Blogs as Self-Management Tools

Dedicated to Joseph Weizenbaum, computer critic and inventor of the ELIZA programme (1966) in which the user talked to the world’s first computer therapist. Weizenbaum died on 5 March, 2008 in Berlin.

“I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject – though not a purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is inherently political, in the sense that ‘subject’, to me, denotes a piece of freedom – where you are no longer rooted in some firm substance, you are in an open situation. Today we can no longer simply apply old rules. We are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no immediate way out. In this sense, subjectivity is political.”
Slavoj Zizek 1)

In Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz states that capitalism has created an emotional culture 2). Against the commonly held view that commodification, wage labour and profit-driven activities create ‘cold’ and calculated relationships, Eva Illouz describes the rise of “emotional capitalism”. The public sphere is saturated with the exposure of private life (and vice versa, the ‘hot distance’). Affect is becoming an essential aspect of economic behaviour—and a fashionable object of contemporary theory. According to Illouz “it is virtually impossible to distinguish the rationalization and commodification of selfhood from the capacity of the self to shape and help itself and to engage in deliberation and communication with others.” There is a narrative in the making, says Illouz, which combines the aspiration of self-realization with the claim to emotional suffering:

“The prevalence and persistence of this narrative, which we may call as shorthand a narrative of recognition, is related to the interests of social groups operating within the market, in civil society, and within the institutional boundaries of the state.”

We all know that media do not merely report. They play a key role in the circulation of sentiments. We do not sit down and passively read and write but we are caught in a web of stimuli and feelings that are channelled in specific ways. Some platforms are better at capturing, storing and sorting the human sensory output than others. Email, for instance, is considered to be more personal and direct, if not impolite, compared to letters written on paper. Once, typewriters were considered a precondition for inspiration, provided the writer had access to a typewriter girl to dictate his streams of the unconscious. Today, the internet creates an endless flow nervous responses that become accessible for everyone.

It is not enough to study the impact of the new media output. We need to develop an awareness about which emotional responses are addressed by which software. What social networking sites such as Orkut, MySpace and Facebook, MSN, Twitter, blogs, IRC chats, email, Usenet and web forums all have in common is that they are not taming the beast. Instead of explicitly ‘civilizing’ its users, internet lures users into an informal, grey space, inbetween public and private. The applications inform us, addressing specific emotional registers. They form us to say this, and not that. Each and every internet application is provoking, shaping and packaging these sentiments in a different way. Building on Nietzsche, who once noticed that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” we can witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... that each internet application is addressing its very own set of human qualities.

This essay is part of a larger project to develop a blog theory 3). As we write this, in early 2008, there are anywhere between 100-150 million blogs, worldwide. Weblogs are successors of the 1990s internet homepage. They create mix of the private (online diary) and the public (PR-management of the self). Blogs have been the software vehicle that turned the internet into a mass media culture, way beyond the eccentric cyberculture of the 1990s. Blogs, and the social networking sites that they are becoming part of in the Web 2.0 wave, have made ‘new’ media mainstream.

Instead of looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasize its counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of an unfolding process of ‘massification’ of the Internet after its successive academic and speculative phases. The void after the dotcom crash made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through freely available automated software with user-friendly interfaces. Blogging in the post 9/11The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States ...-period closed the gap between Internet and society. Whereas dotcom suits dreamed of mobbing customers flooding their sites, blogs were the actual catalysts that realized democratization, worldwide, of the Net. As much as ‘democratization’ means ‘engaged citizens’, it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can’t separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits. Blogs ought to be positioned in the midst of the whirlpool. The abundance of blogs, the similarity of opinions and ‘pimped’ material go to the core of the Capitalist Project and should not be pushed aside as irrelevant info noise. It is exactly the ‘secondary’ status of blogs that makes the posted material so ruthlessly honest.

The entries often are hastily written personal musings, sculptured around a link or event. In most cases bloggers simply do not have the time, skills and the financial means for proper research. Blogs are not anonymous news sites, they are deeply personal. The blog software does a wonderful trick: it constitutes subjectivity. When we blog, we become an individual (again). Even if we blog together, we still answer to the Call of the Code to tell something about ourselves as a unique person.

