jill/txt

Privacy of the Self
Originally uploaded by snappybex

Quite often I receive emails from high school students writing papers about blogging who have long lists of questions they’d like me to answer. Unfortunately I don’t often have time to answer ten questions in detail, but I do try to send some general suggestions and references. This morning’s questions were about guidelines for blogging and how some of Norway’s most popular bloggers follow them. The student plans to look specifically at the blogs of Regine Stokke (she’s the 18-year-old who recently died of cancer and wrote about her illness, bringing me to tears) and Voe (the fourteen-year-old I wrote about last week).

I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly listed guidelines for bloggers - I think that’s very dependent on context and on what kind of blog you’re writing. I’ve certainly discussed various guidelines, for instance in presentations like this one.

When it comes to personal blogs, I think there are three main kinds of guideline or ethical issues you need to consider:

1. Privacy - both your own and your friends’. How much information do you want to share? How much do you think its OK to write about your friends and family? Think about your audience, and your potential audience. Will your friends and family read this? Will they be able to recognise you or themselves? Will your teacher or employer read it? Would it bother you if your (perhaps still unborn) children read this in ten or twenty or thirty years? What about photos of your friends and family? (Thanks to lskwew for reminding me of this.)
   • Dooce was the first prominent blogger to be fired for her blog. I’ve written a fair bit about this in my book Blogging, but you can also find lots about it online, including her first post about it. In a recent article from Forbes, you can read about the continuation of Dooce’s blog - and about how she among other things decided to delete anything she’d written about her family that she wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying in front of a bunch of strangers. That’s not a bad guideline for blogging and privacy: don’t publish things you wouldn’t say to a bunch of strangers.
   • Justin Hall is another famous and long-term personal blogger. In 2005 he posted an emotional video explaining that he was quitting blogging because it drove his friends away from him. Since then he has begun blogging again, but in a much less intimate manner.
2. Advertising and disclosure The FTC (Federal Trade Commission, the US equivalent, more or less, to the Norwegian forbrukerombudet) recently issued guidelines for bloggers requiring them to say so if the products they’re writing about were sent to them for free by the company, or if they have been paid to write about something. This is still not required in most countries. In fact, popular Norwegian bloggers like Voe don’t necessarily disclose that they have received products for free. For instance, it’s not entirely clear from Voe’s enthusiastic endorsement of her OnePiece suit that it was sent to her for free, as this article in Aftenposten clearly states. She does clearly feel a need to defend her integrity in writing product reviews, however, as you can see in this post, “My opinions are not for sale“. In Blogging I argue that bloggers who aren’t honest about when they’re being paid will lose their credibility, meaning fewer readers and less advertising money. Anyway, if you’re a personal blogger and receiving freebies (and most personal bloggers don’t, to be honest you need a lot of readers to get to that point) you need to think about if and how you want to write about those products.
3. Honesty - how truthful do you want to be in your blog? There are plenty of examples of fictional blogs that have presented themselves as real. When readers discovered they were fictional, they felt cheated and became very angry (I’ve blogged about why readers get angry at this. On a smaller scale, most bloggers leave out the ugly bits and maybe play up the good stuff, as in the quote from Lars Tangen in this blog post. I’m not saying you need to be utterly honest (in fact, the more literary blogs get, the less factual truth matters, in my opinion, but you do need to think about this.

Do you think there are other ethical issues that personal bloggers should consider?

Internationally, it seems that the most popular blogs are about gadgets, technology, politics and weird web finds, at least if we can trust Technorati’s ranking list. In Norway, the most popular blogs are written by teenaged girls, like 14-year-old “Voe“, who’s the subject of a long and interesting article about the phenomenon in Aftenposten (if you can’t read Norwegian, you can get an idea of the content using Google Translate) Another extremely popular teenaged blogger is Lars Tangen, a sixteen year old who writes about makeup and the lifestyle of a gay, teenaged blogger.

I’m not sure why these blogs are so extremely popular in Norway. Voe apparently has 60,000 readers a day, which in a country of about 4.5 million people is astounding. There must be some kind of critical mass that builds and suddenly, hey presto, that’s what people in this culture think blogging is about. There has been a lot of media hype about the phenomenon too, and especially about how much money teens can (occasionally) make from product placement, ads and sponsorship agreements. I’m sure many teens are attracted by that possibility, no matter that most bloggers make nothing.

