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Eurozine - Blogging, the nihilist impulse - Geert Lovink

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Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism would be an ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws and that "truth" is inescapably subjective.

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Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition.

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post-virtue".

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It is the move from the festive McLuhan to the nihilist Baudrillard

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Blogs are neither religious nor secular. They are "post-virtue".

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No matter how much talk there is of "community" and "mobs", the fact remains that blogs are primarily used as a tool to manage the self.

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Claire E. Write advises blog writers not to offer the possibility to leave comments. "A few bloggers maintain that blogs that don't allow reader comments are not 'real' blogs. Most bloggers don't follow that line of thinking and believe that reader comments turn a blog into a message board.

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They are better understood as conversations.

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This tendency to remain on the surface, touch a topic, point to an article without even giving a proper opinion about it apart from it being worth mentioning, is widespread and is foundational to blogging. How many of the postings, we can ask with Cornel West, are Socratic questioning?

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icholas Carr has called the Web 2.0 hype, blogs included, "amoral".

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And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor.

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hegemony of the amateur.

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cultural 'flattening'

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'the flat noise of opinion' - Socrates's nightmare.

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ghost communication". "Networking begins and ends with pure self-referentiality,"

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Suggesting solidification/diversification implies that the primary motivation behind engaging online is to participate in purposeful dialogue, to be educated and educate.

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On top of that, not only do bloggers usually refer and answer only to members of their online tribe, but they have no comprehensive idea of how it could look to include one's adversaries.

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The pushy tone is what makes blogs so rhetorically poor.

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Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting.

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The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own

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Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

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As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits.

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Despite countless attempts to feature blogs as alternatives to mainstream media, they are often, more precisely described as "feedback channels".

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In that sense we could also say that blogs are the outsourced, privatized test beds, or rather unit tests[9] of the big media.

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Cynicism, in this context, is not a character trait but a techno-social condition.

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blogs are a gift to humankind that no one needs.

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Can we talk of a "fear of media freedom"? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by "their" channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as "a psychological problem" because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon "the uniqueness and individuality of man".[49] "The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."[50] The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the "community", "swarms", and "mobs" that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

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