Blog pioneer and RSS feed inventor Dave Winer defines a blog as “the unedited voice of a person.” It isn’t so much the form or the content, rather it is ‘the voice’ of an individual that characterizes the blog as a distinctive media form. “If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think—then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it’s not.” 4) Winer does not believe that blogs are defined by comments of others. “The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.” Whereas social networking sites and email-based mailinglist culture are focussed on social networking and (discursive) exchanges, blogging, according to Dave Winer, is primarily an act of an introspective individual that reflects on his or her thoughts and impressions.

For this techno-libertarian Californian, blogs are expressions of free speech, of an individualism that says each is entitled to his own opinion and should be brave enough to say it. Dave Winer’s definition is a good example of a raw, Western, heroic individualism. “Me, I like diversity of opinion. I learn from the extremes.” The blogger is portrayed as a Western dissident: the person who begs to differ. But there is nothing particularly courageous about expressing what one thinks on a blog. The medium knows this: what is encouraged and applauded, what gets the comments stirred up and starts a bunch of cross-posting, is the outrageous, the beyond the pale, the extreme. It doesn’t matter whether anyone actually thinks the extreme view—it can be said just for jokes or kicks, just for hits or attention.

Why is this language game about definitions so important? Winer’s description leads us back to an original experience at the very beginning of this medium in the late 1990s. It is the initial arousement of the developers and early adaptors, to go where others haven’t gone before, seeking the edges of ethics, of freedom of expression, of language and publishing and what is commonly excepted, that informs blogging. There is a perceived challenge of the empty web form, to write whatever is on your mind. Users who arrive a decade later rarely have this sensation. They see themselves confronted with an extremely busy social environment and are puzzled how to fit in. Their challenge is not what to scream in the well but how to find their way through the busy ant farm called ‘blogosphere’.

Despite the short time it needs to set up a blog and the easy-to-use interfaces, users need time to get accustomed to the rules of the game called blogging. Here it is not so much the self-referential moment of sitting down and writing up a story that matters. In Winer’s ontology the essence of the blog experience is the very start of the blog itself. It’s not the software or the social buzz, but the thrill of creating an account, naming your blog and choosing a template, and there you go. “What's important about blogs is not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment. What there is always a shortage of, however, is courage to say the exceptional thing, to be an individual, to stand up for your beliefs, even if they aren’t popular.”

For Winer blogging is a brave act because he associates writing with authenticity—with the unedited, the uninfluenced by a group. Somehow, writing is a pure expression of an individual (comments just dilute the purity and risk pushing the author to conform to group think). Winer’s emphasis on authenticity goes back to an old Romantic idea. In post-modern society this notion has lost its currency in favor of repetition, mimesis, and, everyone’s favorite, the big Other. Most of what we say and think is a repetition of what we’ve read or heard (and we are aware of this). We are spoken through (rather than autonomous subjects creatively producing the new). This isn’t bad or negative or something to worry about—we can get over the fetishismIn its original sense, a fetish was an idol or other object that had magical significance. In the context of sexual activity, it refers to something that excites an individual's sexual fantasies or desires ... of the new and leave that to consumer capitalism. Shifts and alterations, changes in ideas and thinking, occur more accidentally and retroactively.

There is something in Winer’s point about voice that he uses in a sense that is different from the Lacanian Mladen Dolar, author of A Voice and Nothing More 5). The blog voice can emerge as an effect, accidentally; it can seep through the writing and not be produced deliberately via the author’s intention. We could think of this as the subjectivity of the blog or the persona of the blog (which has the benefit of bleeding toward impersonation). Winer’s error is to associate this voice or persona with authenticity and with courage. It is more convincing to associate it with the art of creating a figure. Blogging is a masquerade, impersonation, presentation and a drive to be seen, present, acknowledge, recognized, perhaps a drive just to be at all—period.

It’s important to dig further into another aspect of Winer’s blog definition. The voice also points at the verbal aspect that is gaining importance in new media. Blogging could be read as a digital extension of oral traditions more than a new form of writing 6). Through blogging, news is being transformed from a lecture into a conversation. Blogs echo rumour and gossip, conversations in cafes and bars, on squares and in corridors. They record “the events of the day” (Jay Rosen). Today’s ‘recordability’ of situations is such that we are no longer upset that computers ‘read’ all our moves and expressions (sound, image, text) and ‘write’ them into strings of zeros and ones. In that sense blogs fit into the wider trend in which all our movements and activities are being monitored and stored.