I love this quote from Lars Tangen in the Aftenposten article:

Det meste av det jeg skriver, er sant, men jeg forbedrer og raffinerer litt. En gang tok jeg på meg en bukse fra H&M og skrev at den var fra Gucci. Folk elsker å lese om noen som er bedre enn dem. Det er jo ikke jeg, men jeg later som. (”Most of what I write is true, but I improve and refine it a little. Once I put on a pair of trousers from H&M and wrote that they were from Gucci. People love to read about someone who’s better than them. I’m not, but I pretend to be.”)

In 2008, the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics found that 18% of 16-24 year olds had published their own blog in the last three months. That’s pretty amazing.

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.

– Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p 170.

I spent two days last week at the European Journal of Communication Symposium 2009 - a fabulous little workshop that was held in beautiful Padua, half an hour away from Venice. Every couple of years the journal’s editors invite a group of scholars to a symposium on a specific topic. Everyone contributes a paper, much discussion and debate follows, and later that year, a special issue of the journal is published based on the papers given at the symposium. This year’s questions circle around the changes in communication as the audience become creators. Half of the participants were well-established nestors in the field of communications studies, discussing how old paradigms hold up or must adapt to new media, and the other half of us were something closer to digital natives discussing the specifics of new media communication.

The surroundings were splendid - Padua is one of the world’s oldest universities, and the seminar room was glorious, as you can see from Mark Deuze’s photo above (thanks Mark for documenting us!) Three hours in Venice en route to the seminar was also a fabulous experience - all the better for meeting there my Norwegian colleague Gunn Enli from Oslo (whose paper is about audience voting in shows like the Eurovision Song Contest and Dance with the Stars) and the intriguing and energetic EJC editor wrote about some examples here on my blog a while ago. I need to finish the paper by May 20, before I go to the E-Poetry conference in Barcelona, so I’ll be working hard on it over the next few weeks - and intend to blog about it as I go.

Right now, I want to finish reading José van Dijck’s Mediated Memories in the Digital Age and skim through a paper I just found - On the Design of Digital Heirlooms by David Kirk and Richard Banks. And think about the ways in which I want to organise the paper and my examples.

It was really inspiring to be invited to this workshop - it got me thinking again after being on leave, and I’m relishing the excitement of researching and writing about new ideas. And it was an honour to be invited to such an exclusive gathering. And now to work!

Last week a ring on the doorbell brought a parcel full of - six copies of Blogging! My book is out! And leafing through it I found that I still really like it - don’t you love that feeling when you reread something you wrote and you’re actually happy with it?

To celebrate, I’m giving one of my author copies to one of you readers - leave a comment on this post, and I’ll use a random number generator to select one of the commenters to send a book to. Make sure you leave an email address so I can contact you for your snail mail address!

Here’s the book description at Polity Press. You can order it now from amazon.co.uk or other European bookshops, but it’s still on its way to the US - apparently it takes 48 days for a shipment of books to get there. Eager Americans can order books from amazon.co.uk and have them sent by airmail.

Oh, and happily, you can leaf through its pages over at amazon.co.uk. Hooray!

The New York Times writes that girls are far more likely to be creating content for the web than boys:

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

I’m filling out the marketing form for my book on blogging (copy-editing done; proofs next!), and they want me to provide a list of fifteen people who might adopt the book in teaching - I’m assuming the publisher will send desk copies to these people, or at least to most of these people. If you think you might use the book with your students, leave a comment here and I’ll add you to the list :)

Oh, and any ideas for conferences, professional associations, academic journals, journalists or “bloggers” (the form amusingly uses scare quotes for this) that the marketing department should contact would be great too. I have a number, but I figure more wouldn’t hurt!

Martin Grüner Larsen completed his thesis, “Text, Thought, Time: The Weblog As Essayistic Process”, a literary analysis of blogs, several months ago, and is currently posting a compressed, translated-into-English version on his blog, chapter by chapter in a series he has named “A Bluffer’s Guide to My MA Thesis“. Lots of interesting ideas and insights in chapter 1 - I’m looking forward to the rest!

Here, for instance, is sort of the outline of much of the point of the thesis:

One night, having browsed an online collection of Montaigne’s Essais and a selection of blogs, it dawned on me that these texts actually had a lot in common: the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness - these were all superficial qualities shared by blogs and the essay. I found that these superficial qualities actually signalled a deeper relationship of methodology, composition and structure which I wanted to explore and use to develop a theoretical vocabulary to describe blogs as literary entities and then use in practice to analyse and criticise some blogs.

