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Kill Your Blogs
By Richard Leader
Printable
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One can tell a lot about a society by the way its citizens try
to attract a mate: a decade ago, the most popular career listed
by 20 and 30-somethings in personal ads was that of “web developer,”
most often a euphemism for being otherwise or underemployed; their
peers with real IT jobs were all too busy partying it up in Soho
to bother with something as quaint as a personal ad. Today, in the
post dot-bomb era, young and not so young people looking for love
in a stagnant economy politely refer to themselves as “writers.”
This newfound love for the world of words seems to fly in the face
of objective reality. A study conducted by the NEA found that the
percentage of Americans who read literature has declined by seven
points over roughly that same time period. And the rate of that
decline is growing sharply, with men especially turning away from
such genres: only one-third of American men still read literature
of any sort, even when allowing for the widest possible interpretation
of the term. It is also currently much more difficult to be a serious
writer, career minded or not, as the internet is no longer a new
frontier to be conquered with startling ingenuity but is instead
a quotidian fact of life. Those who turn away from the printed page
still face the same uphill battles of yore in their quest to challenge
and inspire others—effects quite naturally dependent upon
the condition of being published. While self-publishing has never
been easier, instead of simply contending with editors, writers
are now awash in a digital world where no man will budge from the
stage and be demoted, if only for a moment, to a mere member of
an audience. This development has been widely taken as a good thing,
a universal theater for mankind to hurl his defiance at the stars:
through a patriarchal lens, dueling tyrants are often confused with
democracy.
Our culture is profoundly at odds with itself over the value of
ideas. “Information must be set free” and yet somehow
the creation of intellectual property must also be the savior of
the Western economy, a dream that largely died in the late-Nineties
when the advertising bubble burst (an online banner ad once generated
over one hundred times as much revenue as it does now). But for
one brief moment in history that conflict appeared to be reconciled
and capitalism seemed to be doing the right thing. As easy as optimism
came in those days, it all came crashing down and the backlash of
the artificial Blue Collar ethos came into full swing. Even as ‘starving
artist’ and ‘intellectual elite’ have become ironic
synonyms—handy now that oil barons have co-opted the ‘everyman’
identity—here in a sea of Bubba-rhetoric and patriotism there
are somehow now more men who dream of writing the Great American
Novel than those who are even willing to read one, great or not.
The above focus on gender is not unintentional: pseudo-literacy,
a literacy limited by the masculine ego’s compulsion to actively
generate rather than to relate in any fashion that could be misinterpreted
as passive, is the driving force behind the current writing obsession,
manifested by the weblog. Frequently truncated down to “blog,”
the genre took center stage during the 2004 Democratic and Republican
conventions as many of the most popular male bloggers were not only
invited to attend (where they often acted out as literary equivalents
of nouveau riche, snarling lips and keyboards working to disguise
their wide eyes) but also received paid advertising from various
parties and interest groups—none of which tended to see female
writers and their concerns as appropriately political, conventional
wisdom shoehorning them into ‘personal’ genres no matter
their content. Bloggers were also credited with the solving the
authenticity of various National Guard memos and ending the career
of Dan Rather, not to mention a host of more scandalous and increasingly
insipid triumphs.
But what is a blog? According to those who have a vested interest
in promoting it as a named category, whether they participate in
the genre or are journalists trying to cash in on the phenomenon
with expository columns of their own, the consensus is that blogs
are frequently updated ‘guides’ to the web, exposing
links to new content, regularly with annotation by the host: a process
that was once vital during the infancy of the internet when websites
of potentially pivotal importance were being added every day. Yahoo.com
and other such mainstays actually started out doing exactly that
before they began to rely on automated software to build their search
engines. However, the ascendancy of the word “blog”
itself did not take place until the tail end of that process as
domains such as Blogger.com first went live in 1999. Even then,
the term did not achieve any level of real cachet amongst the most
diehard of internet users until at least 2001, with mainstream notoriety
postponed until late-2004.
