Are bloggers really just pundits of another stripe?
This is the question I asked myself when I read the excellent article on the rise of anti-intellectualism (excerpted and quoted below). Certainly the medium would lend itself to punditry. Short concise notations, links to other sites, the ability to pretend -think while linking to people who provide actual thought. All could be true of blogging and of the bloggers themselves.
Could be, but I don't believe it. I've found so many examples of good independant thought in blogs, concise insightful analysis summed up in those short elegant entries that quietly entice you to sideways-surf to the source.
::example: Arts & Letters Daily::
Thursday, October 31, 2002
The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism
"In the torrent of popular culture, there emerges more talk about public affairs than ever before -- virtually nonstop talk about political concerns, debate on burning questions available at all hours of the day and night. But the talk that fills the channels amounts mainly to signals, gestures, and stances -- not reasoning.
Television reporting and punditry are the tributes that entertainment pays to the democratic ideal of discourse. "
:::found via Rebecca's Pocket 31-Oct-02:::
"In the torrent of popular culture, there emerges more talk about public affairs than ever before -- virtually nonstop talk about political concerns, debate on burning questions available at all hours of the day and night. But the talk that fills the channels amounts mainly to signals, gestures, and stances -- not reasoning.
Television reporting and punditry are the tributes that entertainment pays to the democratic ideal of discourse. "
:::found via Rebecca's Pocket 31-Oct-02:::
This morning, the wonder set in. I'm doing it. I'm actually publishing again.
See...years ago, when the web was very young, I used to run a personal website. I got my bandwidth from the online service and ISP I was helping to run at the time in Toronto. I remember posting information about where I'd been for dinner the night before, what I thought about ISP politics (of which there were a lot at the time) and links to sites I'd found with various comments from me about what I thought about them.
I think I ran the site there for almost a year. In programming terms, it was very Mickey Mouse. I've never been a codejock and couldn't seem to muster up the interest to proceed past HTML 1.0. As long as I knew how to add bolds, italics, links, bulleted lists, etc. I didn't care about the rest. My friends outside the tiny Canadian ISP world had no idea why I wanted my own site and thought I was nuts. My co-workers ignored it (not surprising -- looking back, I can admit it wasn't very interesting). I didn't really care though. I had my site. I was part of it. I was happy.
But like many passing interests for me, the idea of needing to write and publish began to wane. I was working 14 hour + days and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to sit down at the computer yet again when I got home. I moved my site over to Geocities, with their free templates to make managing the interface easier. Still not satisfied, I soon moved it to the Globe, during their "online community" period, hoping that having a personal site in that community might spur me on. Nope.
Eventually, I just let it expire and die.
And now, some 4 (or is it 5?) years later, here I am. Publishing again. Not for clients, but for me.
Wow.
Theoretically, of course, it's because of my project, but I guess also because I'm getting some pleasure out of it, some new meaning and connection with the I-Space.
So far.
See...years ago, when the web was very young, I used to run a personal website. I got my bandwidth from the online service and ISP I was helping to run at the time in Toronto. I remember posting information about where I'd been for dinner the night before, what I thought about ISP politics (of which there were a lot at the time) and links to sites I'd found with various comments from me about what I thought about them.
I think I ran the site there for almost a year. In programming terms, it was very Mickey Mouse. I've never been a codejock and couldn't seem to muster up the interest to proceed past HTML 1.0. As long as I knew how to add bolds, italics, links, bulleted lists, etc. I didn't care about the rest. My friends outside the tiny Canadian ISP world had no idea why I wanted my own site and thought I was nuts. My co-workers ignored it (not surprising -- looking back, I can admit it wasn't very interesting). I didn't really care though. I had my site. I was part of it. I was happy.
But like many passing interests for me, the idea of needing to write and publish began to wane. I was working 14 hour + days and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to sit down at the computer yet again when I got home. I moved my site over to Geocities, with their free templates to make managing the interface easier. Still not satisfied, I soon moved it to the Globe, during their "online community" period, hoping that having a personal site in that community might spur me on. Nope.
Eventually, I just let it expire and die.
And now, some 4 (or is it 5?) years later, here I am. Publishing again. Not for clients, but for me.
Wow.
Theoretically, of course, it's because of my project, but I guess also because I'm getting some pleasure out of it, some new meaning and connection with the I-Space.
So far.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
The Weblog Handbook
I am almost finished reading this book. It's wonderful! Well written, accessible, easy for anyone to understand, no matter what their background or level of experience with the Internet. Definitely an "everything you wanted to know but didn't know who to ask or trust" kind of book. I have a feeling I'll be quoting from it often.
In fact, I think I'll quote it now from something I read in it tonight. Consider this, then, this my first citation from the book...
"Weblogs are the mavericks of the online world. Two of their greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media".
This is an idea that I will be investigating throughout this experimental project.
Get more information about her book through her blog, Rebecca's Pocket. If you decide to buy it (which I highly recommend doing), she's put up a handy direct link to Amazon.com.
If you're Canadian, and would rather buy it on the maple leafed version of Amazon, here's a link.
I am almost finished reading this book. It's wonderful! Well written, accessible, easy for anyone to understand, no matter what their background or level of experience with the Internet. Definitely an "everything you wanted to know but didn't know who to ask or trust" kind of book. I have a feeling I'll be quoting from it often.
In fact, I think I'll quote it now from something I read in it tonight. Consider this, then, this my first citation from the book...
"Weblogs are the mavericks of the online world. Two of their greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media".
This is an idea that I will be investigating throughout this experimental project.