It’s also a lot more fun reading this compressed version than it is to read ordinary an ordinary MA thesis - and my job requires me to read a few. Subsections 1.4 and 1.5 are compressed as “meaningless formal drivel” and hence we are spared them. Landow’s book is approved of despite it’s “rather tacky So 90’s! covers”. And potential naysayers to arguments made are brushed aside as “probably crabby old men who couldn’t make a hyperlink if their life depended on it.” I wonder whether Martin met any such in his oral defense?

Great quote from Jeff Jarvis, via Kristine Lowe:

They think this is ‘new media.’ And they think that’s something they need to try. (I would have hoped they’d have come to that conclusion about 12 years ago.) Of course, it’s not just new media. This should be a new relationship. It should be about discovering and joining in a conversation.

I saw another sign of this at the BBC the other day when staffers kept fretting about filling a blog, as if it were a show rundown or a blank page. I told them to stop looking it that way and instead to take the advice I’m giving my students: Find the conversation. Join in. Contribute to it — indeed, contribute journalism, answering questions, finding facts, fact-checking the ones that are there. But to do that — beware — you have to talk at a human level with other humans with opinions (who don’t want to talk to a closed door).

Makes me happy not to be in a new media department. Rather a different approach, really.

I just sent in the manuscript for the Blogging book I’m writing for Polity Press! Hooray!

It’s not quite finished yet. Now it’s going to be read by readers, who’ll give me feedback on it within the next five or six weeks. Then I get a last chance to make changes. And with luck, it’ll be published about a year from now.

I’m mostly pretty happy with the book - it’s going to be awesome! There are some rougher patches, but I’m sure they’ll turn out well too with feedback from readers and not least, the luxury of totally ignoring the manuscript for five or six weeks and then returning to it with fresh eyes.

Hooray! And if you’re interested, the table of contents is below the fold. Of course, it could be modified in the final round of editing, but this is what it’s like at this point:
(more…)

Bjørge actually emailed Datatilsynet to ask whether the video database of all the participants in the Stoltzekleiven Opp race was legal. They say no, it wouldn’t normally be unless all participants had agreed to it beforehand (which they may have - maybe they signed a consent form when they entered the race). Additionally Bergens Tidende is probably excepted from this because they’re sharing information about individuals for journalistic purposes.

This is an interesting distinction, particularly because it relates to the question of what journalism is. In the US, journalists are legally permitted to protect their sources and not even give their names in a court of law. Right now, there are moves to change the wording of the law so that bloggers will also be seen as journalists in this respect - with some limitations. So the question of “are bloggers journalists” is actually an important question in this case, with very real effects. Perhaps in Norway a blogger will publish a database of personally identifiable material and claim that it was done as journalism - and we’ll have our own court cases to test whether blogging is (sometimes) journalism. Hm. I don’t have time to read the full text of the law right now (I only have 48 hours left to finish my book manuscript!) but I notice that it actually says “for artistic, literary or journalistic purposes”, so it’s not just about journalism. Hm.

Viser til din e-post av 4. oktober 2007.

Publisering av bilder av identifiserbare personer på Internett innebærer en behandling av personopplysninger som krever et behandlingsgrunnlag etter personopplysningsloven, i utgangspunktet samtykke fra den avbildede, jf. personopplysningsloven § 8, se link http://www.lovdata.no/all/hl-20000414-031.html#8. Dette følger også av åndsverkloven § 45 c, se link: http://www.lovdata.no/all/tl-19610512-002-043.html#45c.

Et slikt samtykke må avgis før bildene legges ut på Internett. Se link for nærmere veiledning. Den praksisen som du henviser til er således i strid med lovgivningen.

Se link for nærmere veiledning: http://www.datatilsynet.no/templates/article____881.aspx.

For BT sin del gjelder det et unntak fra personopplysningsloven. Formidling av personopplysninger som skjer ut fra journalistiske hensyn faller i all hovedsak utenfor personopplysningsloven, jf. lovens § 7, se link: http://www.lovdata.no/all/hl-20000414-031.html#7.

Vennlig hilsen
Henok Tesfazghi

I’m reading Michael Keren’s book Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, and I’m finding it very annoying. (I suppose the cover should have warned me, eh?) At first I thought the title must be wrong: I thought it would be about political blogging. But the introduction says that the book looks at blogs from the perspective of life-writing and autobiography. The bulk of the book is in the middle nine chapters, where each is a close reading of a single blog: kottke.org, megnut.com and Lt. Smash are the ones I’m familiar with, but the selection is lovely and broad, including blogs from India, Africa, Iran, Israel and Canada in addition to the US, and the gender balance is good too. None of these blogs is particularly political, and the chapters I’ve read so far do not seem to deal with politics, other than the complaints that the sites aren’t political enough, which makes the title misleading. However, the author is a political scientist - so perhaps he sees politics more broadly than I had imagined?