In the case of blogs this is carried out not by some invisible and abstract authority but the subjects themselves who record their everyday life 7). Much like the SMS language used in mobile phones, blogs ‘capture’ the spoken word of the everyday, rather than being judged as a degenerated version of the official written languages as represented in literature, journalism and academic texts. At first hand, this is a confusing observation. Aren’t blogs all about the return of quality writing amongst the ordinary citizens? Still we need to see the informal, unfinished style of blogging within a technological trend in which more and more devices are capturing speech. Paradoxically, at the moment this is (also) done through keyboards. As a secondary notation system blogs have to be positioned between the officially sanctioned writing of books and newspapers, using automatic spell checking and the informal communication of email and text messaging. The example of chatting on MSN and other chat rooms is even more clear. Chatting is talking using the written word.

The blog is one step further towards sanctioned writing in that it is a form of publishing: we add a file to a database once we press the ‘submit’ button. At the same time, this text-based talking to a screen is a personal way of storing a communication we have with ourselves (and the Machine). Whereas chats and emails have a person attached who we talk to, the addressed in blogs is often less clear. If the blog part of an (existing) social network, they are not more than nodes, created to store material (text, picture, profile). If the link list is absent or indicates that there are standard ‘elective affinities’ with A-list bloggers and news media, we can guess that the blog experiment has a dominant reflective, introspective element. In both cases blogs express a ‘distributed subjectivity’, in the first case one that is positioned within a clouds of ‘friends’, in the latter it is pop media.

Let’s face it: the novelty of blog studies that mapped the early terrain is over. The many millions of weblogs that currently exist can no longer be explained by those who pioneered the field. The masses of blogs appearing and disappearing at ever increasing rates easily exceed the terms introduced to describe the A-list of US-American pundits, the disaster and event blogs, and the political swarms. Given the enormity of the blogosphere, the variety of uses, engagements, attachments, performances, networks, and content produced through the practice of blogging, the lack of adequate theorization is palpable. The concern here is not with the (potential) relation to the news industry but with the long tail of personal blogs. How does the unedited voice of the individual relate to the growing tendency, facilitated in software, to position the blogging subject in a web of users and links to documents and multimedia objects? For this we suggest describing the blogger as a ‘distributed subjectivity’. As blog culture progresses into its second decade, we see an increased pressure of the underlying software architecture to move away from the culture of insular retrospection towards a technical positioning of the blogger inside networks, mainly facilitated by search engines (read: Google). From now on the Machine automatically creates social relationships for us, we don’t even have to do it ourselves, provided we feed the search engine with (personal) data. What we perceive as personal, the system has redefined as Working for the Engine. Blogs validate and celebrate the personal, individual, singular. They mobilize the personal as celebrity, championing the individual even as good old liberal bourgeois rights are overwritten by neo-liberal capital and undermined, at least in the US, by enthusiasm for tortureTorture represents the most severe form of trauma perpetrated by one human on another (Silove, 1996) ..., security, and surveillance. In a way, blogs document a change in the status of the personal wherein the personal is mobilized and erased/flattened at the same time (erased insofar as blogging prioritizes display over introspection, documentation without reflection, archiving without internalization). At the same time, the personal that is produced for display uncouples from any supposition of a true or underlying self—that question simply isn’t relevant. What matters is what appears. Communicative capitalism is not an identity provider. Rather, people produce their identities through networked communications media. The internet is a medium for mass experience, but a highly differentiated and singularized mass experience. And this is where blogging comes in as the technology of that experience.

It could be useful to formulate a theory of blogging as a ‘technology of the self,’ a concept developed by Michel Foucault. Blogs experiment with the ‘public diary’ format, a term that expresses the productive contradiction between public and private that bloggers find themselves in. Until recently most diaries have been ‘secret’. They may have been written to be published at a later stage, often after the author passed away, but were nonetheless ‘offline’ in the sense of being not accessible. Despite obvious differences, there are also communalities, as we can read in Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own, People and Their Diaries from 1984.

