Blogs as the People’s Archive The Phantom Public and Virtual Presence (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?
Originally in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6.4 Fall 2006
Weblogs, or 'blogs' have been at the forefront of such a production since the late 1990s when Jorn Barger started using the term weblog to refer to his online journal (http://www.robotwisdom.com/) . They are a site of online communication that has sprung up in the margins around several forms of mainstream public discourses and professional communication practices. Although recently blogs have been featured in magazines, television specials and academic conferences there is little existing scholarship, especially with regards to the impact that such practices are having on re-formulating and re-shaping classic notions of the public sphere (Habermas, [1962] 1989). This essay will try and engage with the above topics in a twofold manner; having revisited Habermas's classic formulations and offered a theoretical overview of the different positions relating to the Internet's political potential, it tackles the following issues: political blogs, cyberdemocracy and the birth of the so-called 'Digital Nation'. The main focus, however, will remain on the 'blogosphere', a term coined by William Quick (2001) to indicate the 'intellectual cyberspace' that bloggers occupy. I will discuss the role of the blogosphere as the new agora in relation to the crucial intersection between technological change and the reformulation of the public sphere, as discussed in the first part of the essay. This crucial intersection is at the core of what goes under the name of 'post-human' political discourse, grounded within the context of the decline of meta-narratives, the erosion of the public realm and the radical indeterminacy of the human subject.
Discourse of blogs: Negotiating the private and the public on the personal weblog
Personal blogs are today being extensively used by individuals for self expression. This paper is an attempt to understand how bloggers negotiate the private and the public on the personal blog. It articulates issues relating to the purpose of the personal blog, the repercussions of self revelations, the concept of ‘privacy’ and relationship between self disclosure and reader relationship. The paper puts forward the proposition that the personal blog is the digital ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault, 1988) which uses the verbalization process to gain a greater understanding of one self. The insight gained into the blogging phenomenon has been supplemented with examples taken from the blogs of two pioneer bloggers: Justin Hall and Carolyn Burke.
2013
Liminality is a transitional form of cultural existence in which orthodox customs and societal structures are deferred and replaced with novel ceremonies and rituals that often lack the impression of rigorous permanence. Taking inspiration from the anthropological analyses of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner this paper reflects in a philosophical manner on the metaphor of blogging as a liminal space. Through interpretation of ongoing ethnographic analyses of music blogs the argument is raised that blogging can be viewed as a liminal process for those that actively contribute to these online forums as well as their anonymous readership. Since a liminal space may contain an unstructured social network then blogging could also lead to a credible emergence of the latter.
Blogs are, like all communication technologies, two-folded: The evolution of blogs into elegant and easy-to-use and -administer sites for self-publishing and network-building has been guided as much by the technologies that undergird them as it has by the life-world needs, desires, meanings, and social practices that bloggers mediate through them. In order to understand this two-foldedness, this article draws out a social constructivist and social interactional theory of the blog and the sociality that it mediates—“the bloggy way of doing things”—and explores the ways that bloggers are immanently (re)inventing blogging technologies via their very social and self-presentational practices. After presenting a brief history of the “blogosphere” and key debates concerning its social and political significance in Part 1 of the article, Part 2 maps out how the possibilities of a micropolitics of the blog first occurs in the very acts of bloggers “creatively appropriating” and collaboratively co-inventing the key structural aspects of blogging technologies. Part 3 uses a social interactional perspective to reassess some of the most salient blogging practices addressed in the literature to date. Having closely influenced the blog’s technological design, these practices include: experimenting with online self-presentation and self-expression, engaging in asynchronous textual conversations, exploring multimedia-based self-publishing, and extending social networks and desires for sociability onto the spaces of the life-world opened up by the virtualized, digitized, flexible, and accessible technologies of the blog.
Blogs and the Right to Communicate: Towards Creating a Space-less Public Sphere
With the emergence of the interactive use of the Internet especially during the course of the past decade, netizens have started to create a " space-less " public sphere. This is an " online " arena where the utopian Habermasian conceptualization of an open and interactive public discussion of issues of public interest is materialized. Blogs in particular exemplify the global, interactive personal communication anticipated, and hoped for, by early advocates of the right to communicate. Both politics and government are significant proportion of the dialogue found on Blogs. Using blogs as a case study, this paper argues that a new space of democratic public dialogue has been formed in which issues of local, regional, national and international matters are discussed freely, reciprocally, and-most importantly-publicly. While the human right to communicate as it is articulated in research [1] was not defined until the late 1960s in the work of Jean d'Arcy, its philosophical roots can be traced back to the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the use of the innovation of blogging as a public sphere demonstrates how a right to communicate is being realized in a real world application. On the other hand, blogs can foster a growing communicative consciousness among netizens throughout the world. The monopoly of communication by the global corporate sector is being challenged as individuals become more aware of the centrality of communication issues to their lives as communicative beings. Such a communicative consciousness generates a demand for the recognition and the realization of a right to communicate for everyone.
Blogging as a Free Frame of Reference
The participatory cultures handbook, 2013
Blogging is not dead, but it has receded from the limelight. In the past few years the excitement and novelty of blogging has largely given way to new technologies and new ways of interacting. For some, this might suggest blogging is merely a blip on the historical radar, one technology in a chain, a peculiar historical moment. But blogging is more than that. It represents a turning point in the way people think about computer networking.
The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere? / Anna Notaro
It is a familiar argument that we are witnessing a period of major cultural and technological upheaval, yet this recognition is rarely related to a recognition of the long history of critical reflection on the nature of cultural and social change. One of the aims of this essay is to consider the most recent discussions over technology and its political impact in the light of the seminal arguments of Raymond Williams. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form. (1974) Williams writes: Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralised information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. ... These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could further reach into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama, until individual and collective response ... became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-157, emphasis mine)
Witnessing absences: social media as archives and public spheres
The study inquires on the ways content-specific social media pages can function as alternative public spheres, by examining the photography-orientated Facebook and YouTube pages entitled ‘old photographs of Thessaloniki’. The study focuses on the online encountering of absences, notably events of socio-political importance with a traumatic impact, which were marginalized by historiography and erased from the city’s material form. In particular, it looks at the ways these absences are witnessed, remembered and negotiated online, through their formal and informal traces. Departing from Benjamin’s and Agamben’s theorizations of memory, media and witnessing, and Derrida’s work on specters, the study concludes that the pages form a highly informed digital archive in constant development that fosters narratives enhancing cultural toleration and understanding, while challenging official master frames. A class-orientated understanding of the city’s ‘ruinification’ and oblivion is, however, undermined, although it remains in a ‘spectral’ form. Published at the Journal of Social Identities (September, 2016)