Geert Lovink on Blogging

Geert Lovink runs the Networked Cultures blog, the Institute of Network Cultures and Amsterdam Media Research Centre, and has written several books about the internet and networked culture(s).

I ran across these (though not for the first time) as I was following links about Sara Diamond, now the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design.  Sara invited me (and quite a few other artists, media activists, and collaboration theorists) to a Banff Centre / Banff New Media Institute Summit conference on Participate / Collaborate: Reciprocity, Design and Social Networks in the fall of 2004. 

She’s a very interesting person, and one of those blessed to have pathways to engage her creativity and capabilities in fun and interesting ways.

.

The Dreamer
Introducing OCAD’s brilliantly loopy new president

Appointed last July, Diamond is the 21st president of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the country’s largest art school, alma mater to such names as Arthur Lismer, Michael Snow and Joanne Tod. It’s her good fortune to take over as the institution is shedding its reputation as the worthy but somewhat moribund dowager of McCaul Street.

Granted university status in 2002, and graced in September 2004 by architect Will Alsop’s spirit-lifting, coffee-table-on-chopsticks addition, the school seems poised for flight as well.

Diamond is committed to breaking through the age-old division between art and design (“I kicked off a cross-disciplinary task force the moment I landed”) and to making OCAD “a hub of diversity and excitement.” And though it would not be accurate to describe the 52-year-old Diamond as flighty (she has impeccable administrative and teaching cred, with some 14 years at the Banff Centre, a creative think-tank, and has taught in both Canada and the U.S.), she does have flash.

.

At any rate, the OCAD and Sara is not what this post is about.

The post is about participation, reciprocity and making meaning.  I have written about these dynamics before here and there, and consider the essay The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create to be the exemplar (not of the subject, but of my limited reflection on the subject).

I found Geert Lovink’s blog post (Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse) from the spring of 2006 to be meaningful and to offer food for thought.

I wish I had looked up Geert Lovink each of the last several times I have been in Amsterdam.  I’ll have to remember to see if I can connect with him the next time I go there.

.

Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

Blogs are successors of the 90s “homepage” and create mix of the private (online dairy) and the public (PR-management of the self). As there are tens of millions of blogs it is next to impossible to make general statements about their ‘nature’. I will nonetheless do this. It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture and social networking into account.

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasize its counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of a unfolding process of ‘massification’ of this, still, new medium. What the Internet after 2000 lost is the “illusion of change”. The created void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through automated software, named weblogs, or blogs.

After a general introduction into net culture I will present my specific work that centres around the often voiced criticism that blogs are cynical and nihilist, because they merely comment and dump on the establishment (be it leftist, liberal or conservative). Instead of trying to prove that blogs are, in essence, good, I have taken up the challenge to interprete blogs as nihilist vehicles. Nihilism is not a lifestyle or opinion but a condition in which (Western) societies find themselves.

In the Internet context it is not evil, as Rüdiger Safranski suggested, but triviality that forms the drama of media freedom.

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message.

That’s the nihilist moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before. Blog software assists users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value.

Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

.

Tags: Geert Lovink, Sara Diamond, Insdtitute of Network Cultures, participation, blogging, nihilism, wirearchy

Powered by Qumana