Keeping in mind that the activity itself predates the named-activity
by almost a decade, the question of “what is a blog?”
can be answered quite differently: a blog is a fascism of format
that promises ultimate freedom of the press—a belief espoused
by many of the genre’s most recent adherents and proponents—while
herding the public into expressing themselves in an externally scripted
and socially defined method of interacting. Modern blogs differ
from their unnamed progenitors in a few notable ways now that the
format has crystallized. Blogrolls, comment sections, and trackback
features are all necessary to fully participate in the “blogosphere,”
a popular neologism that serves to inculcate an insider-focused
dynamic to the genre, even though the content of websites within
the blogosphere is not necessarily radically (or even marginally)
different in scope or style than those without. But given the social
and political currency now awarded to blogs, who wants to be without?
It would be more than a little unreasonable to declare a mode of
communication fascist just because of the mode’s popularity
and inevitable self-propagation, thus driving other styles to extinction,
but in the case of blogging (to use the fashionable gerund) popularity
is often everything; hence the “blogroll.” While the
dynamics are complex, the definition is not: a blogroll is simply
a long list of hyperlinks to other blogs, sometimes those that are
similar in nature to one’s own and sometimes not. These lists
form webs of association and are often created opportunistically,
in that the goal is sometimes as much to win reciprocal links in
the blogrolls of others (hopefully those more famous than one’s
own) as it is for the more mundane reason for the blogroll’s
existence: a way for the creator of a blog to conveniently keep
tabs on the other blogs he or she reads; that is, a personalized
centralization of utility.
In the early days of the internet, such centralization would be
described as a “homepage,” where one kept a copy of
a résumé, a list of interests and assorted links to
other pages, the obligatory pictures of the family pet, and often
commentary on various issues. Indeed, the only difference between
the homepage of yore and the blog of today is the automated infrastructure—most
bloggers can now rely on software to post their comments rather
than meddling with the code themselves—and the imposition
of chronology, each entry bearing a time and date stamp, although
most homepages reflected that as well to a certain extent.
If the homepage was femininely personal in nature, the blog is
paradoxically solipsistic and yet expressly external—and hence
masculine—in focus: the average blogroll is growing ever longer,
to the point where many bloggers rely on special software to continually
update their lengthy lists that have outgrown their basis for existing.
If the stated purpose of the blog is a time saving device, users
filtering the content they judge as worthy of seeing and then presenting
it to their peers for their convenience, the imposition of so many
filters (often focused on redundant content) becomes a stumbling
block when considering the validity of that alleged basis. In other
words, if someone could not possibly read all of the websites on
their blogroll on a regular basis, any etiology of the phenomenon
must therefore lean towards social factors—factors that have
made the homepage a relic of the past while spiraling its reinvented
(yet practically identical) progeny, the blog, into a sexy buzzword.
Besides turning the internet into the equivalent of a high school
popularity contest amongst those who participate in the blogosphere,
conveniently duplicating the social hierarchies of external reality,
the blogroll has had devastating consequences for the websites left
out of the new order due to the way many search engines rank content
through a process of link popularity. For most sites, achieving
a link from a third-party remains a coup of sorts: in the past,
there was little incentive for anyone to ever link to a site with
even the second-best information on a particular subject, as the
best site was usually sufficient. Blogs and their sprawling lists
of links, always prominently displayed on the front page—something
that search engines reward and more traditional websites are disinclined
to do, as they tend to focus on their own content rather than that
of others—short circuit those ranking algorithms, driving
up the value of words and phrases included in blogs at the expense
of sites who do not follow such a socially-oriented design ethic.
Socially-oriented might be a misnomer, given the tendency towards
solipsism, but a concentrated focus on just what “social”
entails becomes necessary in the face of a barrage of claims supporting
the revolutionary nature of the blog—and the promise of not
just free but equal speech that comes with it. This claim
especially appeals to young males who are encouraged to believe
that they are entitled to possess meaningful or even dominant voices
in society, but nevertheless tire of having to wait their turn and
for their elders to step aside. Female bloggers are certainly receptive
and sympathetic to that same rhetoric of equality, but they frequently
lack the same expectations concerning their own voices. So while
the rhetoric is available to women—and often coincides with
feminist ideals—the lack of expectation is often matched with
a lack of result; hence women tend to participate less in the various
blog pranks that their male peers tend to view as revolutionary
‘speech-equalization’ measures.
