The Blog Is Not A Diary

[Note: The following is an excerpt from my yet still untitled thesis project, which I am hopefully getting close to finishing! I think the section below is one of the stronger points made in my thesis, and I thought I would put it out in public not only to make whatever small contribution I can make to the theoretical discourse around blogs, but as a point of feedback and discussion for anyone who's so inclined. Some of it make seem a little out of place without the context of the entire thesis, but I think you'll get the gist of it well enough.]

There just didn’t seem to be someone. So I wrote. For the first and only time in my life, I started a diary. I placed the pages on my new personal website…I just needed to have my own say somewhere where I wouldn’t start a fight about the past. Somewhere where I had the last word. Somewhere that people, in the abstract, could listen to my side…I started Carolyn’s Diary.

- Carolyn Burke, The Online Diary History Project

In the preceding sections, a genealogy of media was presented, through the perspective of medium theory. By examining these broad changes in media technology, it is clear that a “new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 158). Print did not replace orality, and blogs do not replace the printing press. Yet as the “orality of blogging” demonstrates, there are aspects of previous media forms that can be seen in the new. The blog, in many ways, confounds categorization. It was born as a “diary,” a metaphor seated deep within the context of print media. It contains “comments,” a metaphor from speech, and orality. Users communicate through the act of typing, again a metaphor from print, and yet, unlike the book, the blog has no beginning, middle, or end.

Which category holds true? More appropriately, which category holds theoretical potential – which gets at the significance of this new media form?

50 State Strategy

An addendum, of sorts, to the previous post on how Obama won. Apparently, the 50 State Strategy is over:

Right now, the strategy means handing over large grants to state parties from the DNC, and also paying for local organizers in the state. It was effective both as an organizing strategy (see the DNC memo on the subject) and as a political strategy for Howard Dean, as state parties hold large numbers of votes in the DNC and like receiving lots of money and free organizers from the DNC.

This was a program for which the netroots fought hard the past several years. Now that it seems to be over, I hope that our opinion of the fifty-state strategy doesn’t take the same route as our opinion of the utility of appearing on Fox News, including telecom immunity in FISA, or elevating Rahm Emanuel to positions of extreme power. It isn’t right just because Obama did it, although I fear many people will say so.

I think this strategy made both good sense and political sense, and it’s strange to think the Dems would leave all that work behind. But this is something Emanuel fought Dean on, and now the former is Obama’s chief of staff, so, from that perspective, it very well could be true.

Why Obama Won

It’s already started, and over the next week or two, we’ll see ever more stories about why Obama won this election. I think many of the stories will focus on technology, and social networking, and while these things were important, I attribute his win to four factors, four things that, really, having nothing to do with technology (one of them is actually from an old media newspaper!), and everything to do with the game of politics itself — strategy and planning it takes to run a campaign. They are presented in a reverse chronology, which I also happen to think is the order of importance, too.

Organizationless Organizing

Beka Economopoulos recently posted to the IDC list, about her experience with Twitter Vote Report:

Inspired by the use of Twitter at the RNC and DNC mobilizations this year, they imagined a more scalable scenario in which the tool might function to crowd-source election reporting (and ultimately protection) efforts. Over the course of several days the idea took hold among a broader community of developers, designers and activists. In just a couple of weeks, using pbWiki, IRC chat channels, physical coding parties, a googlegroups listserv, and daily lunchtime freeconferencecall.com calls, a team of volunteers were able to launch a multi-channel reporting system, a nice looking site, graphics, badges, training videos, downloadable flyers, sample outreach emails, and more.

It sounds very much like what we did with GetFISARight, and what I called at the time, “nomadic democracy“:

…organizing and participating in the Get FISA Right movement has been “ridiculously” easy. We’re using free, social software tools to connect, to think through ideas, to collaborate, all with the aim of taking the passion and energy created on Barack Obama’s website and shape it into political action.

