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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.

Jodi Dean

To begin, it will be vital to contextualize the Blog and provide its history and emergence. A Blog is a ‘web log,’ an online journal of sorts that allows, at least now in 2011, anyone to go online, log into a blog service provider and write and post just about anything on any subject with a whole myriad of themes, fonts and ways of going about a discussion or debate. Other users or web surfers can log in and add discussion comments, or ‘like’ and ‘re-blog’ other user’s work or images, linking and connecting a gargantuan web of information, opinion, imagery, sound and video bites for all the online world to see. The main sites for blogging in 2011 are WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, each incorporating a unique way of adding posts to a blog template. The history of the Blog is quite short, as the phenomenon has quickly sprung up since the end of the ‘90s. In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as blogs. 23 to be exact, each one based mostly in political discourse and opinion, but this small list of blogs was the beginning of a community that would explode in the coming 10 years. The influence for these online ‘logs’ was based mostly in reaction to access of information regarding political discourse and happenings in American society, a combination of journalism and opinion mimicking that of a discussion forum. Folks like Rebecca Blood and Brigitte Eaton found these forums of information to be an excellent way of garnishing solid news and information, all the while strengthening thoughts and opinions through sharing information with the online community.

Blogs are basically derivatives of forum servers and chat rooms, except that they are created usually by one individual, incorporating and adding ‘posts’ that anyone can respond to and access. In the beginning, web logs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website, web enthusiasts and individuals with skills in web development and commercial advertising backgrounds. Original blogs were link-driven sites, each a mixture of unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. A prominent blogger named Peter Merholz is the originator of the name ‘web log,’ announced in early 1999 and inevitably shortened to ‘blog’ with the weblog editor referred to as a ‘blogger’. At this point, the ball started rolling, as blogs were easy to read and were widely read by internet savvy intellectuals with inside opinions on everything from fashion to religion, to pets, to sexual orientation or food and drink. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs, and suddenly it became difficult to keep track of all the new blogs that were appearing week to week. In August of ‘99, a software developer named Pyra released ‘Blogger,’ the free online blog service provider that is still running strong today. With the ease that this web-based tool provided, web log culture exploded.

The advent of free, simple-to-use blogging software, made it possible for anyone, anywhere to be a publisher, reporter, and pundit. By May 2007, WordPress was hosting 15 million blogs. Though only a few bloggers have audiences large enough to place them among the top 100 websites, their contribution to news and commentary online has been revolutionary, instead of information being provided primarily by a few large players in the media, the new fertile blogger ecosystem could now support millions of smaller players each serving a small but targeted audience. The democratization of blog content creation caught on quickly in the blogging community, as well as other online networks. Wikipedia and other “wikis” enabled readers to collaborate in the creation of content; YouTube allowed a full range of users (from creative geniuses, to proud parents, to nut cases in general) to “broadcast” their own videos; and Facebook gained national dominance as an all-purpose platform for self-expression and communication. Remarkably, WordPress, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook offered these publishing tools to users for free and millions of people became not only consumers of information but creators, curators, and distributors. From 1998 to the present day, blogs and online networks have evolved and solidified themselves as forums and harbors for public information; incredible sources of knowledge and opinion for individuals, governments and the public sphere to utilize.

Hugh Hewitt

One of the key influences blogs have had on society is within the realm of journalism and mainstream media, simply because journalistic techniques and blogging are quite similar to begin with. Bloggers often express a sense of liberation from the mainstream media, whose control over the news, have hindered the ability of citizens to participate in public deliberations over politics and policy. Blogging has been seen as a revitalizing deliberative democracy, a move against the one directional flow emerging from the mainstream monopoly of information and news. Blogging can be seen as “individuals engaging in the polis of America and the world in a direct way, one that is almost impossible in the physical world. The modern community will be built by the digital empowerment of the individual and the blog is at the heart of it”. Ideas like these point in the same directions that good journalism does, blogging simply involves more facets for an individual to cultivate and depend on the information provided. Blogger Hugh Hewitt compares his perceived liberation from the hegemony of the mainstream media to the sixteenth century reformation: “Once Luther’s spark set the fire, the availability of editions of the Bible made the collapse of the Church’s authority inevitable, though the struggle was long and often bloody”. Similar to Hewitt’s comparison, the collectivity, and more importantly the anonymity and pseudonymity that blogs provide have allowed them to become a formidable force that contends fiercely with large media organizations in terms of information gathering and sharing in journalism. In recent years, through independent fact checking and investigation, bloggers have run stories that institutional media organizations were unable or unwilling to publish.