Taking advantage of their format’s privileged place among
many search engines many bloggers have engaged in a process now
commonly known as “Google Bombing.” This is done through
a premeditated campaign of reflexive hyperlinks within participating
blogs: in short, by using various keywords to misdirect the software
that scans websites for content, they can drive the relevancy of
an irrelevant page to the point where it begins to overwhelm real
information. One notorious example is that a Google search for “weapons
of mass destruction” will return a page with a joke about
U.N. inspectors. Many young men see the privileged position of blogs
in search engines as a prosperity doctrine, recompense for their
current, if temporary, placement on the lower rungs of patriarchy;
a way to strike back at everything from Rolling Stone to
The New York Times, or any institution from which they
feel their voice is excluded. However, Google Bombing and other
such stunts—or even just the significant boost in audience
that can be garnered from the development of the blogroll—will
never displace such institutions, only those people who are less
able to exploit the new (and almost-mandatory) format for electronic
communication, a group composed largely of women.
The ability of third-parties to post instantaneous comments to
most blogs is the primary aspect of the genre’s appeal, as
are various “trackback” features that allow the owner
of one blog to inform owners of other blogs that they are being
discussed, perhaps rallying them (and all of their readers) as potential
audience members. While ostensibly another social aspect of blogs,
this must be weighed against the evidence concerning conventional
notions of literacy: the explosive popularity of blogs is in no
small part due to the fact that men can actively express themselves
not just in their own blogs, but in those of others, reading only
so much as they need to in order to form their own rebuttal—which
one can imagine to be quite a meager amount of reading indeed. Writing
has become the new reading, subject to the “if a tree
falls in the forest” effect: reading as an activity only possesses
efficacy when it can be proven, empirically, by immediate material
benefit. This is something that renders blogs exceedingly valuable
to the masculine mind beset by doubt. Despite our gender’s
happy illiteracy, we have always managed the lion’s share
of letters to the editor in other venues as well; here, the rewards
for being a ‘reader’ have never been so enticing.
A certain amount of crosspollination has occurred, given that more
traditional journals and news agencies have discovered that allowing
comments is an easy way to both draw more readers—principally
male ones, of an age and demographic favored by advertisers—and
to keep them coming back to older content in order to view further
comments perhaps influenced by their own. Alternet.org, a liberal
news portal, got off to a rocky start when entering the world of
blogs with their Peek: its initial blogroll included only male writers
(other than Wonkette, which will be discussed below) causing a fair
amount of consternation. The list was emended and one of the feminist
writers they added, Trish Wilson, was later approached by one of
the Alternet editors to compose a full fledged article for their
website. Her “Solomon’s Solution,” an argument
against presumptive joint custody of children in divorces, naturally
proved controversial, although it is impossible to tell how many
of the commentators were themselves readers of Alternet (and presumably
liberal males) or were just chronic hecklers of Wilson, following
from her own mention of the article in her blog—though there
she had some measure of control over what responses could remain
posted.
Although direct reader comments are also enabled for some of the
more famous syndicated columnists who appear in Alternet, their
words appear elsewhere and can be seen without the venomous retorts
joined at the hip. In some respects, Wilson’s article has
more authority than the anonymous contributions that trail after,
though that authority is not absolute: while headlines and bylines
as artifacts continue to be privileged (just as conservatives rankle
that they still fail to possess academia and its canon of ‘dead
white male’ geniuses, even as they declare the world of higher
education to be trivial and out of touch with real American values),
the limited authority that Wilson is afforded does not necessarily
exceed the greater risk and effort it took her not only to write
the article but even to make the radar of Alternet in the first.
