Have we figured out what blogging is yet?

The following is from one of my favorite blogs: So What? Kim Dot Dammit Live..

I mean, who are these characters/people/demons we have created out in cyberspace, and when does the division between reality and creative fiction blur and when does it separate? And why is it that this kind of creative identity feels so much more taxing on the internet than it does on paper (say in a newspaper column or a literary series or something like that)? Is it because blogging is still a somewhat “new” medium, and we don’t understand the parameters of it like we do in other forms of writing that have endured the test of time? Are we creating the parameters and dismantling them as we go? Is it because there are no boundaries because of the open space of the medium?

Kim has a more intimate and creative relation to blogging than I do. But her questions haunt me, nonetheless. Maybe it has something to do with the affective structure of blogging as a practice. That is, for those who have blogged a while, who read and write on blogs regularly, who comment, who encounter others in the settings blogging produces, even artificial personae produce feelings. In a way, it doesn't matter if the other person is 'really' or 'authentically' who they present themselves as. The feelings incited are incited, nonetheless. The person's voice and presence on different blogs over time is a recognizable entity, a someone with a life, a someone who exposes herself or himself to others in this medium. For those whose blogging produces something like community, there is no anonymity. Even trolls have distinctive personalities.

In this setting, we have different responses to arguments, conflict, wars. For some, these are just a game; none of us are real. This strikes me as a fundamentally psychotic way to relate to other people, a presumption that emotions incited through typing are not felt and that one then has no responsibility for that incitement. Or maybe the presumption is more properly perverse, an attempt to hurt and harm and in so doing prove how transgressive one really is (and thereby call the law into being).

Conflict and disagreement are difficult face to face. They are also difficult online. It sometimes seems to me that there was, for a while, a fantasy that mediated conflict wasn't really conflictual, that it was one giant wiki of the multitude, filled with productive desire and love. So trolls were an issue, a violation, a shock to newbies easily dismissed by cynical old hands. But the feelings they incited were real, nonetheless.

Comments

[Bill]

I like your post. I learned more about a blog then I have from any other article.