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January 10, 2007
Glenn Fuller, over at the cultural studies based Event Mechanics has an interesting post on Geert Lovink’s recent article on blogs that I mentioned here. Fuller's post has its roots in a paper given at a Blogtalk conference in Sydney last year.
Fuller follows Lovink in rejecting the way blogging and the ‘Old Media’ have been traditionally set up in an antagonistic relation, and he then reads Lovink to explore and think through the nature of blogging. He says:
The complexity of blogging becomes apparent when the two points outlined above are brought together – the topology of interest and the event-based nature of blogging. The scale of blogging as an event is determined by the shared interest distributed across the network of bloggers.
By the first point Fuller means that bloggers produce media that is organised around their shared interests, rather than the old situation of having their interests dictated or at least cultivated in the broadcast model of media. Well that's pretty right as there are a lot of blogs, such as this one, which do not centre themselves around the corporate media. It is the political blogs, such as public opinion, which do so.
Fuller then explores the event-based nature of blogging by saying that 'something happens and bloggers then comment in particular ways. The event shifts from that which has happened to incorporating the elements of the event now distributed across the blogosphere. ' So the event is Geert Lovink’s article on blogs and we have a series of commentary in the Australian blogosphere that bounces off it in a variety of ways. This commentary forms into a network and so we have different types blogging networks based on shared interests, such as the cultural studies one. 'Event' here is not simply Lovink's representation of blogging but his intervention in the blogging world, which helps to actualize more commentary, and presumably events.
'Network' is a key concept here. Fuller says that:
Lovink is spot on when he suggests: “the network is the alternative [to ‘old media’].” That is, the synergistic concrescence of all these differentially repeated elements of events (what Whitehead calls prehensions) across blogs produces and modulates events on different scales. As Deleuze intimated in The Fold, the structure of events forms a nomadic baroque architecture, and the models and images of inter-blog citations and networking that I have seen are thoroughly ‘baroque’.
He qualifies this by saying that the reality is that the supple baroque event-based structure of the blogosphere is insinuated in the more rigid hierarchical mode of media distribution of ‘old media’ and other stratified social institutions. So we have the politically orientated and entertainment blogs attached to the corporate media with most newspapers now have their range of inhouse bloggers.
The problem I have with both Fuller's and Lovink's interpretation of blogging is that they don't really move away the corporate media versus blogging relationship to consider the relationship between, say cultural studies based weblogs eg., Event Mechanics, or Home Cooked Theory or Memes of Production and Lovink's concern with cynical reason and nihilism. Shouldn't this relationship be of key concern to those academic researchers in the humanities
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