Yet those who wanted to oppose her view and affirm that of patriarchy
needed only a temporary-email address to register at the site and
counter her, without fear of consequences; a product of the so-called
democratic and equal speech granted by the new dynamic of read-to-writers
fostered by blogs.
The presence of third-party commentators also invalidates the genre’s
raison d'être: if blogs are proof that the press
finally belong to the people, what does it mean when one can be
comparatively better published by posting one’s best thoughts
inside the margins of a more popular blog (through commenting) than
crafting one’s own work at home? Yes, given the mercurial
nature of the internet, fame can come swiftly and without warning
(and depart just as fast), but those patterns of success typically
follow those of the world at large, reduplicating the same prejudices
that proponents of blogs swore would be abolished. A blog’s
worth is not just in its content but in its pedigree—which
does not necessarily make the content itself more credible or authentic—whether
the proprietor is a student at Harvard, a professional writer, a
faded celebrity, or even just an attractive face in a webcam photo;
so-called ‘readers’ can jealously attach themselves
to those legacies through the possibilities afforded to them by
their own comments to the elite’s blog, a process more immediate
and gratifying than being a more passive consumer of such cultural
legacies as people have been in the past.
Now that the constraints of physical space no longer act as a barrier
to sycophancy, even the stereotypical young-radical finds himself
at an impasse when railing against elite institutions, given how
he sometimes shares vicariously in them to his advantage when courting
fellow bloggers and the entangled web of social dynamics that such
activity entails. This aspect of blogs also obviates against social
change, where liberal and conservative straight white males of age
can rail against each other in their dialectics only to call it
a night and share a beer with another, metaphorically or in all
actuality, while those outside of that norm lack the same freedom
to “agree to disagree” since those disagreements tend
to run ramshackle over their identities, forcing them into an ontological
oblivion.
It was no accident that tomfoolery such as Google Bombing was promptly
renamed “memes” (a “transmitted unit of cultural
information,” after the Greek mimeisthai) by the
men who perpetuate such deeds, the borrowed academic jargon affording
legitimacy to their actions. Few question the validity of such authority—stemming
from institutions more intangible than academia, such as patriarchy—despite
the fact that it incontrovertibly undermines the democratic new
world that blogs have promised. It is then easy for the words of
public revolution to be co-opted by individuals. While those who
participated in the “weapons of mass destruction” meme
might have felt that they were involved in something grander than
themselves, it was still the owner of the WMD 404 Error page itself
who received the profits from the sale of branded t-shirts. When
thousands of liberal-leaning bloggers pasted a “Fair and Balanced”
logo on their websites, was it truly in solidarity with Al Franken
and his legal battle with Rubert Murdoch (whose FOX News contested
ownership of the phrase) or in emulation of him? The deference involved
only points out the obvious and Franken has sold more books than
any of his supporters.
The conservatism and illiteracy of men in general regularly works
to their advantage in the world of blogs: not only does the reactionary
nature of the format (responding to news rather than reporting it)
suit most men’s proclivities quite well, the constant struggle
between aggressive egotism and indolent Laconism, those who are
otherwise often receive more than their fair amount of attention.
And while very few men strictly journal in intensely personal and
vulnerable ways, compared to the number of females of all ages who
engage in such writing (the “confessional” genre synonymous
with “chick lit”) it is these men who are most rewarded
of all for their disclosure. Even as the media creates paranoid
fantasies about teenage girls acquiring gifts (facilitated by Amazon.com’s
“wish list” feature) from lecherous men who feverishly
watch their diaries, men themselves stand to benefit even more for
their forays out of the political and into the personal: many of
the most well read and respected of the “mommy” bloggers
are themselves male parents and, on the professional front, not
much in chick lit can compare to the success of Dave Eggers and
his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Even collaborative
blogs created for the express purpose of furthering female writers
and artists have become launch pads for male pundits to get their
start, as they are bound to receive more interviews from the mainstream
press than their female peers, given the unique edge that sitting
at the “girl’s table” affords a man.
