The Social Construction of Blogspace

Post without the rich text code mess, sorry about
that.

Ryan Griffis
The Social Construction of Blogspace

"In these high tech times, the question isn't why
publish, rather it's why not?"

Interestingly, the statement above was made by zine
publisher Edward Dean in 1989 in response to the
question of why zine producers publish, but the
axiomatic belief that technology practically demands,
rather than enables, people to publish bears a
striking resemblance to the stated motivations of many
bloggers.1 Similar to this understanding of zines,
blogs are also generally identified by their
technology and form. As historians and theorists of
both zines and blogs point out, any attempt at
defining them according to content proves futile.
Zines are often described to be non-commercial,
cheaply produced periodicals on any number of topics,
from popular to subcultural, which are created and
distributed by individuals. A commonly accepted
definition for blogs, short for weblogs, is frequently
updated websites consisting of chronologically ordered
and archived posts published by individuals or small
groups using an informal and personal writing style.2

"Blogs have made the creation and publication of
content as simple as browsing the Web. Blogging tools
have removed virtually all the technical barriers that
previously prohibited publication by the masses."3
The utopian ideals of participatory democracy found in
the discourse surrounding both blogs and zines seem
rooted in notions of access to communication
technologies. Alternative forms of communication and
distribution, allowed by increased contact with
inexpensive and relatively easy to use technologies,
are believed to "reactivate the memory of everyday
life and reconstitute the narrative of daily practices
and anonymous itineraries hidden in the thick folds of
the social fabric."4 At the moment, blogs, unseating
the deflated hype of the Internet in general, are
often cited as the communicative form that best brings
what de Certeau calls the "memory of everyday life"
into the mediated space we call "public". It is this
rhetorical function, and potential, of the "everyday"
that seems to be implicit in how blogging is framed by
its proponents as progressive.

What seems to come through in the rhetoric and
aesthetic of blogs is the power given to the local,
the specific, the individual. In this sense, one could
say that de Certeau's notions of a public sphere, one
infused with informal networks of narrative and "how
to" knowledge, meets the rational ideals of a
Habermasian public based on consensus building through
logical dialogue. But, I would argue, when one looks
at the conversations both within and about blogs, the
pragmatics of consensus break down into "mere
opinions" as fast as ever.
The publicness exhibited in blogs is one constructed
of individuated spaces, where the movement of
personalities can be identified and tracked. While
there may be a strong communal ethic, blogs are sites
of contact for externalized egos, and are definitely
to be distinguished from other forms of communicative
networks currently being organized, like Wikis, where
the content and structure of a website are modified by
members of a community in the process of
communicating. Linguistic researchers have noted that
"I" is the most common form of identification used,
and the overwhelming number of active (not to say the
most widely read) blogs are sites of personal
storytelling, ranting and journaling.5 As one
prominent blogger puts it, "a weblog used technology
to bring the psychological you outside."6

The situation of mediated contact, or interface,
between the individual and the "public," places the
blogger in a position of an intermediary or mediator.
For de Certeau, the transmission of communication
through a network involves three levels:
intermediaries, original sources, and the practices of
circulation and transmission. Bloggers map quite well
onto de Certeau's loose schema as mediators - those
"who decode and recode fragments of knowledge, link
them, transform them by generalization." These
individuals are further defined as "linking agents"
and "amateur mediators" who "distinguish themselves by
the very particular interest and razor sharp attention
that they bring to the slightest issues of life."
Bloggers are valued, not for their objectivity and
disinterestedness, but for their overt perspective and
personality in how they filter through the haystack of
media to find the needle that pricks interest.

One of the strongest ideological imperatives within
zine culture remains its steadfast opposition to
commercial culture. This reactionary aspect, while
often part of the literary content of the medium,
became a very deliberate aesthetic practice. In the
1980s, producers of punk zines made sincere claims
that such publications were:
"authentic, and get to the heart of the matter. They
exist outside of commodification; they are real. They
come straight from the source."7

This sense of expressionist immediacy is most
certainly found in discussions about blogging.
Descriptions of blogs as the "pirate radio stations of
the Web" that are "first on the scene" are common
among enthusiasts and theorists alike. One of the
traits common to de Certeau's intermediaries is a
wariness of official language and administrative tone.
For de Certeau, this caution stems in part from a
conscious and unconscious attempt to avoid the
formation of dependent relationships based on
authority. Aversion to institutional forms of speech
is not something found just in personal journal style
blogging, but even in those run by academics and
researchers. Even the process of peer approval is
handled in a pedestrian manner, blogrolls, and other
forms of interlinking among sites with similar
interests, are often as much signs of "solidarity"
("shout outs") with similarly minded writers as
bibliographic citations. It has even been noted that
within blog networks, those sites with a high rate of
"solidarity links" occupied more central locations
(read: more widely read/referenced) than did sites
with more informational links, which tended to exist
on the periphery.8

"The idea of communication immediately calls up that
of the network, with all the ambiguity attached to
that word. Does it mean networks materialized through
an infrastructure allowing for the circulations of
goods, furnishings or persons? Or networks plotting
the implantation of a belief or of an ideology?"9

So what about the other two aspects of networked
communication offered by de Certeau, the original
media sources and the practices of circulation? It has
been said that the "only aspect of mail art that one
can state with any degree of certainty is that it is
entirely dependent upon the international postal
system for its existence."10 While the dependent
relationship between blogs and the Internet is as
self-evident as that between mail art and the postal
system, stating this is pretty meaningless in and of
itself. My Interest is how these relationships are
perceived, and how that perception shapes action.