Get more information about her book through her blog, Rebecca's Pocket. If you decide to buy it (which I highly recommend doing), she's put up a handy direct link to Amazon.com.
If you're Canadian, and would rather buy it on the maple leafed version of Amazon, here's a link.
So here I am. My own blog.
I'm a Concordia University student in Montreal, Quebec, majoring in Sociology. My interests are particularly in popular and cyberculture, online community, and construction of identity/reality.
I've been around the Net for a while. I can truthfully say I remember it "when" ... when it was pre-web, when Archie and Veronica weren't just slightly-dated comic strip characters, when a BBS was the next best thing to real life, when having an email address made you a total geek. As a result, I guess I consider myself a bit of a cyberexpert (but not a Net Yoda though -- they amaze and scare me!).
Thus....when my Mass Communications professor said I could do any kind of media project on anything we covered in class, instead of doing a 15 page research paper -- well, silly me, I decided to take him up on it. Rather than take the easy way out and do that paper, I've decided instead to do a website. The site itself will be the project, and it's based on a theory I’ve got.
What's my theory? Simply this…that this place we call the Internet, despite its roots in science and alternative academia, has become increasingly corporatized as a result of big money moving online and walling off, buying up or otherwise rendering the net a far different place in which to live and be. But now, with a bunch of new ideas, new technologies and new approaches to using the space that is the Internet, we, the people, are taking it back and reclaiming it, turning it back into our own I-Space.
My theory is grounded in the work of two heavy thinkers in the cultural studies universe. The first one is this guy Michel De Certeau, who in the 1970s wrote a very cool work called The Practice of Everyday Life". (Not an easy thing to read, because it's completely couched in over-the-top academic language). Anyways, the gist of De Certeau's argument is we, the people, derive meanings and pleasures from our everyday lives by using tactics to counter the forces of domination and their controlling strategies. Our chosen tactics allow us to carve out our own personal places within the corporate spaces of everyday life. One of De Certeau’s favourite concepts is of "la perruque" (which was my second choice for a blog name, given that I live in a French-Canadian city).
The second guy is Stuart Hall, with his theories on the representation of the image. I’ll save the explanation of his theories though, for another day.
Anyways…
And …so… here I am.
And if you're still reading this, here you are.
This is my project. That's what this blog is. In the next 30 days, I will attempt to crawl daily through the net and cull from its billions of bytes nuggets of cybergold that prove my theory. Then I'll post them here. Along the way, I hope to talk to others who blog and find out why (maybe even approach a few Net Yodas). I might look into a few other tactics as well, like cyberbards, white-hat hacking, etc., but we’ll see. In the process, I hope to learn more about the medium of blogging, learn about the way netizens are deriving meanings and pleasures from their own online activities and perhaps delve into a few theories of what is yet to come for us all in the Internet and online worlds.
Oh…yeah…and, of course, I’ll hopefully get an “A” from my prof.
So…welcome….to my own personal piece of I-Space.
I'm a Concordia University student in Montreal, Quebec, majoring in Sociology. My interests are particularly in popular and cyberculture, online community, and construction of identity/reality.
I've been around the Net for a while. I can truthfully say I remember it "when" ... when it was pre-web, when Archie and Veronica weren't just slightly-dated comic strip characters, when a BBS was the next best thing to real life, when having an email address made you a total geek. As a result, I guess I consider myself a bit of a cyberexpert (but not a Net Yoda though -- they amaze and scare me!).
Thus....when my Mass Communications professor said I could do any kind of media project on anything we covered in class, instead of doing a 15 page research paper -- well, silly me, I decided to take him up on it. Rather than take the easy way out and do that paper, I've decided instead to do a website. The site itself will be the project, and it's based on a theory I’ve got.
What's my theory? Simply this…that this place we call the Internet, despite its roots in science and alternative academia, has become increasingly corporatized as a result of big money moving online and walling off, buying up or otherwise rendering the net a far different place in which to live and be. But now, with a bunch of new ideas, new technologies and new approaches to using the space that is the Internet, we, the people, are taking it back and reclaiming it, turning it back into our own I-Space.
My theory is grounded in the work of two heavy thinkers in the cultural studies universe. The first one is this guy Michel De Certeau, who in the 1970s wrote a very cool work called The Practice of Everyday Life". (Not an easy thing to read, because it's completely couched in over-the-top academic language). Anyways, the gist of De Certeau's argument is we, the people, derive meanings and pleasures from our everyday lives by using tactics to counter the forces of domination and their controlling strategies. Our chosen tactics allow us to carve out our own personal places within the corporate spaces of everyday life. One of De Certeau’s favourite concepts is of "la perruque" (which was my second choice for a blog name, given that I live in a French-Canadian city).
The second guy is Stuart Hall, with his theories on the representation of the image. I’ll save the explanation of his theories though, for another day.
Anyways…
And …so… here I am.
And if you're still reading this, here you are.
This is my project. That's what this blog is. In the next 30 days, I will attempt to crawl daily through the net and cull from its billions of bytes nuggets of cybergold that prove my theory. Then I'll post them here. Along the way, I hope to talk to others who blog and find out why (maybe even approach a few Net Yodas). I might look into a few other tactics as well, like cyberbards, white-hat hacking, etc., but we’ll see. In the process, I hope to learn more about the medium of blogging, learn about the way netizens are deriving meanings and pleasures from their own online activities and perhaps delve into a few theories of what is yet to come for us all in the Internet and online worlds.
Oh…yeah…and, of course, I’ll hopefully get an “A” from my prof.
So…welcome….to my own personal piece of I-Space.
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