Conversely, men with popular blogs are often able to harness women
as “guest bloggers,” who are granted a larger audience
in return for volunteering their work, even as they—due to
their gender—become a form of social or political currency
to the man who runs the show. Sometimes the politics of this are
hard to discern for most readers, as in the case of blogs like Wonkette.com
that are created purely as a product: Nick Denton, a minor media
mogul of sorts, needed to slap a nubile female face on his Wonkette.com
in order to make it more marketable than its competitors. Despite
being a corporate creation staffed by an entire paid team, the supposed
personality of its editor, Ana Marie Cox, had to be inflated to
eclipse those other facts—and thus become “Wonkette”
herself—to meet the genre requirements of the blog format,
banking on the new medium to reap financial dividends in the future.
Wonkette is best known for launching Washingtonienne (a twenty-something
DC intern’s salacious blog recounting bad sex with a variety
of barely-veiled politicians) into the limelight, a Playboy
appearance included in her fifteen minutes of fame. Cox credits
herself for discovering the young intern, but for many Wonkette
fans, Denton himself remains invisible in his role as puppet master
and profiteer.
In a world where private and corporate blogs are frequently blogrolled
together indiscriminately as similar or equal entities (in a way
that Sue’s Homepage.com and Sony.com normally would not be)
it is dangerous to allow such hierarchal disparities to remain in
the shadows, subsumed in the triviality of genre. It might be more
than a little bit brazen to declare blogs the opiate of the people,
but they certainly work as an escape valve for creative pressure
(creativity not accepted or endorsed by those who run print and
other types of media until they can take advantage of it on their
own terms), while it allows people the fantasy that hierarchy has
been rendered irrelevant in the post-modern era. As the benefits
of “independent media” are increasingly advertised to
young people, little effort has been made to teach them how to read
the fine print to discover exactly how independent many ventures
are.
As much as the current popularity of blogs reflects specific goals
and inclinations of gendered dominance, in the end, blogs themselves
are not the problem: after all, the activity existed long before
its more problematic components emerged and the format imposed itself
as an iconic mode of communication. Indeed, many of the first blogs
(if not in name) and hyperlink-galleries were created and operated
by women, something quickly forgotten in the short memory of contemporary
culture. However, given that blogs have become emblematic of the
attributed promises of all electronic discourse, these
promises themselves bear examination as they are either untenable
or outright lies. The internet will never be space devoid of sex,
race, and class that libertarians demand, thereby normalizing everyone
else to their white male standard. Beyond that, however, there are
dire implications for the craft of writing.
While journalists have lamented that electronic media is hamstringing
the spelling ability of teenage girls, given the abbreviated language
they must use on various electronic devices (though the effect of
the similarly abbreviated taunts that boys use in their videogames
are of no worry, given that their parents, teachers, and journalists
have not consigned them to the pink collars of secretarial pools),
peer-learning has become the dominant form of education. This is
manifested not just in school children but even in the writing of
middle-aged men who work for various US based technology websites
who are now as prone to write “IBM have” as “IBM
has,” adopting Anglophonic forms from their often more literate
peers in Britain. The very fact that their language was so transformed
remains unbeknownst to them.
Peer-learning has both positive and negative effects, the latter
in that it tends to privilege cleverness over elegance or the poetic,
but with the imposition of the cult of cool surrounding the blog
and the cultural primacy granted to the mode, peer pressure itself
becomes a confusing thing when it is next to impossible to define
who is or is not a peer: and without knowing that, aspiring to one
standard or another is rendered ever more difficult. On the one
hand blogs are the champion of the people, especially the young,
who are disenfranchised from the printed page. And yet just about
every brand-name magazine or journal is trying to cash in on the
phenomenon by hiring paid professionals to work blogs under their
aegis. These professional blogs tend to be unimpressive as the author’s
more original and compelling thoughts naturally get shifted to other,
more lucrative and prestigious venues; their blogging remains a
diversion at best, a perfunctory public relations duty at worst.
