January 7, 2007
Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink has an interesting article on blogging in Eurozine. It is entitled Blogging, the nihilist impulse, and it connects blogging to cynical reason (ie., enlightened false consciousness) and nihilism. This is a different approach to the political blogging/journalism one, which sees blogging as opposed to the mainstream corporate media, and is the usual way the talk about blogging in Australia up to now.
Lovink, who works from the Institute of Network Cultures was recently in Australia, and the talk he gave seems to be similar to his Blogging/nihilist article. On the nihilism point he says:
Nihilism is not a monolithic belief system. We no longer "believe" in Nothing as in nineteenth-century Russia or post-war Paris. Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition. It is an unremarkable, even banal feature of life, as Karen Carr writes is and no longer related to the Religious Question. Blogs are neither religious nor secular. They are "post-virtue". The paradoxical temporality of nihilism today is that of a not-quite-already-Now.
He says that the blogger is an individual "who lives in self-conscious confrontation with nihilism understood as a meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power." If bloggers are classified nihilists, it merely means that they stopped believing in the media. Or academia? Philosophy is being done outside of academia.
Lovink introduces the idea that instead of contributing to the fragmentation of the media landscape we are:
seeing the proliferation of specialty blogs as an indicator of the fragmentation of our society, we should see this trend as providing a way for citizen-experts to emerge and to bring together global constituencies in many disparate fields."
He suggests that blogs are "technologies of the self" by which he means blogs are primarily used as a tool to manage the self. Management refers to the need to structure one's life, to clear up the mess, to master the immense flows of information, as well as PR and promotion of self. It can be mangement of the self in terms of educating oneself in new philosophical material outside of being an academic in a university. This is certainly the ethos of philosophical conversations.
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