BLOGS: OWN OBITUARIES. THE INTERNET MADNESS
We have discovered the PIN code that grants us access to the world. The Internet has claimed other mainstream media and created unparalleled communication possibilities that have not yet been known. I am now writing these words thanks to it. Thanks to it, there are a number of feminist web pages. An untamed forum of comments and publications has developed. A garden of Eden for women?
A blog constitutes the casual side of the phenomenon; it is like a homely spot. The Web behind the scenes. Blogs are typically run by women. On the blog.pl website they make up 60% of the registered users. The everyday life of a blogger consists in the revealing of a personal life that becomes known and is commented on by others. Personal blogging then involves being exposed to and surrounded by strangers, intruders, curious onlookers and peeping Toms.
To keep a personal online diary means to spin a web full of senses and implications. Also, to track the threads that connect you, as a blogger, to others with similar interests, and to await being paid a visit. The Guest Book is the most comfortless stretch of a blogger’s land, the entreaty for revisits and request for adding an entry that should challenge you to share more. Well, should.
A while ago, the teaching common room of Bunkier Sztuki (a contemporary art gallery) has organized a lecture on the issue of blogs and their lack of literary value. As if it was about literature.
It is a well-known fact that blogs, above all, are ghettos of the alike. Just track the links to other blogs – the ‘threads’ of topical connections between the messages – and you will have no doubt. Similar people stick together.
The Web – taking all of its features into consideration – and a blog – with the same considered, should both be the places of typical womanly bustle. It follows the need of intimacy and being in touch, the need to confide and unbosom oneself, to meet and talk. Each user is cultivating and looking after his/her own little garden, getting about his/her own little piece of land and the neighboring areas. Such cultivated space – neither of absolute privacy nor absolute social background – was first brought to life online about 1997, mainly as a medium necessitated by the needs for fast saving of thoughts, comments and directions of the network navigation. A hybrid of genres. A blog.
Today, a blog is, above all, a showcase where the owner can present their own ideal profile. Blogs can be used as instruments of marketing and political strategies. This could be observed in China not so long ago when the government barred the citizens from accessing private online diaries. The proscription was justified by the fact that blogs display contents too many of which are pornographic, capitalistic and subversive. Now, a department of the Beijing police in the number of 40.000 administrators is watching over the Net.
In Poland the access to blogs is unrestricted. For a charge of less than 8 zlotys you can multi-clone yourself and create stories in which you play the leading parts. That is how new myths and pop culture heroes are born. Blogs indeed present a new vision in the world of process art. In the world of everyday art practised on the Net. They are patronized by a new symbolic representation which does not touch upon any of the deep layers of our imagination nor the history of the world at all, but which instead takes the form of an easily recognizable emblem. That is where their power comes from. Blogs are fragments of personal life stories which, in this way or another, refer to present-day images, idols, examples derived from popular culture. A man and his humanly feelings come first. Then there are everyday bustle, work, the subtleties of relationships with others, school and living in apartment houses that recently has got so popularized. A simple needlework, a play with the remains of a day.
Living their daily existence on the Web, blogs feed on the beauty of entropy. We are enthralled by seemingly distorted images full of shredded emotions and broken impressions. There it is: the power of impression, a stamp on your experience, an attendance record, accurate recording of hours spent on keeping watch. Space practically decontrolled. A comfy couch for guests.
True… anything can happen on the Net.
Intuitively, we associate blogs with what is feminine in art. The association might involve the notion of having our daily routine under control, or the notion of “kitchen and bedroom concerns” that determine the course of domestic life. But maybe this all is just about preserving memory. We still remember when Zofia Turek and Grzegorz Opałka struggled with each other in the media for the victory over detail and a more precise record of the passing of time. Thus, an indefinite chain of numbers and indefinite number of actions. Two incarnations of time: binary system distance and reality show. Two aspects of fear of death and of life itself.
A shopping list, a roll of achievements, a mail of order. A blog seems a test on social tolerance. In this sense it may be identified with teenage diarists’ works. Not without reason. After all, one of the first Polish blog links was the Filipinki website. Personal online diaries of teenage girls are replete with bitterness and dirty little secrets. They lack any degree of critical detachment from their personal lives and the world around them. Their power inheres in their menacing, nasty language and the feeling of loneliness. They belong to the world of ordinary people who deserve the company of one another. The people by whom Lejeune was – and still is – so fascinated ever since he discovered a diary kept by one of his forefathers and set up a new art category of mediocrity. Now the author of “Autobiographical Pact” is studying the blogs of the online journal community of French teenagers.
The ratio of freedom to loneliness stands at ideal proportion on blogs. The project seems to be offering interactive functionality, while the truth is all it has to offer is the illusion of coming into contact for real. It is just an intelligent way of making bloggers fall into deceit of taking part; the frozen “I”. Baudrillard’s model presents some media phenomena of this kind: phenomena of which such exchange and simultaneous cultural confinement are typical.
The process of converting sets of own adventures and experiences into episodes of a series accessible via the Net involves simulation and thirst for attracting attention. It is how show-business works. Aren’t blogs trendy after all?