As some have observed, the potential of networks is
often discussed as if they "suddenly appear out of
nowhere," despite their historical and ideological
inheritence.11 And we certainly must be critical of
all claims of immediacy and authenticity, not just
because such claims depend on repeatable conventions.
One of the ways that blogs as communicative tools are
usually separated from more static websites, like the
"personal home page", is that they exhibit a degree of
"self-organization." Steven Johnson has explained that
static websites lack the ability for self-organization
because they are inhospitable to feedback.12 But
weblogs - where feedback is part of the structure -
are positioned as an "emergent" form of organizing.

"Emergence," an explanation of order and regulation
derived from self-organization and practice, rather
than a top-down model imposed by authority, is often
cited by those asserting the democratic potential of
blogs.13
The power of "emergence" as a concept seems to come
from its use of analogies to the natural world. Ant
colonies and neural networks provide compelling
examples of self-organization and order that seem to
bypass ideological conflicts and make the
democratization of knowledge not just desirable, but
biologically determined. The problem to be solved is
self-evident; it is the observable fact that
representative forms of governance and media are
incapable of managing "the scale, complexity and speed
of the issues of the world today."14 New forms of
communication, like blogs, are said to be able to
generate a more natural form of direct democracy.

But I wonder about the use of concepts like
"emergence" and deference to what seems "natural."
Critique of the political usage of "Nature" is, of
course, nothing new, which is partly why I'm
suspicious when some understanding of the behavior of
ants is used to support beliefs about democracy,
especially when those beliefs include technology.

Weblogs depend on structure, and a fairly rigid and
hierarchal one, to function as defined, both in terms
of the visual presentation of information
(chronological, vertical, etc.) and as it relates to
the larger space of the Internet. This spatial aspect
of weblogs is beginning to be discussed in terms of a
political economy that includes the cultural and
economic exchange of value through links.15 The
mechanisms of access are also discussed, including
search engines like Google that are considered as
integral to blogging as "the Otis elevator was to
skyscrapers."16 But what of the aesthetics of
management utilized by blogs? The rigid, hierarchal
structure of blogs is what is said to allow for the
aesthetics of immediacy within the content. What does
this understanding of content and form within weblog
discourse mean politically?

"The modern world has given us ways to experience the
extension into space, ways that are more accessible
(maybe) than older routes of mediation… Space has
become obsolete."17

I certainly don't have any answers to my questions,
just suggestions for discussion. The issue of space,
where contact between subjectivity and social
conventions occurs, is one that seems worth
investigating. The dichotomy of form and content seen
in blogs can be seen to intersect with how space is
created and understood. If the form of distribution
(blog tools and the Internet) creates an experience of
public space as a field with no distance, then the
content becomes a marker by which to recognize
location. Blogs become "virtually local" within the
communities they participate in.18

If de Certeau's assertion that the local has
consistently been an obstacle to the historical
development of communication still holds true (if it
ever did), what does the current situation represent?
If there does seem to be a kind of return to the
local, it has a largely rhetorical function. The
battle between a homogenized, ideal public realm and a
network of fragmented subjectivities seems to find
resolution in the naturalist metaphors of
self-organization, but there are no virtual Galapagos
Islands from which to observe these developments as
they occur. We are certainly moving into a paradigm of
standardization in communication, and this movement
involves managing space as much as knowledge. It may
be the motion of emergent organization, but as always,
the fuel used to power its mechanisms are the desires
and interests of its active agents. If there can be no
communication without standards and operations, the
question is "Whose standards will we practice?" Will
we organize as a "plurality other than the masses
consuming and repeating imposed models,"19 or possibly
"capitalize on the homogeneity found in networks to
resonate far and wide with little effort?"20 Or will
we emerge somewhere more familiar? At least I can be
assured that if someone comes up with any answers
they'll be posted somewhere, on someone's blog. Or
even better… published in a zine.


1 in Mike Gunderloy's compilation for Pretzel Press
called "Why Publish" available at
http://www.zinebook.com/resource/gunderpublish.html
2 See: Jill Walker's definition drafted for the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/blog_theorising/revised_definition.html
3 Eric Janssen, "Weblogs Will Save the World,"
http://www.webraw.com/theory/weblogworld_050903.shtml
4 from Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and
Other Political Writings, University of Minnesota
Press, 1997
5 Stephanie Nilsson, "The Function of Language to
Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research
Weblogs"
http://www.eng.umu.se/stephanie/web/LanguageBlogs.pdf
6 Joe Clark of JoeClark.org quoted in Nilsson
7 Fred Wright, "The History and Characteristics of
Zines, http://www.zinebook.com/resource/wright1.html
8 Nilsson
9 de Certeau
10 Stephen Perkins, "Mail Art and Networking Magazines
(1970-1980), Zinebook.com
11 Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, "The Limits of
Networking," sent to Nettime 3/15/04
12 Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2001
13 Joichi Ito, "Emergent Democracy," v. 1.3, 2003
http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html
14 Ito
15 Jill Walker, "Links and Power: The Political
Economy of Links on the Web," 2002
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/txt/linksandpower.html;
Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality,"
2003
16 Tim Dunlop, "If You Build It They Will Come," Evatt
Foundation
http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/91.html
17 Sean Wolf Hill from "Why Pubish?
18 Gary Thompson, "Weblogs, Warblogs, the Public
Sphere and Bubbles"
http://transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue7/articles/text.htm#thompson
19 de Certeau
20 Galloway and Thacker