So we’re using email and a listserv. We have a wiki from Wetpaint. We’re using Google Groups and Google Docs to create initial drafts before posting them for public review. And we’re using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to get the word out.

One of the goals of the GetFISARight group was to serve as a model, from which others could learn, and improve upon, in order to take advantage of the technologies available today to create political action.

What I was getting at with the term “nomadic” is the centerless-ness of these kinds of groups, how it is a really a patchwork of different sites and services that people can use to connect to each other, how action is created from a multiplicity of tools, rather than a single point — it’s no longer simply “we need a web site.” And the potential of these kinds of effort actually stems from the centerlessness of it all.

Perhaps a better term would have been “organizationless organizing,” to paraphrase the subtitle of Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.”

That’s really what this is. I have no idea if GetFISARight did serve as a model for the Twitter Vote Report group (I do know at least one person involved with both efforts) — it might just be that in addition to these kinds of technologies becoming “boring,” they might also now be “obvious.”

We’re getting to the point where this type of organizationless organizing is becoming second nature.

11.4.2008

Yes. We. Can.

Untitled Thesis Project: Intro (draft!)

[Note: This is a first draft of the intro to my thesis. I am not sure if I like it, so I'm hoping to crowdsource this for critique and comments. Anything you might be able to suggest would be appreciated, even if it's just a "Hey, not bad!" or, "Really? You're an idiot!" Either, or anything in between, would help. Thanks.

Introduction

From a theoretical perspective, it is perhaps easy to say the blog [ADD DESCRIPTION], both as a medium and social practice, is “nothing new.” Indeed, traces of its antecedent forms can be found throughout the cultural and technological history of the interdisciplinary field of media studies: The pre-Internet science fiction fan communities studied by Henry Jenkins; Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”; the proto-hypertextual memex of Vannevar Bush; Walter Benjamin’s recognition of “readers ready to be writers” in the age of reproducibility; Kittler’s mechanization of writing in the discourse network of 1900; the coffeehouse culture of Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere; the collective production of manuscripts in the transitory period of McLuhan’s pre-typographic man; the group-centric orality found in the work of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong. The case for the blog as “nothing new,” it turns out, is actually quite easy to make.

Yet, dismissing the blog in this way would be misguided, because, despite the parallels found in historical media forms and practices, the blog is, if not something unique, certainly something culturally significant, particularly in the way bloggers have engaged in the political process. The first widespread use of blogs began less than a decade ago, and since then, the political blogosphere has played a major role in three national elections, and perhaps has changed forever the institutions and practices of the field of journalism.[NEED TO CHANGE THIS TRANSITION, CLARIFY] Even more significantly, blogs have made an impact from the “bottom-up,” through free, open source software [CLARIFY WHAT OPEN SOURCE HAS TO DO WITH THIS, OR REMOVE], a participatory movement that has grown organically from the grassroots (political bloggers, in fact, refer to themselves as the “netroots”). It is a movement constituted through the collection of comments stored within the blog’s database, held together by social bonds created in cyberspace, a unique form of subjectivity and sociality that is the foreground of this thesis.

The following work, then, examines the virtual world of the blogger, arguing that both the medium and practice of blogging create an “orality” that, in turn, engenders a community. This community’s potential is rooted in its virtuality, just as the blogger’s subjectivity is rooted in his or her cyborg existence. But the notion of cyborg, as this thesis will argue, is not rooted in the exotic or the fantastic; it is unlike anything portrayed by scholars such as Haraway or Hayles. Instead, the cyborg nature of the blogger is revealed through the pervasive ordinariness of blogging, one that centers around practices such as checking in on the news, and conversing with others online, discussing not only politics, but cats, gardens, and struggles with drug addiction – in short, the mundanity of everyday life. It is through this mundanity that networks of relations form, networks that give rise to a new kind of politics, a hyperpolitics made possible only when the medium of the blog becomes “boring,” and part of the everyday practices of the blogger.