PII. Social Architectures

Many bloggers make recourse to tools and software packages that are widely and often freely available online, and which are similar but not identical to one another in the constellation of features they provide. Even minute differences, though, in the ease with which a popular ready-made software package might facilitate the inclusion of images or the provision of ways for readers to comment on blog-posts will have a significant impact on actual blogging practices on the ground and so on the generic development of the form.

danah boyd, for example, has recently pointed to the ways in which discursive communities that have coalesced around the use of “LiveJournal” software are often discernibly different from those of the wider “blogosphere” with which it tends to be identified.

She suggests that part of the reason that support groups and communities celebrating marginalized enthusiasms might have drifted more into the orbit of LiveJournal than to alternate packages like, say, the likewise popular “Blogger” or “Movable Type,” is that it provides an architecture that very readily facilitates control over the extent to which texts “publicly” circulate, providing for publication to a wide range of more intimate reading publics, consisting only of family members, for instance, or just friends, or other broader but still restrictive affiliations.

boyd’s discussion registered the concerns of some users of LiveJournal that valuable cultural and personal prosthetic practices mediated through the software might be undermined or even altogether lost in the aftermath of LiveJournal’s purchase by a new company whose sensitivity to these issues was imperfectly known.

This is a story that nicely reverberates with many of the preoccupations of this dissertation at once, because it highlights so many of the ways in which digital networked publication practices and the social software and media technologies that facilitate them are palpably reconstituting the lived demarcation of public from private life in this historical moment. Practices of collaboration facilitated by social software (like blogs) are not just reshaping the everyday experiences and expectations and values that freight our sense of the “private” and the “public,” but they are mobilizing as well a whole set of fraught discursive quandaries around the ongoing “privatized” provision of “public” goods.

You know, I imagine a very substantial proportion of readers a moment ago felt a considerable sinking feeling at finding such an elementary definition and then somewhat belabored description of blogging appearing so early on (or at all) in this essay. Some, indeed, may scarcely have been able to resist heaving a histrionic sigh at the very sight of it.

These sufferers likely cleave more or less neatly into a few clearly discriminable camps: First, there would be those for whom blogs are altogether too newfangled and strange and likely-as-not too weighted down with technophilic hype to deserve much in the way of serious scholarly attention in the first place. Second, there will have been those familiar enough with blogs and comparable web applications to know that the profusion and evanescence of the forms they are taking threatens to render any delineation of such terms nearly meaningless when all is said and done anyway. And finally there would be those for whom blogs are in any case yesterday’s news, already long superseded by newer tools and the always inevitably more arresting newer cultural formations that are incubating them now and will surely accommodate them later.

Although it is a commonplace to hear technological development described as though it were monolithically “progressing,” “accelerating,” “emerging,” “converging,” or what have you, the truth is that the prosthetic practices in which we invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools and techniques are of course unutterably multiform. And so it will always be difficult to pitch technocritical discourse at the right level of generality, to the right expectation of familiarity, in the right moment within a given developmental arc to render its interventions useful to more than very specialized audiences.

Now, according to Merriam-Webster, visitors to their online dictionary looked up the term “blog” more than any other word in 2004, and the American Dialect Society selected the term “blog” as their own “word of the year” at the same time as well. That the American Dialect Society chose “metrosexual” as the prior year’s word with comparable fanfare delivers us forcefully into the dilemma at hand. Clearly, something is afoot in the aborning “blogosphere” but just what is it? and does it matter? and if it does, how much? and how on earth are we to know? and just who is best positioned to tell us so? Or, to ask these questions via another phrase from the archive whose vexed overdeterminations perfectly exemplify the dilemmas at hand, “where’s the beef”?

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