Unfortunately, the introduction makes it clear that Keren looks at blogs through a very limited perspective. He argues that blogs are melancholic, in the sense of the narrator of Dostojevski’s Notes from Underground - this man lives in a mouse hole and feels fundamentally outside, excluded from society - and in Freud’s sense:

In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Sigmund Freud defined the distinguishing features of melancholy as profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings “to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (12)

Well, that sounds just like blogs, don’t you think! Keren further notes that melancholics need to talk about their melancholy all the time. But they don’t do anything about it - they’re fundamentally passive (p 13). So the idea of the melancholic blogger fits nicely with the image of bloggers as bizarre exhibitionists. Keren quotes Freud:

It must strike us that after all the melancholiac’s behaviour is not in every way the same as that of one whoe is normally devoured by remorse and self-reproach. Shame before others, which would characterise this condition above everything, is lacking in him, or at least there is little sign of it. One could almost say that the opposite trait of insistent talking about himself and pleasure in the consequent exposure of himself predominates in the melancholiac. (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, p 157, qtd by Keran, p 12)

Interestingly enough, Keren (who doesn’t blog himself) notes on page 14 that when he attended conference panels on blogging, he was “probably the only melancholic in the room”. No wonder his glasses are rose-coloured, sorry, melancholy-coloured. Keren saves his argument from this apparent paradox by claiming that he’s not labelling individual bloggers as melancholics, he’s talking about the blogosphere (or “blogosphere” without a “the” as he insists on calling it) as a whole. The point is the “norms apparent in [the blogosphere’s] thought and action, and those emerging in blogosphere are often norms of withdrawal, not of enlightenment” (14). On the next page he’s even clearer: “The withdrawal and rejection identified wtih melancholy, I would like to argue, is not a personal quality of bloggers but a systemic attribute of blogosphere.”

In his analyses, however, Keren does not maintain this separation of the general politics of the blogosphere and the individual disposition and life of bloggers. Actually, in the paragraph right before that last quote, he already confuses the two: “Millions of individuals write their lives while giving up on living them” (14). And although he argues that he’s only analysing the “characters (whether fictional or real) that emerge from these diaries” (11), in his analyses there is little awareness of this - or at least, any such awareness is not expressed explicitly.

So Jason Kottke, for instance, is for Keren a melancholic who is characterised by “political withdrawal” (30) who lives “on the edge of urban life” (31) based on the lack of discussion of political issues on kottke.org (which is after all a blog about design and technology) and on a couple of posts where Kottke describes feeling out of place among all the designer-clothed people on 5th avenue and another where he describes rules for ignoring each other on the NYC subway - hardly unusual New York experiences. Keren’s interpretation is broad and absolute, though: “The perception of life on the edge makes political activity seem futile - something others are engaged in” (31). Kottke.org, for Keren, is the center of an internet “cult”, where readers respond only to issues that deal with cyberspace and “virtual reality” (26). In summary, Keren finds Kottke.org is characterised by “withdrawal into virtual reality, cult-like relations forming in blogosphere, and an overall political passivity” (35). “The cult seems generally disinterested in anything happening in the world unless it is related to the cyber-world” (30) - yes of course! It’s a blog about technology and design!

A major fallacy in Keren’s interpretations of “blogosphere” in general and of these blogs in particular is his assumption that a blog represents the blogger’s life - that bloggers actually blog everything, or even that what they blog is intended to portray a “whole” picture of their lives. If I were to write an autobiography, I would certainly leave a lot out, but I would attempt to create a narrative of my life that seemed balanced and that included all aspects of my life that were important to me. When I blog, I leave out 99% of my life. I don’t blog about hanging out with my friends, or about family get-togethers or gardening or my emotional concerns. I rarely blog about what I vote in elections or which political meetings I attend or whether I’m active in organisations that have nothing to do with the topic of this blog. I blog very, very little about my daughter or my husband. This blog is about my research and to some extent, about teaching and about what it’s like working as an academic.

