Blogs and blog theory – ideas on how blogs interact with media and culture.
Since the late ‘90s, the Internet has drastically transformed the ways in which an individual can derive his or her information. There’s also been a growing shift in the way individuals conduct their personal lives and go about constructing their social, political and cultural ideals. A bulk of this activity occurs online with sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia, online communities fueled by millions of people scuttling about the immensity of cyberspace. One of the fascinating phenomena to come out of the flourishing of the online world since the early ‘90s, is the burgeoning of blogs. Online ‘web logs’ that allow millions of individuals whose personal narrations, which were formerly considered marginal to political and social dialogue, are posted on the World Wide Web for the world to read and respond. Blogs have created an open discourse of shared knowledge and have brought about the rapid spreading and reproduction of ideas, art, and information. While it’s hard to assess the exact magnitude of the phenomenon, the number of people writing blogs, reading them, and commenting on them is estimated at tens of millions. The ‘blogosphere’ or the ‘blogepelago’ as Jodi Dean refers, is an incredible landscape for media theory and culture theory, and for exploring the ways in which a Habermassian deliberative space for free discussion and debate works within contemporary society, and how it affects the individuals and information contained within it. The content of this discussion will revolve around the way blogs work with the individuals who use them, how they have influenced journalism and activism, how they influence art, literature and ideas, and how they contend with issues of Marxism, politics and the public sphere. All whilst relating to conceptual examples of theory and criticism by theorists like Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, and many others. The goal is to better understand the way in which Blogs, in their short but rapid emergence, are affecting the individual, information and society.













