Blogging zwischen Nihilismus und Zynismus

--- Geert Lovink hat sich mit seinen medientheoretischen Einschätzungen der Blogosphäre sichtlich verausgabt. Da wird vieles angestochen, aber so richtig weiß der Autor dann doch nicht, was er aus dem ach so postmodernen Phänomen machen will. Ein wenig Denken mehr auf den Punkt hätte dem an sich lesenswerten Text über das Thema "Wir bloggen, also sind wir (nichts)" gut getan. Ein paar Auszüge:

Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports. ... blogs fit into the wider trend in which all our movements and activities are being monitored and stored. In the case of blogs, this is carried out not by some invisible and abstract authority but the subjects themselves, who record their everyday lives. ... Net cynicism is a cultural spin-off from blogging software, hardwired in a specific era and resulting from procedures such as login, link, edit, create, browse, read, submit, tag, and reply. Some would judge the mere use of the term cynicism as blog bashing. So be it. Again, we're not talking about an attitude here, let alone a shared life style. Net cynicism no longer believes in cyberculture as an identity provider with related entrepreneurial hallucinations. It is constituted by cold enlightenment as a post-political condition and by confession described by Michel Foucault. People are taught that their liberation requires them to "tell the truth", to confess it to someone (a priest, psychoanalyst, or weblog), and this truth telling will somehow set them free. There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities. In lieu of a common definition, we could say that cynicism is the unpleasant way of performing the truth. ... There is no possibility to simply ignore blogs and live the comfortable lifestyle of a twentieth-century "public intellectual". Like Michel Houellebecq, bloggers are trapped by their own inner contradictions in the Land of No Choice. The London Times noted that Houellebecq "writes from inside alienation. His bruised male heroes, neglected by their parents, cope by depriving themselves of loving interactions; they project their coldness and loneliness on to the world." Blogs are perfect projection fields for such an undertaking. ... We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. ... Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal but a condition whose existence one must recognize. "We blog," as Kline and Bernstein say. ... Blogging is the opposite of the spectacle. It is flat (and yet meaningful). Blogging is not a digital clone of the "letter to the editor". Instead of complaining and arguing, the blogger puts him or herself in the perversely pleasurable position of media observer. ... Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What's declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. ... As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pajama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media. Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise. ... Translating Karen Carr's insight to today's condition, we could say that the blogger is an individual "who lives in self-conscious confrontation with a meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power." ... What is blogged is the relentless uncertainty of the everyday. Whereas entrepreneurs colonize the future, energized by collective hallucinations, bloggers expose the present they find themselves caught in. Blogging is the answer to "individualization of social inequality". It hits back, not so much with collective action, but with massive hyper-individual linking. This is the network paradox: there is simultaneous construction and destruction of the social at hand.

Schlußfolgerung: Weitermachen!