Blog Theory Chap's 1-2 Outline

“Just like the spread of lily-pads in a pond, the analogy goes, so will blogs and other innovations emerge and die, flourish and struggle” (P31).

“Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think” (P3).

“I take the position that contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” (P 3).

The term for this is “Communicative capitalism” -> The combination / convergence of democracy in networked communication and entertainment.

In other words, the internet is the vehicle and terrain for politics and economics, which are converging/ combining.

Social acceleration, largely attributed to the Internet and its family of technologies, is making these changes happen very quickly.

Symbolic efficiency  -> defined by Zizek’s reading of Lacan “There is no longer a master signifier stabling meaning, knitting together the chain of signifiers and hindering its tendencies to float off indeterminacy” (P6).

USE BLOG

Instant gratification fills in the lack contusive of desire

“The result is a situation of non-desire, non-meaning, and the unbearable intrusion of enjoyment. This decline in symbolic efficiency is a fundamental feature of communicative capitalism” (P9)

Unknowns can and will have massive unforeseen effects- our reaction to the world is reflexive (reactive)

Buck Soros and Taleb argue “The reflexive structure of communicative capitalisms fast ubiquitous networks increase the likelihood and impact of high consequence events” (P13).

Dean argues they don’t go far enough. -> “The endless loop of reflexivity becomes the very form of capture and absorption” (P13).

Addressing counter arguments:

Dean offers a lengthy argument against techno-enthusiasts who write as if reflexivity were the solution to a wide range of social and political problems  

Links this to new communalist’s flawed beliefs that:

1.       Technology will save the world

2.       Adopt faith in IT, while denying institutions it’s modeled off

3.       Say tech is liberating as it contributed to political economic and cultural change-ie neo liberalism

(“Neo liberalism entails the governmentality of active, multiple vigilant and omnipresent intervention in society, an intervention exercised through and by multiple networks traversing micro and macro domains” (P18) emphasizes the market competition rather than exchange)

Thus the ‘counter culture’ is really the status quo.

“Even if geeks are ‘about’ justice and equality, the consequence of the widespread adoption and extension of their work is the most extreme economic inequality the world has ever know” (p23).

Dean proceeds to string up Christopher Kelty, who thinks free software is re-orientationg knowledge and power in a good way. Dean argues that the re orientation is OUT of the hands of the people.

 Displaced mediators- mediators, whose functions have been displaced from their pervious role,.

On page 28: Widespread intake in participation on a commercial social network like Facebook or Myspace may displace other practices and activities-pick-up basketball or going door to door to collect signature for a campaign- say –practices and activates that then come to be viewed in media terms. So texting enables kids to arrange basketball games or online petitions make signature gathering faster and easier. What’s displaced from view are the pleasures and benefits accompanying the prior mode of being “

Enter the Blog

In the framework laid out there are implications of blogs/ blogs can be used to display this theory.

-          Blogging emerged as a practice in communicative capitalism

-          Blogs are displaced mediators

“Blogs acess key features of communicative capitalism; the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks (communicated about communicated) the emergence of ‘whatever beings’ (beings who belong but not to anything in particular) and the circulation of affect (as networks generate and amplifty spectacular effects).” (p29)

Chapter 2

The blog is dead!

“The audiences before whom we perform our identities- child, expert, collector, lover – converged, under-mining the separations and distinctions that told us who we were, rendering us nothing in particular, but still something” (p56)

Blogs highjacked by capitalism, “By 2009 70 percent of bloggers said they blogged about brands” (p34) incredibly global.

Was the intention to make money?

Dichotomy of new journalism and journaling never really worked.

“Blogging is parasitic, narcissistic and pointless- and that’s is why internet users all over the world blog in ever increasing numbers” ( P37) .

Did people ever want blogs?

The lure of the newness

Early link between search and blogging. A blog was a way to navigate the internet with a guide—someone who could thus be trusted. –both search and blogging flawed (p 43)

Major historic shift in how info/ reading /writing is consumed/ produced

Gey Rundle: “…network capacity, which makes everyone producer and consumer, and hence collapses the notion of an audience (since time does not expand, while blog numbers do)” (p 46)

“The decline of symbolic efficiency is accompanied by a convergence between the imaginary and the Real” (p57)

Drive->  a kind of compulsion or force, that fragment and disperse.

“Blogging after the death of blogs persists in an analogous domain of the drive. Caught in the curtits of communicative capitalism out of which it emerged, it persists, whether in the form of fully automated splogs, the remnants of past posts excavated and ranked by Google, or our compulsions to make ourselves seen” (60)

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  Questions:

 Why are there only a minority of students posting on the blogs when they are a requirement? Would having to hand in a ‘hard copy’ be any different? 

Discussion in the blogs has raised the point that neo liberalism-largely through communicative capitalism is not a bad thing, as increased wealth and is leading to the development of the third world, is this the case? Is the reality more nuanced then Dean lets on?

What is the difference between Terranova and Dean’s accounts of network politics?

Cyber bulling -- 58