Bloggers will recognize themselves in what Mallon writes: “I’m always behind. I try to write each night, but I often don’t get around to writing up a day until several more days have gone by. But I manage to keep them all separate. I suppose it’s a compulsion, but I hesitate to call it that, because it’s gotten pretty easy. There comes a point when, like a marathon runner, you get through some sort of ‘wall’ and start running on automatic. Of course, there are days when I hate writing the thing. Who needs it? I’ll ask myself; but I’ll do it anyway.”8)

After reading hundreds of diaries, Mallon concludes that no one ever kept a diary for just himself: “In fact, I don’t believe one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator, saying, ‘buy bread’.”9) Keeping a diary provokes reflection about the activity itself. For Mallon, Virginia Woolf is the greatest critic of the genre: “The activity is, after all, so queer, so ad hoc, and supposedly so private, that it doesn’t seem amiss for the diarist to stop every so often and ask himself just what he thinks he’s doing.” Her fundamental motive is to “hold on to it all, to cheat the clock and death of all the things that she had lived.” What intrigues me here are the ‘time folds’ that we so often find in blogs as well. Many of Virginia Woolf’s entries, says Mallon, are provoked by her neglect of regular dairy writing. “The journals are frequently interrupted by physical illness, madness, the press of work or social life. And sheer disinclination.”10) Sound familiar?

Situating blogging between ‘online publishing’ and the intimate sphere of diary keeping brings into question the already disturbed separation between what is public and what is left of privacy. It is remarkable that many participants do not perceive blogs and social networking sites such as Orkut or MySpace as a part of public life. Online conversations between friends are so intense that the (mainly young and often naive) users do not realize, or care, that they are under constant observation. Yahoo! researcher Danah Boyd explains: “Teens are growing up in a constant state of surveillance because parents, teachers, school administrators and others who hold direct power over youth are surveilling them. Governments and corporations are beyond their consideration because the people who directly affect their lives have created a more encompassing panopticon than any external structure could ever do. The personal panopticon they live in is far more menacing, far more direct, far more traumatic. As a result, youth are pretty blasé about their privacy in relation to government and corporate.” 11) Boyd therefore advises: “Unless we figure out how to give youth privacy in their personal lives, they are not going to expect privacy in their public lives.” Until further notice the festive documentation of the private will continue—and it’s up to family, social workers and clergy to reconcile with this potlatch. Instead of raising concerns, one might better start harvesting human feelings from weblogs, as wefeelfine.org has been doing.

Because of its ‘public diary’ character, the question of whether blogs operate inside or outside ‘the media’ is not easy to answer. To position the blog medium inside could be seen as opportunistic, whereas others see this as a clever move. There is also a ‘tactical’ aspect. The blogger-equals-journalist might find protection under such a label in case of censorship and repressionIn repression, the person is expelling or withholding an idea or feeling from the consciousness .... Despite countless attempts to feature blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media, they are often, more precisely described as ‘feedback channels’. The act of gatewatching mainstream media outlets does not necessarily result in reasonable comments that will then be taken into account by any internal review by the media. In the category ‘insensitive’ we have a wide range, from hilarious to mad, sad and sick. What CNN, newspapers and radio stations the world over have failed to do, namely to integrate open and interactive messages from their constituencies, blogs do for them. To ‘blog’ a news report doesn’t mean that the blogger sits down and thoroughly analyzes the discourse and circumstances, let alone check the facts on the ground. To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting, remarkable or is in disagreement with it.

It is a misjudgement to disregard blog culture as part of the larger self-marketing trend. What cultural pessimism is doing in such a case is blasting the perverse pleasure of narcissist and praising the hard-thinking intellectual who goes through the critical issues. Blogs are not the perfect media machine to express the laziness of self-centred ego. What ordinary blogs create is a scattered cloud of ‘impressions’ around a topic. Blogs will tell you if your audience is still awake and receptive. Blogs test.

Blogs express personal fear, insecurity and disillusion, anxieties looking for partners-in-crime. We seldom find passion, except for the act of blogging itself. The overall situation remains laid back and cool, if not indifferent. Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe and like. In that sense they divert from the polished PR image. The blog confessions carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider compared to other media due to the informal atmosphere. Mixing public and private is constitutional here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage and back to everyday boredom.