for duncan

napalm girl

Echoes

Last night, I began to take notes for a blog post about blogging. I was momentarily troubled by this urge to write, stemming purely from other blog posts I had read, and a growing sense of having the news pass me by without response. Regardless of the validity of these feelings, I think this is a good starting point for talking about the nature of blogging as an activity that fundamentally concerns reading and re-reading texts. I think that its easy to over-emphasize a paradigmatic shift brought on by the ability to comment and re-interpret media through blogging. I think blogs and other ‘web 2.0’ applications are in line with other ‘postmodern’ media sources that emphasize the ability to read (or satirize) media events. For television shows like The Simpsons (or SNL?), the emphasis has always been on reinterpretation of public events, news stories and their actors. Also, I think the assumption of a paradigm shift assumes a certain level of passivity on the part of regular newsmedia readers or TV watchers. People talk about TV, it becomes part of our collective consciousness, etc. The basic ‘stuff’ that forms the foundation to blogging comes from this rereading process – the format for any ‘good’ blog suggests that a post include links to other media as well as about 250 words of commentary. This suggests that one primary function of blogging is a shift in the economy of attention that drives news cycles: allowing people with computers to highlight and reinterpret media events in such a way to encourage people to then read and reread their own blogs. Indeed, the big ‘victories’ for blog culture involved the ability to draw attention to certain news stories that otherwise would have remained ‘under the radar’ of mainstream news. The primary functions of ‘web 2.0’ software – tagging, indexing, wordclouds, etc. – concern the ability to highlight attention to certain ideas, and to link them to others. The effect of these functions, as with satire, is often to gain mastery over the news and the swarm of information that composes the internet, and to transform them into objects of easy manipulation. This function parallels the phenomenology of computers as tools for data, image and information manipulation, as well as the experience of using and customizing graphic user interfaces as a whole. The goal is empowerment of the user – and blogs feed this illusion by allowing for the reclamation of and commentary on news media. For anyone growing up in an imagistic childworld, the process of writing and linking news on personalized webpages mirrors that process of postering walls with ads for cars and athletes, or the use of graffiti writing to transform image scapes. Reading and rereading mass media environments gives the reader a sense of social power. The discourse about citizen journalism that vastly overstates its truthtelling function demonstrates the fundamentals of blog writing and reading: entertainment as attention-distraction and the ability to be a capable reader of texts.

Duncan