I don’t think this is because I’m an academic writing about research. Fashion bloggers blog about fashion, not about the latest gadget or about politics or about parties they’ve been to (unless they dressed well for them). Knitting bloggers blog about their knitting projects. Gadget bloggers about gadgets. Diarists blog about their daily lives. None of these are going to portray all aspects of a blogger’s life - or even all aspects of a blogger’s online activities.

Based on Keren’s reading of Kottke.org and the other blogs he discusses, my blog - and thus I - would be “melancholic” and “withdrawn from society” and “in a cult where everything is about cyberspace” and “politically disinterested”. Which is, to my mind, entirely beside the point.

There are some reasons to read the book. I enjoyed Kottke’s analysis of Lt Smash’s site, where he doesn’t go on about melancholy but instead sees a transition in this soldier’s writing from everyday descriptions of a civilian thrust into the army to a way of presenting the war that is far closer to shiny media portrayals in movies and presidential addresses. This is an interesting argument.

There are also discussions of a number of blogs that I’m not familiar with - and while I haven’t read these yet, I certainly intend to. That is, if I can get past the antagonistic comments Keren made about bloggers in this interview with the Globe and Mail.

Until then, I’ll just continue to be annoyed at the portrayal of bloggers as melancholic - or nihilistic. I suspect it’s largely the authors of these portrayals that are melancholic and nihilistic, rather than the bloggers.

Amazon says it can’t deliver Geert Lovink’s book Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture for weeks, but seeing the table of contents, I realised that of the two essays in it that are actually apparently about blogging, at least one is online (thanks to Martin G. Larsen, who wrote an impassioned and interesting response to the essay, and received a response, of sorts, from Lovink). The essay in question is the first in the book, and is titled Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse I actually read a draft of it a while back, too.

So I’m reading through it again to see whether I want to use anything from it in my Blogging book. I’m not sure that there’s a lot to use though. The basic idea is that blogs are a medium that is changing our relationship to truth as something that can be objective and absolute, and that they are “decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.” He sees this as blogs’ “nihilism”, and ties it into some discussions of nihilism in contemporary philosophy and what he calls cultural cynicism.

But the essay is so heavily filled with generalisations about what blogs are like, with no examples, few sources and little argumentation to back up the assertions, that I don’t think it’s a very useful essay. Perhaps it is primarily useful as a way of explaining blogs to philosophers? It certainly has something in common with the anxiety that many established experts appear to feel when faced with blogs:

As Baudrillard states: “All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car?”[17] 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? There is no possibility to simply ignore blogs and live the comfortable lifestyle of a twentieth-century “public intellectual”.

Henry Jenkins also initially used this us vs. them rhetoric to talk about bloggers, as Torill and I discussed in our essay “Blogging Thoughts” (pdf). Now he blogs himself. Jakob Nielsen, a well-established though today somewhat controversial usability expert, argues that experts shouldn’t blog. Habermas has expressed concern that intellectuals are “suffocating from the excess of this vitalising element, as if they were overdosing” (Axel Bruns was at Habermas’s lecture and posted a considered response to it on his blog).

The constant generalisations and un-supported assertions no examples are the most frustrating thing in this essay. When Lovink talks about “the oft-heard remark that blogs were cynical and nihilist” all I can do is shrug and wonder what he means - have you heard that remark often? I don’t think I ever have, except in this essay. Please tell me if everyone else is actually talking about this! Or the assertion that blog culture is only interested in itself , which is supported neither by argument, example nor by other sources. (”How can blog culture transcend the true, yet boring accusation that it is only interested in itself?”)

There is a presumption that blogs have a symbiotic relationship with the news industry. This thesis is not uncontested. Hypertext scholars track blogs back to the hypercards of the 1980s and the online literature wave of the 1990s, in which clicking from one document to the next was the central activity of the reader. For some reason, the hypertext subcurrent lost out and what
remains is an almost self-evident equation between blogs and the news industry.

I’d be one of those hypertext scholars, I guess - but the argument seems to be missing here, there’s just an assertion that there’s “an almost self-evident equation between blogs and the news industry”. I’m not sure where that assertion comes from, to be honest. In a July 2006 study of bloggers (who were selected through an randomised national telephone survey by Pew Internet Research), 65% of the bloggers interviewed stated that they did not think of their blogging as a form of journalism, although nearly 60% of them in fact “often” or “sometimes” try to verify facts and reference their sources. It should also be noted that 37% of the bloggers surveyed said that the main topic of their blog was “my life and personal experiences” – these are diary-style blogs, and so fact-checking and linking original sources would be entirely irrelevant. These figures show that a clear majority of blogs have little to do with “the news industry”. Lovink doesn’t have a lot of faith in bloggers.