Some professionals cast into the role of bloggers use the novelty
of the medium as a chance to act out in ways that would likely have
them held to a higher standard of responsibility in other arenas:
The Nation’s incipient blog, ActNow!, penned by Peter
Rothburg, promoted a pornographic calendar last December as a windfall
for the “political gift giver.” Babes Against Bush,
a project of one David Livingstone—presumably also a man—and
his Orwell Productions PR company, was perhaps a reaction to a similar
group in support of the president, only his included nudity and
ties to the sex industry itself. An acquaintance of mine wrote a
letter of complaint, arguing against The Nation’s
support for the group: even if feminists might sometimes seem divided
when it comes to issues of objectification, a more general progressive
magazine should certainly be required not to pick sides, especially
under the pen of a male writer.
What she received, I am told, was a personal email from Katha Pollitt
(despite the complaint being made to a generic address), asking
her to recognize that not only is she herself a feminist columnist,
but so are Patricia Williams and Naomi Klein, ignoring anything
to do with the issue at hand through some kind of self-tokenism.
While Pollitt has been critical of blogging in her own writing (“That
opinion writing is a kind of testosterone-powered food fight is
a popular idea in the blogosphere”), for her own part, even
she loses out: while several blogs carry endorsements from her,
claiming her as an admiring reader, her statement of support is
often listed alongside others from male bloggers, who themselves
have nary a fraction of Pollitt’s own influence or success.
She had to achieve that much more in life to be worth that blurb.
Yet the elevated status of professionals inflates the value of
such work within the blogosphere, winning them spots on blogrolls
(aiding their publication as a whole when it comes to internet search
engines, generating traffic and revenue, as many advertisers rely
on a rather opaque ranking generated by Alexa.com to judge the worth
of websites) as amateur writers attempt to court them through the
comments they make, perhaps hoping to win a reciprocal hyperlink
or even get their foot in the door as a journalist though their
newfound connection to a ‘real’ writer.
Authenticity remains the holy grail for bloggers, although possession
of it remains divisive, with some bloggers contending that their
medium’s ability to topple empires (or just Dan Rather) is
proof enough of as their validity as writers. Such claimants, however,
are rarely direct participants in such actions and likely only blogged
about those who were involved, typically after the mainstream press
had already run with the story. Indeed, the blogs of socialites
and political interns where many stories are first broken frequently
belong to those privileged both by birth and geography, who grew
up in the Suffolk and Orange Counties of the world, who could have
just as easily gone the more traditional route in fast-track journalism
(and often do): while blogs have most certainly shifted the perception
of increased-opportunity amongst writers, the format has been far
less successful at actually widening it in any meaningful way.
Others bloggers are less serious about their role, some simply
because they are less serious individuals to begin with, while others
see themselves as almost or near-journalists, a role they are more
than happy to step into given their acceptance of the ethic of pseudo-objectivity
professed by print and broadcast news: sensing that the value of
blogs is in their over-the-top bias, they believe that taking their
work to a higher level would strip it of precisely what makes it
worthwhile. Thus bloggers experience a world of lowered expectations
paradoxically tinged with the promise of entering the field as a
professional writer—and all the silly cultural baggage the
career entails—yet there is no bridge provided to span the
gap, other than their own excitement.
The internet as we know it was built on the back of such excitement:
AOL once harnessed over 14,000 “community leaders” who
freely, or for the pittance of a complimentary account, created
the value-added content that helped to make the company what it
is today. This was perhaps in violation of minimum wage laws as
the concept of volunteerism does not apply to for-profit businesses,
or so argued Leon Greenberg, a lawyer for many disgruntled community
leaders seeking a class action suit. The internet’s promise
of potential was so strong in people’s minds that it outweighed
their own indoctrination in capitalism, something the true capitalists
were able to exploit to their advantage.
