Day Two

Another way of viewing the blogosphere is as a vast machinery of self-promotion. I am real. I am here. I am visible. LISTEN TO ME. Has Nietzchean ressentiment become so absorbed into our culture, our constructions of an identity, of our relationship to hierarchy and power, and has individualism been driven to such a modern consumerist limit that such a thing as ressentiment stops being a useful description? Another phrase which comes to mind is amour propre. Somehow the French is more expressive, carrying with it an appropriate petulance: the vanity of the bourgeous, the employee, the citizen, the cog.

A blog is also, of course, a form of publishing. The button on this blog tells me to publish my post when it's written. And there is value in this description. It assumes a readership. And an expectation of a readership might impose a discipline. This is where the blogosphere confronts another kind of paradox. Everyone can be published, can be heard, can be read, make a mark. Yet there are so many bloggers and the nature of it is so immediate - hence the likening of it with the diary form - that most, the vast majority, are anonymous. But, still, might there be a discipline in being overheard? Does this apply to those who appear on reality television? Do they remember they are always on camera? or does their sense of being in the world absorb quickly the fact of being watched so there ceases to be a distinction between the private self and the persona of someone who is watched by many strangers. If I blog enough, will I forget that what I write exists in the public domain. Will I lose the discipline of communication.

Editing. Editors. A filter. Judgement. What happened to them?