All blogging is local

From home cooked theory:  Self-branding.

A key aspect of my online identity that I’ve been made aware of this week is the way that I have used my blog to express feelings of loneliness, isolation and disaffection with Brisbane since moving here. While those feelings have certainly had a real basis at times, particularly early on, it’s increasingly apparent that reading about those feelings on my blog has led people to make gestures and suggestions about my life (from coffee dates to flatmates) based on that knowledge. It seems that sometimes they have been offended when I haven’t recognised these offers as indications of potential friendship.

So, without dissecting this too much, and in the spirit of expanding this into a wider discussion about blogging voices, I simply want to ask: what is it about a blogging voice that makes people believe what they read is the truth? Is it because of the perception that blogging is ‘authentic’, or that it must be real if it sounds emotive? If the first point is true, why do people educated in post-structuralism still desire authenticity in an author (I wouldn’t imagine many people who aren’t university graduates would be interested in this blog)?

Alternatively, are these gestures a sign of a lingering suspicion, even amongst bloggers and blog readers, that people blog in order to overcome some inadequacy in their life? Do the generally negative theories of blogging affect how people interact with bloggers they know in person? Be honest!

I don’t tend to assume that people read my blog, so why would I recognise their gestures as inspired by my online state? How to negotiate an unspoken accumulation of knowingness? At least the take-up of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and various other ‘mood’ displaying platforms will make this experience more common for others. If I have described the performance of online presence in terms of ’self-branding’, as the circular for tomorrow’s discussion suggests, then describing myself as lonely seems a clear case of having been tarred by my own brush… except for the quite important fact that I consider writing itself to be my main form of retreat from feelings of loneliness. I’m starting to realise that the combination of being online and archived means that I now risk being made to feel responsible for my textual self in real life, long after the moment of motivation to write has passed.

In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler claims that the Internet has allowed us ‘to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in social ties,’ he argues, ‘it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections’ (15).

One of the reasons I describe my current research in terms of ‘online intimacy’ is that I’m trying to find a way to start talking about these weaker connections that so many of us are experiencing without the negative connotation that ‘weaker’ implies. I want to develop a way of describing a new range of friendship functions that take place in mobile cultures - which is to say both online cultures and cultures where people are often moving from place to place for work. In this changed context, people can’t necessarily rely on, maintain or access the forms of security that existed when the terms ‘friend’, ‘contact’, ‘acquaintance’, ‘colleague’, ‘buddy’, or even ‘relationship’ were originally formulated.*

The classic example of the moment is ‘the Facebook friend’ (which means what, exactly, beyond a cheezy, zeitgeisty, middle-class chuckle?). But I’m also thinking about the whole range of reliable and valuable connections that exist, from your regular E-bay vendor to the e-mail romance that becomes Real (often after a lot of doubts and experiments, precisely because of our lack of a positive vocabulary for these new forms of connection).

What I’m most concerned about in all of this is that we seem unable to recognise that the inadequacies of our concepts - and hence the superficial anxieties about blogrolls or who is friends with whom - are mere surface symptoms of fundamental economic and employment changes. These changes mean that a hell of a lot more people will have to leave their established and comfortable intimate communities and develop new ways of identifying who can be relied on, and who will be on their team. What it also means is that only those who accumulate enough links in the right ‘textual neighbourhoods’ will prosper.

*The hollowing out of workplace hierarchies in information jobs means that the ‘co-worker’ tag and the preeminence of ‘the team’ overwrite previous forms of hierarchy and division of labor (not to mention division of affect - a whole new realm of immaterial workplace stress which, particularly after the past two weeks, I need to learn to handle better, or find another job altogether).

Comments

[MC]

Thanks for the mention, Jodi. I love it when we cross paths in this way! I've been re-reading a Lauren Berlant essay today (it's part of a collection on 'affect theory' I'm editing with Greg Seigworth). I think some of her ideas might help us out. Will write more on my blog - M