Each day we turn up at a meeting that was arranged and make new appointments. Most of blog aficionados treat their readings as a substitute of eye-witnessing fascinating trends of events. And someone else’s life as well. Blog-reading feeds an intense personal experience accompanied by the sense of reaching the heights and taking part in the spectacle. The universum of intimacy is replaced by the universum of communication. Baudrillard refers to this mass culture experience using a direct way of expression: the ecstasy of communication. Bliss, then.
The miniature circulation of attention, the checking up on the number of visits, the register of entries, the counter of links. Blogs are phantom-sites that freely go round the Web. They are objects remotely-controlled and fed every day on misleading images of selves or with one particular feature only. The way we can experience this artificial world is discontinuous and instantaneous, as in seeing in flashes. A sudden flash of light and the light dying down. A blog is a small part, an isolated fraction, never a structure itself. The broken network of e-mails and web pages. Still, the artificial world thrills us, and what thrills us even more is the attraction of “reality”, something that actually is happening, something we can identify with. The idea of reality is, of course, determined by actual talents of the bloggers and the degree to which they are creative. There are blogs which allow of a compelling presumption that they are real. They present a provocative perspective or remark and they are intended to cause a reaction provoked by the possibility to meet in the real world. Blogs of this kind become hits and attract biggest numbers of visitors. Visitors hungry for details.
In blogs, the category of “reality” seems to matter most. The readers feel crashed and extremely disappointed when they find out that what lies beneath the words has in fact little in common with the author’s real life. A blog is somebody’s discovered mail, an intercepted letter and triumph of perceptiveness. Each reader has the feeling of discovery and in this sense they can be compared to anyone who looks at Photographs. Here – as well – the pictures of reality have been replaced with the experience of reality. Or better, the experience of living it.
Blogs are cycles. They never generate new embodiments, new images, new worlds and realities, but they create schemes of lifelike, clear and always somehow familiar characters. And the creation process is stimulated by the sentence: it is not a man, it is just a mask.
The use of familiar themes, motifs, plots and images together with the use of possibilities provided by the Internet bring about the grounds for new mythology. The mythology of our little everydayness.
What marks the beginning of each personal blogging? A love story, a story of disillusion, failure and change. Tired of awaiting their own story widely publicized in the media, bloggers try to gain renown on their own. They give rise to a myth based on their own experience and they write it down using the most durable form of record. Maybe we have another response to the “crisis of death” by Barthes? Gravestones which are light, chic, humor- and kawaii-filled.
None of the mass media has ever so far been used and co-created on such a scale. The fourth power handed over to the masses. In this sense blogs make up the anthology of banality and grafomania.
Blogging is the art of play in which masters of transformation, pastiche and postmodern vision have the lead. The phases of blue and pink, single-notes salons, comic book galleries, galleries of forbidden photos, devilish incantations and modern design. Most of these messages are left unclaimed. But perhaps, as Dziamski says, the incompleteness and scatter of information mark the beginning of a new genre in art.
Any author hopes for some tolerance and a bit of understanding. Blogs provide an extensive source of autobiographical literature on which heavyweight dissertations are based. As the researchers suggest, blogs’ recipients should get rid of their stuffy reading habits and anticipations governed by convention according to which esthetic values prevail over the principle of rapport and urge to get to know the sender. Blogs are released from a literary obligation. It has been replaced with the authenticity of experience. It is not easy to say, though, which of the two may be subjected to more devastating criticism.
Blog characters are real people of flesh and blood. At least most blogs are based on the presumption that this is exactly the message which should be conveyed. As readers, we are exposed to the “directness of emotion”, whereas the narrators have the advantage of continuing and letting their newly created identity take roots. It seems important, especially now, in the times of grasping deconstruction when each of us is put to the test on using many identities at the same time.
The Net is a place most suitable for provocateurs and precursors of new meanings. Ania Nacher, supported by the readings of Bauman, says it straight: If it is possible for a person to have many different personalities and identities – excluding the case of exposing oneself to the accusation of suffering from schizoid personality disorder – then it is possible in the Net, with computers playing an intermediary role in communication (Nacher 2002: 204). For blogging is a community. Considering the discrepancies in the ways in which men and women communicate, blogs correspond with the feminine style of utterance. Patching up, soothing, supporting, encouraging the interlocutor, trying to arrive at an agreement. It should seem we have been offered new space for us. A garden of Eden for women.
In the blogs’ area, just as on the entire Net, the identities of travelers are locked in codes, characters, masks or pieces of writing. Human carnality – as an existential category – does not exist; it is subject to digital processing in the style of “queer”. The Net has become a natural habitat of pedophiles, freaks and subversives of different kind who take cover, using pseudonyms to give them skin-deep sense of security. The network of blogs unites communities which normally function as groups making up the fringes of society. Of course, their place in the structure is determined mostly by a common area of interest. Aside from local communities, blogs include seasonal fan clubs, each of which stems from fascination with a particular field of interest shared by its members. Almost any article devoted to the subject of cyberspace supports the thesis that virtual communities constitute an ideal alternative for people who somehow, because of various reasons, fail to find their place in the “real world” (Godzic 1999: 92). But what in our everyday defines the boundary clear enough between the real and virtual world? The two worlds seem to be governed by same rules. The exemption from the first does not mean spot constitution in the other. Perhaps we give in to an old attraction for a new medium?
