Group blogging must be akin to the 'great on paper ideal' oft referenced by the eternal naysayer when building the received/standard argument for why X (e.g. socialism) can never work. Quietly passing over the mundane irony that I'm contesting the "it only works on paper" argument not on traditional paper, group blogging embraces all those values anathema to contemporary notions of individual credit/fame/celebrity: group participation, quasi-anonymity (by choice), bi-directional feedback and above all else, group authorship leading to that ultimate democratic idea, mutual responsibility.What we are actually responsible for, only time will tell - but the ethos of mutual responsibility is an inspiring one: I may not be my brothers keeper, but in a sense I am my brother's tweeter. What/how I choose to contribute reflects on the blog/concept as a whole that organically emerges day-to-day, post-to-post.
By now you've sighed and thought "how obvious!" To that I say: obviousness is often a co-pilot of sincerity and desktop publishing can certainly use a healthy tincture of sincerity.
In regards to desktop publishing, blogging has freed us from the Desktop and turned "publishing" into the useful verb it was always envisioned to be. Group blogging when successful can only free us from the trappings of narcissistic personal blogs whose intentions, while usually sincere, are mired in self-(over)reflection, self-(over)indulgence and self-(over)censorship. The aesthetics of group blogging may lack the elegance of one, single vision, but it arms the (our!) march with an inner complexity with all those emergent properties expected of the riot of ideas.
aiming for nothing short of the death of the liberal subject, bro! indeed, one shall see that this blog stages a valuable intervention on our contemporary late-modern crisis of subjectivity via a 'performative emancipation from western civ's myth of self-containment' (miss u, ego!)
ReplyDeletethere is no singular 'I' when we say in song, "totes, totes"
IF HOUSE WAS A NATION, THIS WOULD BE ITS MINISTRY OF INFORMATION
ReplyDelete"The abstractness of contemporary thinking is thus ambivalent. Like abstractness, the mass ornament is ambivalent…The human figure enlisted in the mass ornament has begun the exodus from lush organic splendor and the constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity to which it relinquishes itself when it stands in truth and when the knowledge radiating from the basis of man dissolves the contours of visible natural form.”
ReplyDeleteIt was always already there man.