Speed Interview for Il Manifesto on Blog Theory

Interview with Geert Lovink
By Nicola Bruno, for Il Manifesto (February 19, 2007)

NB: Why is blogging a nihilistic practise? Do you refer to a historical condition (such as post-modernism in Western countries) or to a specific development of social software that is behind blogging?

GL: Blogging is our contemporary form of self-publishing. When we blog we put information out there. We contextualize ourselves through links to material elsewhere on the Net and through the so-called blog roll, a list of favorite sites and bloggers. The nihilist aspect comes in when we see blog communication in relation to mainstream broadcast media that still claim to represent their audiences. Bloggers do not represent anyone but themselves. In that sense they level out, zero out (literary meaning nihil) centralized meaning structures. Authorities, from the Pope to the Party and the Press no longer shape our world view. At least, I have to careful, this is potentially the case. More and more people are moving away from ‘old media’ when they look for meaning, information and entertainment. This insight is not very shocking and it particular journalists who depend on the broadcasting industries who get upset when you state the obvious as it is undermining their legitimacy.

NB: Let’s look further into the relationship between mainstream media and blogosphere. You write that blogging is not related to “gatekeeping”, but to “gatewatching”. Blogs are feedback channels, not news-creators. What do you think about current crossbreeding of blogging with social bookmarking? Isn’t’ it gatekeeping? And grassroot information sites, isn’t it news-making?

GL: The sites you mention are neither high traffic nor do have a lot of impact. Social bookmarking and alternative newsmaking are marginal in comparison to the roughly speaking 100 million bloggers worldwide and the tens of millions who use Flickr, MySpace or YouTube.  For instance, it became quickly known that only a hand full of contributors to the Digg collaborate news filtering site were responsible for the majority of postings. This tendency is similar to the blog elite that links to each other and get all the traffic and media attention. Do not think that this environment is not sensitive to manipulation and that’s all decentralized and therefor democratic and progressive. Blog culture in the USA is primarily male, white and conservative. It is indeed interesting to position Indymedia in all this as early 2000 this site had some very interesting features. Unfortunately the Indymedia focussed to much on becoming a press agency, a web portal as it could not deal with the wider community aspect. Indymedia could have been more successful if it would have dropped its narrow Chomsky-WSF line, its politically correct NGO attitude, and would have engaged in the rich variety of its early tribes. Indymedia had very interesting social networking aspects and multimedia features. It is such a pity that we now depend on Rupert Murdoch and Google. There is hardly any social networking site that is clearly open source and non-profit. Nonetheless, time and again there are openings, chances, like the Howard Dean campaign, that lead to interesting software initiatives.

NB: Why bloggers have not been able to find an alternative to mainstream ideology? Do you think the top-down model is destined to last long?

GL: Blogging has no roots in progressive social movement. It’s critical of US mass media, but the overall tendency is rather conservative-libertarian. But what blogs did is that they opened up the media landscape in a way that the Internet hasn’t done yet. So far top-down media are not in real danger, but newspapers for instance could lose vital advertisement revenues. Certainly we’ll have TV and Hollywood films for a long time to come. Maybe blogs are not the ideal vehicle for ‘new media’ to reach massive visibility. On the other hand, we may not recognize television and film anymore in the way images are delivered. In Australia they use ‘screen culture’ as a wonderful synthesis. I am not sure we are there yet, as the separate disciplines and production modes can be pretty stubborn. In the end it’s all about screens, from tiny cell phones to gigantic urban screens on city squares. The ‘moving image’ will have multiple outlets–more than we can manage.

NB: In your essay you write that in the blogging context “explicit self-referential group building is still a new concept”. And you make the example of blogroll, a tool designed to express only agreement (homophily). Which are main risks of self-referentiality? And, how could we overtake this problem? Developing better social-software architectures?

GL: It wouldn’t be a bad idea to forget communitarian ideas for a while and, to say it with Max Weber, move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in cyberspace. The way to do this is through software. Different architectures will result in other discursive structures and social relations and this is why we should not let the software to the geeks but spread the techno competence to other groups in society. What we need are agonistic programmers, if I may refer to Chantal Mouffe. We need to get a better understanding of the importance of early adaptors. The millions that move in years later simply do not have the possibility to, for instance, change blog culture or the games aesthetics of Second Life. It is indeed a problem that people do not link to their opponents, or the people you dislike. The result of this is inbreeding and dumb crowd behavior. Time and again we see what happens with social and artistic movements that have strong self-referential practices. At first it look rich but after a while the inward-looking tribes fall apart. We may see this as a natural phenomena, but the problem with the Internet is that is here to stay. Structures of new media that are invented now will have a long shadow in the future. This is why we can look down at software development as if it were a minor detail. Software structures our future society.

NB: In the essay you point out another blogging obsession: statistics and measurement. Why do you stigmatize this attitude?

GL: Everyone is vain, right? But why further cultivate self-obsessive, narcissistic gestures? “I got more incoming links than yours.” Let’s no go there. There is enough penis enlargement on the Net. The true potential of the Internet is in The Long Tail as Chris Anderson correctly described it. The conclusion of the Long Tail would be to move away from the few sites that attract all the traffic, delete the obligatory blogrolls and start to explore the social dynamics and financial possibilities of specific Long Tail applications. This is crucial for freelance writers, musicians, but also activists and movements. What the Internet needs is sustainable economic models, away from the dogma that we have to give away everything for free. This model should not be based on traffic stats but instead on peer-to-peer micro payments, real money, so to say, not the crumbs of Google.

NB: It seems you don’t like too much the Power-Point style of blogging writing…

GL: Criticism is unrelated to taste. It doesn’t matter whether I like power-point presentations or not. In fact, I do not encourage PowerPoint because it blocks conceptual development. What power-point culture does is summarize discourses without making explicit what lines of thought and approaches are behind the bullets. It is McKnowledge. Blog culture can be amazing self-reflective, resulting in some really interesting writing. Powerpointilism reduces complexity. In some cases that might be useful, like if you want to attract traffic to your site. But in the end it is part of a marketing approach. Again, I got nothing against marketing but what will have left to monetize? We should not reduce blogging to the production of advertisement slogans and instead practice wild and savage forms of writing that explore the unknown, and not just list the known.

NB: Do you find business is altering blogging architecture? If yes, what is the danger?

GL: No, I do not see the danger of commercialism. The universe of blogs is vast and rich. Advice from sites like http://www.problogger.net/ how to make a living with your blog are well meant but only few will implement all these extra features and change their style of writing in such a way that suddenly everyone will jump on their blog. It is well known how difficult it is to make a living of blogging at the moment, unless you have positioned yourself as a ‘citizen journalist’ who contributes to the limited list of issues that news agencies and opinion leaders are setting.