I blog, therefore, I Am

Μια φίλη μου έστειλε ένα ενδιαφέρον άρθρο σχετικά με τα blogs.
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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, there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their "nature" and divide them into proper genres.
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.
"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."
As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization.
Blogs allow you to see whether your audience is still awake and receptive. In that sense we could also say that blogs are the outsourced, privatized test beds, or rather unit tests of the big media.
The boundaries between the mediasphere and the blogsphere are fluid.
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.
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?
The computable comments of the millions can be made searchable and visually displayed, for instance, as buzz clouds. Whether these maps provide us with any knowledge or not is another matter.
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.
Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself).
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.
we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit.
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.
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. 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.
Justin Clements writes that "nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that occurred long ago." 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.
Blogging does not grow out of boredom, nor out of some existential void.
If bloggers are classified nihilists, it merely means that they stopped believing in the media.
we should see this trend as providing a way for citizen-experts to emerge and to bring together global constituencies in many disparate fields." Seen from the political class perspective, hand-picked bloggers can be instrumentalized as "opinion indicators".
Bloggers might communicate what issues people tell the media they want to think about. But once the hotness has worn off, who cares? The nihilism starts there, after the fall of the blogs, the stolen laptop, crashed server, unreadable back-up files, disappeared online service provider, "comments (0)".
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
The essence of a blog is not the interactivity of the medium: it is the sharing of the thoughts and opinions of the blogger.
Blogs do not arise from political movements or social concerns. They have an "obsessive focus on the realization of the self, " says Andrew Keen of the Weekly Standard.
"If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent"
cultural 'flattening'
'the flat noise of opinion' - Socrates's nightmare
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. Blogrolls (link lists) unconciously preassume that if you include a blog you agree or at least sympathize with its maker. We link to what's interesting and cool.
"The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."
Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

Blogging, the nihilist impulse - Geert Lovink