In spite of everything, blogs satisfy the needs posited by modern culture. They combine their program with the phenomenon of interactivity. Communication, which has become the mark of a new genre, takes a new meaning on the Internet. The exchange of messages on a particular topic is carried on in the actual time and, after all, between real people. The end product of the process is a blog recording, which may perform both therapeutic and artistic functions to a comparative degree.
Does personal blogging stand for a show of the narrator and does the narrator always get the leading part? Or maybe blogs mark the end of the postmodernist approach and, at the same time, the beginning of the project of context as a work most current in art in which the reader can freely wander about? From a perspective of Derrida’s deconstruction strategy, blogging seems a game of chance that is free of subjection and strict context. In this sense, it becomes a process, an everlasting dialogue, re-construction, con-versation, dis-sipation, dis-traction of meanings. Just as our everyday and thoughts are.
At present, modern art is using the category of authorship as a replacement for an author. A project requires creative commitment of a bigger number of authors, including viewers and participants. Blogs implicate creative reception of art. A cognitive function is, at the same time, an auto-cognitive act. To understand means to participate in the writing process. In cyberspace, designing art means designing reality – says Roy Ascott – designing communication systems which function in cyberspace and are conducive to our desire to strengthen human cooperation and interaction in a never-ending process of constructing the world (Ascott 1993). Where on this map is feminism located?
Pop culture means variety. Some people associate the term with the reception of low-grade data, unsophisticated, or even simply plebeian messages. It is common knowledge that feminism allows in art not only what is popular, but also carnal and physical. The two categories do have their place in blogging. It is a complete structure of network femininity which allows what has been so far kept beneath. A feminine discourse, feminine space – however it is interpreted with regard to the gender of a user – opens the possibility to a wanderer personage of unusual transformation in art. Blogs have created a new kind of the character – the wanderer is a woman – a reader – she-flaneur – she-dandy – a stranger. A modernistic paradigm has been broken.
Some of us treat blogs as magazines. The act of reading is combined with unflagging pleasure, the sense of publicity freshness, satiation, eroticism and fullness of being. The line of reception is somewhere between challenge, hedonism and seduction. The audience like blogs just as they like stories about themselves. The perspective of mass culture provokes and makes the audience conform to it. It feminizes its recipients and makes them rely on it by creating a form of erotically based dependency. For blogging means disappearance, dissipation and making use of the privilege of cycle. These narcissist, exquisite and cynical magazines have flirt with the masses. Whereas, for Kopcewicz, readers, recipients, wanderers and masses represent a completely different version of mono-sexuality – lesbianism (Kopcewicz 2001:107). A paradise for women then?
Blogs communicate exactly the same what people do. They are stories about everyday decay, decomposition, reproduction and extinction. Usually they are trite discourses about someone’s so-called life. They are shallow, superficial and hasty records, consumption of some excerption and something apparently smarter and more impressive. Travesties, press clippings, cuttings, snippets, TV gibberish, excerpts from books, song lyrics, receipts. Suffering often provides ideal background to creation, creativity and expression of what Sontag called ‘a form of auto-expression’. The watchword most commonly used by a blogs’ editor is a modern culture slogan: can you feel it? A blog is therefore external memory, a list of daily responsibilities and resolutions towards people you care about. As a serviceable tool, a blog may be compared to a domestic appliance – a fridge in which there is always something left, something uneaten, something frozen. A blog is a promise of fresh, a recall of something like in Photography.
Everydayness brought back to life. Surfing blogs mean starting anew over and over again and confirming one’s identity that is based on mystification and desires. It is a creation in every particular. Projects as of today. The role of a discoverer is assigned to a body. Its role – even greater now than it used to be – is a sign of our times. A body and its attributes on blogs, pictures, templates, the guest book, the number of comments and entries, they all constitute the postmodern emanation of our “I”. They constitute space that is private property, pre-mutated, shredded and subjected to irradiation.
On blogs, the everyday is experienced with a growing glamour (like in TV series), anyone can be someone (like in quizzes), nothing is done with an effort, everything is governed by chance perception (like on TV). You can also commit suicide anytime, which means deletion of your blog and starting again. New incarnation, new look.
A blog is just dreaming about immortality and fame. Embellishment and decoration of own gravestones becomes something more powerful here. It stems from the apotheosis of individualism and courage of one’s convictions. The special space in which blogs are located – the influence of audience and interaction – deprives them of the right to retain sexuality. It is more like a discourse alternative, a style, resultant, like dreams come true and expectations satisfy. There is much of the Lasch’s sexual utopia in it: “everyone is welcome” as a gesture of absolute exchange. A blog is a view, no restraints, no veil. A clear, transparent and detailed message. A substitute of this all can only be found in Japan these days. The culture of Otaku, Idoru and kawaii. The culture of teflon-coated she idols and aggressive avengeresses.
Agnieszka Kłos
Translated by Dominika Szkoda
The article comes from the quaterly “Rita Baum” issue no. 10 (2006)