Consider the similar situation of Amazon.com and the “reader-reviews”
the website is able to offer, useful not just for convincing potential
buyers to choose one item or another, but because every word of
every review is content for search engines to collate and refer
back to their own users. While mainstream journalists have poked
fun at authors for anonymously abusing the service to promote their
own work or ridicule that of competitors, little attention has been
given to the fact that people are all too willing to donate their
own time and abilities for the benefit of a massive corporation—one
that is not shy in exploiting not just that work but is willing
to prey upon ego and insecurity (notions certainly tied up in our
society’s conception of the art of writing) to ensure that
it continues, granting “Top 100” or even “Top
1000 Reviewer” awards to participants. Consider the language
Amazon uses to promote involvement in its “Listmania”
feature: “It’s free, democratic, and fun,” the
knee-jerk politics of the appeal serving to obscure the financial
motivation of no-cost content generation.
Most bloggers must clearly feel that they benefit from their pastime
or vocation—however one sees fit to describe it—but
so do those who slave away day after day in pursuit of a “Top
100” badge next to their screen-name on Amazon.com; the question
of who really benefits seems a prudent question to ask, even if
it ultimately remains unanswerable. What can be addressed, however,
is informed-consent: how much of our excitement in pursuing an endeavor
of any sort is genuine, and how much is shaped by external coercion,
threats and promises made to guide us into taking that specific
course.
If making it into established forms of media was not presented
to the average writer as even more untenable than it actually is,
would they still choose to blog to the extent that they do? Would
young people especially continue to dedicate themselves to writing
in the most transient of formats were it not for the cult of cool
that surrounds them, one fostered by the professionals we admire
and long to emulate, even as they themselves begin to slum in our
realm of ‘zines and ‘blogs—truncations of longer
words that we, not they, are supposed to be too hip, too ephemeral,
to say? Put in those terms, it seems doubtful, and this decade’s
cause for excitement is less genuine than that of the last, given
that the golden-goose of online advertising is cooked: the last
time internet-based writing enjoyed a surge of popularity it was
backed by cold hard cash. If that excitement turned out to be in
vain, current events look far less rosy and might turn out to be
equally heartbreaking unless the false promises attributed to electronic
forms of communication are dealt with honestly, with the realization
that such mythologies were created as political tools.
The promise of unmitigated free speech and the fetish-like appeal
of “independent media” is a contract between one generation
of males to the next, an impossible pledge of shared power and influence
in a zero-sum society. That men both young and old, poor and rich,
are able to buy into the fantasy of blogging as an antidote to all
problems endemic to hierarchy, serves to keep males of all sorts
in line—and thus ahead of women—herding back those who
might rebel against the system. The “democratic-underground”
can be an awfully nice sandbox to play at being an adult in, a quagmire
that grabs hard, and even though some of the more excessive notes
of the blogosphere should cause obvious alarm, most of us have already
invested far too much time and energy to renege on it—and
patriarchy is calling.
The internet is an idea so powerful that many still demand that
the word be capitalized as if it were a brand name that Al Gore
mythically invented. Over the course of the past decade, Gil Scott-Heron’s
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” has been gradually
replaced by the appropriately anonymous “The Revolution Will
Be Downloaded” within popular consciousness. Unless that revolution
is pornography, it would seem that the arrival of the internet has
done little to change the political landscape, only accelerating
it: As a society, we have a vast need to imagine that our latest
obsession is radically different from the media of the past. The
mythology of agency ascribed to the internet, overstating its participatory
nature by forgetting that reaction is privileged over action, has
only served to disguise how it often functions in similar ways to
older forms of communication that we rightly hold in suspicion.
While the online world does lend a sense of participation to its
users, the true agency of its contributors is often exaggerated,
something easily exploited by the corporate interests who still
run the show.
After all, television viewers have chatted about their favorite
sitcoms around the metaphorical water cooler long enough to create
the very expression. By relating the scripted events to their own
lives, the process of social networking manufactured the meaning
of the text after the fact as audiences spoke in languages handed
down to them by the medium itself. We must allow for the possibility
that the same laws of physics apply today, even to our most darling
of inventions.
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