Working Through / Blogging

I received an invitation to write on the subject of blogging, and why I blog. This allowed me a much needed reflection on why it is that I choose to devote time to blog, or post parts of my dissertation online. In a way, reflecting on why I blog carries the answer within itself; I blog to reflect on what I write. Yet, I won’t be so presumptious as to argue that this was the reason I began blogging in the first place. Originally, it was a desire to keep up with developments of web technology and cyberculture, but it has since grown into something different.

First off, I began blogging about my personal life in Danish over at my other website dissemination.dk, although at first I wrote in English and began mixing in academic work among the posts on my everyday life. However, that turned out to be a very schizophrenic activity; blogging in English for my Danish friends. I realized that I was in fact trying to achieve two things in one blog - communicate everyday experiences and funny events to my friends, and write in-depth thoughts on cultural processes. Writing to my friends in English seemed stupid, but working at an English Department most of my academic work centered on Anglo-American culture, something I imagined being of interest to other than purely Danish audiences.

This caused me to create a new blog (this one, obviously) where I deal with my (academic) interests in contemporary culture. It also points to an interesting division - or should I say split? - between my blogging activities. My ‘personal’ Danish blog is for me and my friends. It is written for them, especially during the time I spent at Wayne State University in Detroit. My other blog is directed at those who have similar academic concerns and interests to me (which includes several of my friends), but this is a much more diffuse group of people - most of whom I don’t even know. I say ‘most’ without knowing how many readers I might have, so in the end, my academic blog has ended up being for the one person that I do know reads it; myself.

But here is a split again, for if I wrote only for myself, why publish it to the web? In other words, blogging splits me, since I write not only for me but also for others, yet in this process I allow an internal process - thinking - to become external. This external, (im)material form of my thought is my blog, which is not part of me. My mind is no longer confined to my body, my though process becomes virtual, so is it still me? Gray Kochar-Lindgren writes in TechnoLogics that we, as free ideal beings, are not “somehow constrained, captured against our will by the machine-assemblages in one version or another of the iron cage of materialism. It means that the very form of our being, in the simplest form of daily life, is to be technobios, to be cyborg”. (Kochhar-Lindgren, TechnoLogics)

I am connected to the web and the web is part of me. No longer a division but a node along the network. No longer individual but plural. Me writing to myself but inevitably also to others - just as I am written by others, those that I cite and link to. Blogging becomes a way for me to work through things I read but only by paradoxically placing them exernally to myself, while also integrating them into my own consciousness.

Yet all of this examines only one part of the process - the ‘me’ end of it, which is often seen as such paramount importance to bloggers. To what extent are my readers part of the reason why I write, and can blogging be anything but narcissism? Jodi Dean (herself a blogger) has written on the fame motive of blogging, stating that

“Given that blogs are ways to communicate with strangers, to establish a connection, a knowing, with those one does not know, is blogging necessarily implicated in a desire for fame? Does blogging provide existential reassurance? Many of us are quite open about wanting to increase the hits on our blogs, about playing to the audience, wanting more viewers. And some bloggers who do this are clearly not in it for the money–they don’t have ads on their sites. So, is it a desire for fame of some sort?” (Dean, “The Fame Motive”)

Dean argues that fame is not the proper term when dealing with academic blogs, but rather that a sense degree of reassurance or registration must be involved in the process. We do wish to be read, noted, commented and yes, to some extent admired. At the very least, knowing that we have somehow been useful is reassuring, something noted by Brett Bumeter at There’s Something About Harry: “In publishing my articles on the internet and in a blog, I receive the benefit of sharing my knowledge and small kernels of wisdom to others that might find it useful in the future.” (Bumeter, “Purpose of Blogging”)

Following from Dean’s point that we as bloggers want to be read and Bumeter’s idea of sharing knowledge, is the concept of dissemination, a concept very tightly connected to my interests contemporary culture and its transformations. For Derrida, dissemination is the division of meaning; the tendency of textual meaning to move out in all directions and so resist closure. Dissemination becomes the endless play of meaning both as divided and doubled; because words have too many meanings there will be an indefinite number of meanings, meanings proliferate. When my writing is placed on the web, it will disseminate in ways that I cannot control, but which will hopefully inseminate other people’s thoughts.

It is this dissemination and insemination which seems to me to point toward the social aspect of blogging. While a blogger cannot control who reads the blog, nor control what is done with the contents, there is a spirit of offering and comunity inherent in the way that material is placed online. Of course, there is always the question of plagiarism, but blogging concretizes one aspect of academic culture; we are always influenced and inseminated by other people’s thoughts. While we give credit where it is due, it does not change the process.

I don’t mean to glorify blogs or hail them as revolutionary innovations which will change the nature of knowledge sharing. Rather, I wish to focus on the fact that knowledge increases the greater access we have to it and the more knowledge there is. Knowledge is hardly self-generative, but it is viral in the way it spreads, and blogs have most definitely become part of this process.

This brings me back to the question of the split I located in blogging, and my final point. Working through blogging allows me to articulate my thoughts to myself - to work through some of the textual ghosts, encounters with the Other, that all reading (in its broadest, cultural, sense) entails. That this can only be done by externalizing these thoughts - by blogging - seems to me quite fitting. That my process allows others the possibility for an inseminating encounter with me as Other must be the only appropriate, generous response.