(dear nettimers, this is a shortened version, first published in the
german and danish editions of lettre internationale, of my ongoing
essay on blogging. it was published recently on the web by
http://www.eurozine.com. an extended version will appear in my next
book zero comments that routledge new york plans to put in july 2007.
the editor has not done anything with manuscript ever since I submitted
early september 2006, so that was kind of encouraging news... if you
are interested to read the pdf version and would know publishers would
could do a translation, let me know. routledge only owns the rights to
the english version. best, geert)
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html
Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse
By Geert Lovink
"An der rationalen Tiefe erkennt man den Radikalen; im Verlust der
rationalen Methode kündigt sich der Nihilismus an. Der Radikale besitzt
immer eine Theorie; aber der Nihilist setzt an ihre Stelle die
Stimmung." Max Bense (1949)
Weblogs or blogs are the successors of the '90s Internet "homepage" and
create a mix of the private (online dairy) and the public (self-PR
management). According to the latest rough estimates of the Blog
Herald,[1] there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly
impossible to make general statements about their "nature" and divide
them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this. 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.
Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or
emphasizing their counter-cultural folklore, 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 software.
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.[2] A blog allows for the easy creation of new pages: text and
pictures are entered into an online form (usually with the title, the
category, and the body of the article) and this is then submitted.
Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page,
creating the new full article page (called 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. They (usually) allow the
administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permissions and
access are easily managed.[3]
Microsoft's in-house blogger Robert Scoble lists five elements that
made blogs so hot. The first is the "ease of publishing", the second he
calls "discoverability", the third is "cross-site conversations", the
fourth is permalinking (giving the entry a unique and stable URL), and
the last is syndication (replication of content elsewhere).[4] Lyndon
from Flock Blog gives a few tips for blog writing, showing how ideas,
feelings, and experiences can be turned into news format, and showing
how dominant 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."[5] 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.
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. 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. Building a
laid-back parallel world made it possible for blogs to form the
crystals (a term developed by Elias Canetti) from which millions of
blogs grew and, around 2003, reached critical mass.
Blogging in the post-9/11 period closed the gap between Internet and
society. Whereas dot-com suits dreamt of mobbing customers flooding
their e-commerce portals, blogs were the actual catalysts that realized
worldwide 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 elem