Louis Althusser

The public arguably derives benefit from this investigation, through increased media accountability and the spread of previously undisclosed political information, like the kind that WikiLeaks can provide. What occurs with these notions of disrupting the one directional flow of institutionalized information relates to a direct interplay with the ideological state apparatus of communications. The concepts of Louis Althusser derived from Marxist theory work well in conjunction with the way in which blogs and online journalists work against the repressive nature of the State, in this case large scale media corporations that control what the public knows and what they are kept from knowing. One can look at blogging as a form of class struggle, a move to break free from the hegemony monopolized media has created.

A lot of criticism surrounding blogs and its comingling with journalism is the legitimacy and accuracy of blog information in relation. Some critics refer to bloggers as “‘wannabe’ journalists, amateurs lacking credentials”. Where exactly is the information these people are deriving coming from? How can the public trust what is being provided and discussed? This is not to say that accuracy and verifiability are not paramount concerns in the blogosphere, as they are in traditional journalism, rather, the means of attaining those ideals are different in the blogging context. Information that is laid out in a public setting has a self-regulating effect. Unless there is an overhead control mechanism, like a major news corporation, or even the government, there is no reason why facts and truths cannot exist legitimately. A perfect example of this is Wikipedia’s content, and this idea is also related to Gramsci’s public intellectual, but that will be touched on later in this discussion. As newspapers and other media institutions have shifted more and more of their content to the Internet, an increasing number of bloggers, most of whom have no formal ties to traditional media, have actively assumed the role of competitor to those institutions.

Today, few people would argue that a relatively small number of media organizations have the power to speak as “the voice of God” and monopolize news content, yet comparatively there are signs that the idea of bloggers as journalists, or at least as individuals analogous to journalists, is gaining ground. Arguments for blogs as the future of journalism or democracy evoke Michael Warner’s notion of a counter-public: ‘where a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a public and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public’. Certainly, blogs are not dominated with the same violence as the groups which Warner has in mind in his work, but there is a clear suggestion of a group which is outside looking in, wanting a place at the media’s table. This is clearly linked to the blog and the blogger’s relations to journalism and its ideals of truth and qualitative content.

Shirky

Blogs have had an influence on the valueof news, art and information as well, by the ways in which media is proliferated and transferred throughout the blogosphere. In comparison to blogs, hard copy, published newspapers and journals have both intrinsic and extrinsic values. Firstly, there is value in the works themselves, in that it takes real work to create, store, ship and sell the published product. Extrinsically, published works have the value that the physical presence of the work has as well, its value rests in the fact that someone saw the potential of spending time and money on actually creating the physical object and its content. Basically, there are entrance barriers and standard formations that publishing created simply by the ways in which information is provided traditionally for the public. Blogs in many ways alter these values, and it is the alteration of these values that makes blogs so important. Blogs rearrange the value of art, news and information by making it heavily abundant and reproducible with virtually no cost. Most individuals want a world where global publishing is effortless, a world where individuals don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud and a world that shares art, music, news and information freely; the blogosphere clearly provides this service. Clay Shirky sums up the problem that arises from this type of situation: “When we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free”. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of individuals, most of the words read cost nothing. This abundance of information and the ease of access to images, sounds, thoughts and opinions by virtually anyone, is something that is almost incomprehensible if you look at the future from a lens of say, 25 years ago. What comes with Shirky’s summation of the proliferation of information in the blogosphere is a relation to Adorno’s concepts on mass culture: “However useful it might be from a practical point of view to have as much information as possible at one’s disposal, there still prevails the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought”. Jodi Dean remarks on these thoughts as well in relation to art, images and literature on blog websites: “The deluge of images and announcements, enjoining us to react, to feel, to forward them to our friends, erodes critical-theoretical capacities”. These thoughts relate directly to the way in which Tumblr works, one of the most popular blog servers on the Internet. Photographs, images, sounds, information and opinion are posted into the blogosphere of Tumblr and are forwarded, ricocheted and essentially ‘tumbled’ around in cyberspace. There is sense that an object or work posted in Tumblr, loses its ‘aura,’ as it is ‘re-blogged’ and reproduced hundreds and thousands of times over for the patrons of the server; something that Walter Benjamin contends with. Thanks to Adorno’s ideas of mass reproduction and the way blog culture works with the information or images present in a post, there is clearly a loss of attention and legitimization of much of the content on servers like Tumblr; the value of the works in question is clearly altered and reshaped by the operation of blogs.

