This post is written essay-style. It is intended to deal with the theory at the heart of my project. As such, the language and topic is a bit academic.
Hopefully, though, it is still accessible. If you disagree, let me know.
A key tenet in De Certeau's concepts is the idea of a "place of containment" owned by the "forces of domination" who uses "strategies" to gain and maintain power that is intended to keep the powerless controlled and contained.
Central to my argument that bloggers are re-appropriating the Internet in order to create an I-Space for their own meanings and pleasures is the idea that the cyber "place of containment" is the corporatized Internet.
Note that I use the term "corporatized" in the sense of "for profit".
Thus, I posit that the rise of the corporatized net had closed off or silenced various groups and individuals who, previously, were front and centre online. This included intellectuals, artists, students and hobbyists.
A primary strategy of the dominants has been the need for space creators to be ever more technical in order to create space and voice online. As HTML morphed into XML, basic scripting morphed into Java scripting, simple imagery became Flash and pseudo-interactivity, the demands of the technology served the corporatized net’s agenda by closing out the individual and moving the corporations, with their endless store of resources, to the heart of the cyberplace.
The individual was never expected to be able to learn or master the new, wide range of technologies needed to create their own I-Space from which they could attempt to gain prominent voice online. Thus were they contained or silenced, kept in the place set aside for them by the dominants, out on the fringes of the I-Space.
It is my observation and assertion that in the online place that was the pre-blog Internet, the increasing demands for more imagery, more sound, more motion reflected, not the dreams of the individual, but rather the desires of the dominants. Using this pseudo-motion online to represent them, the dominants were able to minimalize text-only voice and reduce the previously active netizens to a passive audience of consumers who obediently and willingly gave their eyeballs and dollars to the dominants, feeding the dominants profits as a result.
(There is an intersection here between Michel De Certeau’s theories and language, and that of Stuart Hall, with his ideas on imagery. I will explore and explain this intersection at a later point.)
This hunger for profit on the part of the dominants led to the rise of many insidious online practices that are now common, such as banner advertising, intrusive pop-ups, and “pay for display” search engine positioning. Eyeballs, not ideas, became central.
It lead to the positioning of the Internet as a place for commerce, rather than a space for community, a place for shopping carts instead of a space for conversation, a place of passivity rather than a space for activity. Dollars, rather than discourse, became prime.
I argue however, that blogs are changing this. While the ideas behind blogging aren’t new, and there have always been areas available in the pre-blog era (such as Geocities and Tripod), these spaces were bought up by corporations, moved to the fringe of the cyberworld and once again put to use for eyeballs and dollars.
Have you visited a personal website on Tripod recently? With the many and varied advertising strategies perennially popping up at you with each click of your mouse, individuals’ words which constitute voice online are drowned out in the cacophony of marketing-related images that beg you to click away from the individual voices and back to the controlled for-profit centres.
In other cases, such as The Globe, the two conflicting desires for corporate place around individual space clashed, and the individuals’ spaces were silenced when the corporate place failed to create enough profit to continue its existence.
Being human, we notice imagery before we notice words, simply because the colour inherent in imagery catches the eye in a way a word cannot. In this way, the corporatized place stays predominant to the viewer of the personal site, keeps the individual’s words contained in their space according to the dominants’ strategies.
I believe that this is changing, as a result of the birth of the blog. Through blogs, individuals are once again able to creatively commute the technology resources to their purpose. Their online space can once again be based on the active process of choosing and generating meanings and pleasures, in their own words, through devices of their own choosing, within communities of their own creation.
They are able to route around the places of containment online to once again bring discourse and community to the fore. They have reclaimed their voice and created their own I-Space within the corporatized online place.
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