituted especially by the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue.
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20 Sep 08
katarina peovicI see blogs as part of an unfolding process of "massification" of this still new medium. What the Internet lost after 2000 was the "illusion of change".
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20 Jun 08
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27 May 08
Peter CruickshankA theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.
2008 article blog project:demo_net social networking participation culture media theory
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22 Apr 08
Francisco Arlindo AlvesMedia theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entri
GeertLovink critica cibercultura web2.0 SocialMedia Baudrilard FriedrichKittler project democracia blogging artigo bibliografia
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26 Feb 08
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Can we talk of a "fear of media freedom"? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by "their" channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as "a psychological problem" because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon "the uniqueness and individuality of man".[49] "The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."[50] The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the "community", "swarms", and "mobs" that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?
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20 Jan 08
Marcus O'DonnellMedia theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entri
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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.
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Despite countless attempts to feature blogs as alternatives to mainstream media, they are often, more precisely described as "feedback channels".
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In that sense we could also say that blogs are the outsourced, privatized test beds, or rather unit tests[9] of the big media.
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Cynicism, in this context, is not a character trait but a techno-social condition.
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blogs are a gift to humankind that no one needs.
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26 Jun 07
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16 Jan 07
danMedia theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entri
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11 Jan 07
era-serGeert Lovink
Blogging, the nihilist impulse
Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief iarticle blog blogging Blogs theory culture media wiki writing
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09 Jan 07
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08 Jan 07
Jan Zuppinger"I see blogs as part of an unfolding process of "massification" of this still new medium. What the Internet lost after 2000 was the "illusion of change". This void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through freely available automated soft
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06 Jan 07
organisedMedia theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entri
article media research web2.0 theory writing corporate participatory culture for:joeturner
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Michael Farisarticle on blogging - argues reinforces MSN dominance?
blogging blogs democracy media philosophy research theory writing thesis
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05 Jan 07
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Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism would be an ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws and that "truth" is inescapably subjective.
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Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition.
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post-virtue".
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It is the move from the festive McLuhan to the nihilist Baudrillard
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Blogs are neither religious nor secular. They are "post-virtue".
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No matter how much talk there is of "community" and "mobs", the fact remains that blogs are primarily used as a tool to manage the self.
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Claire E. Write advises blog writers not to offer the possibility to leave comments. "A few bloggers maintain that blogs that don't allow reader comments are not 'real' blogs. Most bloggers don't follow that line of thinking and believe that reader comments turn a blog into a message board.
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They are better understood as conversations.
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Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?
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This tendency to remain on the surface, touch a topic, point to an article without even giving a proper opinion about it apart from it being worth mentioning, is widespread and is foundational to blogging. How many of the postings, we can ask with Cornel West, are Socratic questioning?
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And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor.
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icholas Carr has called the Web 2.0 hype, blogs included, "amoral".
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hegemony of the amateur.
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cultural 'flattening'
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'the flat noise of opinion' - Socrates's nightmare.
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The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own
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Suggesting solidification/diversification implies that the primary motivation behind engaging online is to participate in purposeful dialogue, to be educated and educate.
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On top of that, not only do bloggers usually refer and answer only to members of their online tribe, but they have no comprehensive idea of how it could look to include one's adversaries.
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The pushy tone is what makes blogs so rhetorically poor.
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Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting.
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ghost communication". "Networking begins and ends with pure self-referentiality,"
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