Beyond nihilism, the bloggable future

Quoted in a March 2008 post at Counterterrorism Blog, VeriSign CTO Kenneth Silva said, “once you get on the internet you don’t get off, you stay there.” As someone who is both employed in internet research and writes for two blogs, I often feel like a slave to the screen.

Nicholas Carr linked to an extraordinary essay by Geert Lovink, Blogging, the nihilist impulse, in which Lovink, a media theorist of long standing, aims “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.” Carr summarises Lovink’s conclusions as “To a man with a blog, everything looks like fodder”, and quotes the last paragraph of the essay:

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”. “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.” 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?

Guilty as charged. The seduction of the mutual hyperlink, Technorati, traffic reports and Alexa rankings. The panic that comes of finding two thousand unread posts in your RSS reader, the perception that you are falling behind in your responsbilities to your Feedburner fans. And all the while not producing anything of original worth, merely reproducing the tired and, in the zero-time of the internet, old? I’ve always thought that ‘adding value’ to every link posted was one way of mitigating for lack of originality , and I’ve tried to adhere to that vague formula. I confess to feeling uncomfortable when not linking to something, which is perhaps an academic failing – the necessity to scrupulously cite one’s sources lest you be accused of plagiarism. But when the whole world is hyperlinked, who’s to say what is plagiarism and what is coincidence?

Read Lovink if there’s time in your busy browsing and blogging schedule to do so. It’s a pretty impressive feat of original thought in itself, and has certainly got me wondering about blogging from a slightly different perspective. All the best blogs seem to intuitively follow Lovink’s thesis. I started blogging in order to learn, and this holds true, but perhaps there is more to bloglife than the link?