Žižek

A similar concept to those featured above is a concept that Slavoj Žižek develops from Claude Levi-Strauss. It is referred to as the decline of symbolic efficiency, in other words, there is an immobility or failure of transmission of a work in question, be it a photograph, an image of a painting, or an essay when it is posted onto a blog and commented on, or redistributed out of context. Žižek posits his concept in the pinning down of the meaning of a work, something that can be totally lost in the blogosphere. Sometimes it is difficult to tell when a blog or a post is ironic and when it is sincere, when it is funny or when it is serious. Terms and styles of expression that make sense to an ‘in-group’ can shock, insult, or enrage individuals who happen upon a blog. As well, there is potential for unexpected meanings and uncertainty that affect the intensity of the declining symbolic. The concept is most prominently at work in the random search engines that some blog servers provide for patrons perusing a blog server. One clicks a link and is sent to a blog with no initial context. In addition to the effect of random shuffling, blog sites that harbor opinions and debate publically can allow for indirect deconstruction of the original thoughts they provide through comments and discussions by anyone who has an opinion. Some other option, link, nuance, some other experience of some ‘other’ who could be someone damaged or disenfranchised by the content, or may have found a better angle on the subject, or a completely different assessment of the opinion altogether. These are just opinions and comments, yet they have a link in affecting the symbolic efficiency of the work in a post, it can be lost or neutralized by the influence of the other, the breaking down of the message through meaningless arguments and ad hominem attacks on comment boards. Jacque Lacan’s signs and signifiers can be worked into this situation as well, wherein the absence of a signifier destabilizes meaning in a work, the absence of signification through the subjectivity of an author or artist is lost in the complete open and infinite amount of possibilities for interpretation of the work in the blogosphere. There is no choice construction in a blog server like Tumblr, or a comment board accompanying a post on WordPress, the subject loses the incentive for their word to be their bond; the signifier is virtual, it works not as another element in a chain as Lacan suggests, it is something more than itself, something present as potential, the meaning is suspended through the post and reaction posts alike on a blog. Information, opinion and debate can be diluted, and the symbolic efficiency of blog content is reduced.

Hayles

Katherine Hayles relates the compounding of Žižek and Lacan’s signals to new technologies like blogs and the Internet. Information technologies change the mode of text production and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further Hayles refers to them as ‘flickering signifiers,’ and her definition is an interpolation of something just like symbolic efficiency and the value of how texts, and language in Hayles’ case, work. Wolfgang Iser’s thoughts on reader response theory can parallel Žižek’s concepts as well, in that the way a patron of a blog forum interacts with its content. Because Iser states that the structure of the literary text is what guides the reader and is constantly modified by his or her viewpoint, it can be seen that the nature of reading primarily from web-site based and blog themed settings, affects reader response, and thus the value of the work being viewed. This connects to Žižek’s ideas of how works are contained within the movement and operation of blogs. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that Iser describes can be disrupted when an image, essay or re-blogged article is situated, related and given no context. The individual viewing the work in question may have difficulty with the filling in of the ‘blanks’ that Iser describes present within the text, and the ways in which the reader must work to fill in those gaps. Blogging and blog culture in the sense of mass reproduction, random posting and the generalization that blogs effects can have on the value of information is quite interesting to note. The operation of clicking, ‘liking,’ ‘re-blogging’ and surfing the blogosphere have tremendous implications on the ways in which individuals interpret and understand information, and how the information can be transformed by blog operations.

Habermas

Along with the important influences on value and legitimacy in the blogosphere, it is interesting to note the strength in the ways blogs host public discourse, despite its ability to dilute opinion. As touched upon earlier in this discussion, the argument over the blogosphere as a forum for public discourse is one of great influence, and it relates directly to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere. According to Habermas, the liberalization of the market since the High Middle Ages brought about the manifestation of civil society as a private realm within the absolutist regimes of early modern Europe, a process enhanced by the rise of public forums like the coffee house and literary salon, where individuals could discuss issues beyond those sanctioned by economic consumers, church patriarchs, and state leaders. The blogosphere, liberating the individual from one directional media like radio and television, can been seen as a revival of those coffee houses and salons. Individuals within the blogosphere behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion, just as in the way Habermas discusses. Lately, however, the view of the blogosphere as a new public sphere has been challenged. Michael Keren notes the “often celebratory enthusiasm displayed by many authors regarding the participatory potential of the Internet and the blogosphere, in particular,” and warns that “the image of the blogosphere as a deliberative space, as a model for an online (Habermassian) public sphere where every person is free to air his or her views, thus making rational dialogue between equal status-free participants in public debates possible, is somehow problematic to say the least”. One reason for this challenge to the potential of blogging, is the sharp divide between politically identifiable groups in the blogosphere who hardly link to each other and mostly strengthen their biases by in-grouping and shutting out external opinion. The blogosphere, like the Internet more generally, is certainly good for democracy, because it increases the availability of information. But if linking behavior on blogs can be taken as a proxy for information filtering, it is reasonable to think that many readers are obtaining one-sided views of political issues . This raises important questions about the political impact of the blogosphere, and the overall mass of blogs. The fact that millions of men and women of all nations, races, and classes are taking advantage of the blogging medium to articulate their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and particularistic identities online, without having to get the approval of book publishers, newspaper editors, employers, or party bosses, is undoubtedly a new phase in political communication. However, to bolster this relation to Habermas’s concepts on the public sphere and its roles along side state activities, blogs are clearly providing new communication channels that can “temper or reverse the crisis in political communication by challenging the indirectional flow of message traffic that has tended to characterize mass-mediated democracy”, linking the blogosphere directly to the way in which Habermas’s unrestricted public body operates.

