2007

Lovink, Geert

Blogging, the nihilist impulse

http://www.eurozine.com./articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html

Weblogs or blogs are the successors of the '90s Internet "homepage" and create a mix of the private (online dairy) and the public (self-PR management). According to the latest rough estimates of the Blog Herald,[1] there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their "nature" and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this. It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture, and social networking into account.

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasizing their counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of an unfolding process of "massification" of this still new medium. What the Internet lost after 2000 was the "illusion of change". This void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through freely available automated software.