To “blog” a news report doesn’t mean that the blogger sits down and thoroughly analyzes the discourse and circumstances, let alone checks the facts on the ground. To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting or remarkable, or is disagrees with it.

There are of course many blogs that simply do this, but generalising as Lovink does is not a way to help us understand what blogs do. After all, many, perhaps most, news stories published in mainstream media do not involve thorough analysis of the discourse and circumstances, let alone checking the facts on the ground. Good journalism does involve this.

What ordinary blogs create is a dense cloud of “impressions” around a topic. (..) Blogs test. They 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.

This is an interesting point, and might well be the way mainstream media and marketers largely view blogs. I like how Lovinck turns the “empowered blogger” concept upside down, although of course, I refuse to simply look at myself and my fellow bloggers as “outsourced, privatized test beds”. How depressing. And, in a way, how one-sided to see bloggers only from the point of view of mainstream media - it’s rather like the 1970s assumption that audiences were passive recipients of mass media, rather than co-constructors and active fans and choosers. The claim is valuable, though, in showing up the one-sidedness of the opposite assumption, that bloggers are far more powerful than mainstream media. There’s a clear symbiosis between the two.

Other places the words Lovink puts together simply don’t seem to really mean anything. For instance:

Blogging is a nihilistic venture precisely because the ownership structure of mass media is questioned and then attacked. Blogging is a bleed-to-death strategy. Implosion is not the right word. Implosion implies a tragedy and spectacle that is not present here. Blogging is the opposite of the spectacle. It is flat (and yet meaningful).

What on earth does that mean? I presume I have missed out on reading important contemporary philosophy on nihilism - and I expect that those who have read more than I about the spectacle would understand that reference better. Perhaps flatness means something particular in that context. But who is bleeding-to-death? Bloggers or the mass media? Am I, by blogging this, bleeding the mass media to death? It sounds great, in a way, but does it really mean anything?

The core of Lovink’s argument about blogs being nihilistic is, as far as I can tell, expressed in the following paragraph (though of course you should read the whole thing to see whether I’m right or have simply misinterpreted it):

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. Sold by the positivists as citizen media commentary, blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of lamenting the ideological color of the news, as previous generations have done, we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit. As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pyjama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. 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.

I think part of the weirdness of how this reads is that the “we” Lovink is speaking to, and sees himself as part of, is not the “we” of bloggers. But really, despite the meaty sound-bites (”Blogs bring on decay” is used on the back cover of his book), what he’s saying is exactly the same as “the positivists” are saying, isn’t it? And I’m assuming positivist here means people who think blogs are great rather than someone who’ll only believe something is true if it’s scientifically and verifiably proven. Although that’s all rather confusing given the discussion of truth in that paragraph.

There is, fortunately, more explanation of what Lovink means by nihilism further on in the essay.

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.

Basically, it seems, nihilism isn’t that complicated at all, it’s what most of us seem to assume these days, and what blog “positivists” have argued for ages. So does Lovink actually agree with the positivists, then? But prefers to write what they say in different words?

Based on the table of contents, there is one other chapter in the book that discusses blogging, “Blogging & Building: The Netherlands After Digitization”, and perhaps the other chapters will do. I’m interested to see whether the book really does develop “a general theory of blogging”, as the book description at Amazon claims. That goal certainly isn’t achieved in Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse - I’ll let you know how I like the rest of the book when I have it. Amazon estimates it’ll take a while, though.

There are so many books about blogging now that it’s easy to miss the interesting-looking ones. I just ordered these three that look like they contain academic discussions of blogs, culture and history. Thankfully none of them look like they’re going to be like the book on blogging I’m busy writing. Phew, eh? Hope they arrive soon!

I’ve been working on the chapter on commercial blogging, and have been looking at Dooce.com, which is pretty much the only personal website in the top hundred blogs as ranked by Technorati, and which was also one of the first personal blogs that actually supported the blogger financially. I noticed that in 2005, when Dooce introduced graphical ads, she got a lot of complaints from readers. However, the Alexa traffic graph for her site shows that her readership increased a lot after introducing ads. It’s been sinking recently - she’s now own the 40th most popular blogger - but apparently ads didn’t scare people away, anyway. Any ideas on what might have caused the recent slump? I noticed that several big blogs have recent slumps in readership - Boingboing, Problogger, Engadget (run them through Alexa yourself, it’s fun!) - perhaps it’s simply seasonal?