Gramsci

As mentioned previously in this discussion, the way in which these public spheres and mass-mediated democratic communities operate is dependent on the legitimacy of the information circulating throughout them. Bloggers that tend towards the ideal of truth and qualitative content in their commentary can be compared to that of the public intellectual that Antonio Gramsci’s work touches upon. Intellectuals give social groups like the blogosphere “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function”. Today, most popular bloggers are often seen as public intellectuals, due to the expansion of what ‘public’ is by incorporating many private concerns discussed in blogs, and the opportunity given to a much larger number of people to comment on public affairs, as discussed above. The growth of online venues has stimulated the quality and diversity of public intellectuals: “The Internet is viewed as a vital aid for the renaissance of public intellectuals. The explosion of online publications, podcasts, dialogs, and especially blogs has enabled public intellectuals to express their ideas beyond the narrow confines of elite op-ed pages and network television”. A real world example of how this is emerging from blog culture is that of public debate taking place in Iran and the Arab world. Clearly, the Arab Spring was heavily influenced by a strong online presence of intellectual bloggers intent on the proliferation of emancipation from dictatorial regimes, and the social production of intellectuals, and more importantly of intellectual debate that has occurred in the Arab Spring required sufficient public space for such debate to emerge. Blogs and the Internet allow for this public space; a “far greater range of voices speaking ‘intellectually’ than ever before”.  The conception of bloggers as public intellectuals allows their classification by the same criteria applied to intellectuals in the past, as in the case of traditional intellectuals, there is clearly a difference between those who are politically engaged and those who are not. These types of intellectual bloggers have a regulating effect on the blogosphere, as well, they have an effect on the symbolic efficiencies that may be affected through the debate and public discourse that occurs within their opinionated forums. Like Wikipedia, the presence of intellectuals acts as a kind of guarantee of legitimization of information and qualitative content; Gramsci notes this concept in his work: “A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in it’s own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders, in other words, without a group of people ‘specialized’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas”.

The political force that the blogosphere can generate is quite significant. When intellectuals, coupled with blogging practices that limit the effects of symbolic decline, reduce disruptions to the hermeneutic circle, and are able to really harness the value of the Habermassian public sphere of democracy present in the blogosphere, incredible things can happen. Blogs have played an important role in places like Iran, China, Myanmar, and other countries who’s oppressive regimes force bloggers to often risk their lives to express independent views and bring data and images on human rights violations to the world’s attention. It has been coined ‘cyberactivism’ and it works closely in conjunction with the power blogs have to getting information ‘out there’ for the world to see. During the aftermath of the Iranian elections of June 2009, blogs and other new media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube served as vehicles to organize activists, mobilize the Iranian diaspora, and inform world public opinion about the crackdown on demonstrators in the streets of Tehran. While the cyberactivism surrounding the Iranian protest was unprecedented, “the war in the streets spread to an online war of words”. And as important as words are, they are insufficient in themselves to bring down a determined political regime supported by a ruthless secret police. It remains to be seen how effective blogs work in conjunction with cyberactivism in the future, and how capable it will be in overcoming regime counterattacks involving blocking Websites, flooding the Internet with disinformation, and intimidating street journalists, the expectation that the blogosphere could change the balance of power in favor of the individual in oppressive regimes, and serve as an arena of deliberative politics in democratic ones, due primarily to its being an endeavor played out in virtual reality.

By looking at the ways in which blogs have emerged from a small online community of internet savvy political and social opinion makers in the late ‘90s, its easy to see how much potential lies within the blogosphere and within online networks like Wikipedia, Facebook and more recently, Twitter. Today, the single page website of an obscure Turk named Mahir can sweep the web in days. But the unassailable truth is that corporate media and commercial and governmental entities own most of the real estate on the web. Bloggers are still outnumbered by Internet conglomerates like Dell and the corporate public relations and advertising departments of Coca Cola, or news organizations like Time Warner. The democratic public sphere that the blogepelago has created is working well to counter the one-directional flow of information coming from such institutions, as well as acting as a harbor for truth and qualitative content that has real meaning in the arenas of pedagogy and epistemological evolution. What comes with the benefits of the blogosphere also come detriments to the value of information, art and culture within it, even though we are able to find and collect a myriad of knowledge on a day to day basis, the Huxlian concept of ‘too much’ can hinder an individual as well.  It will be interesting to see how blogs continue the proliferation of public opinion, political influence, creation and distribution of information and the ease of social interaction.

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