ANTH245-2007-11-19

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Blogs and|as Selves

Business

• Final papers -- please discuss
• Responses -- new plan

Recap

• Salam Pax and Second Life
  • What kind of community?
  • What kind of person?

Segue

• Todays readings focus on the topics of community, identity and "vulgarity"
• These themes intersect with themes discussed earlier in the coruse
• Manovich
  • These activities are a kind of databasing of the self
• Lyotard
  • the representation of self-hood in new media
  • not merely passive -- since self *is* text to some degree [ASK--What is self?]
  • Posts on the network:
    • "A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. One’s mobility in relation to these language game effects (language games, of course, are what this is all about) is tolerable, at least within certain limits (and the limits are vague); it is even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, and in particular by the self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance. It may even be said that the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected “move,” with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes."
  • And thwarting the language games ...
    • "We know today that the limits the institution imposes on potential language 'moves' are never established once and for all (even if they have been formally defined). Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell stories in a cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the barracks? The answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops; yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits of the old institution are displaced. Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the game."
• Anderson
  • The way that national identity is used as a resource in this new discourse

The Vulgar Spirit

The analytical problem: "vulgarity"

• High-brow vs. Low-brow blogging

The approach: "deep play"

• Blogging is a perfect example of "deepl play"
• Deep Play: "cultural sites where multiple levels of structure, explanation, and meaning, intersect and condense, including the cultural phantasmagoria that ground and structure the terrain on which reason, will, and language operate but cannot contain."
  • Deep -- many layered
  • Play -- situated action; a "game" with improvization (e.g. hacking), not a "plan"

Blog as a "speech genre" shows these effects

• Private diary? Personal letters? Op Ed? News? Effects of all
• Some side effects
  • privileging of short, effective speech, not long essays
  • uprootedness form context --> source of "planning" mentality
• FORM (Outer)
  • Links, commens
  • Temporal
  • Reciprocal linking and status
  • I would add: CHUNKED
• CONTENT (Inner)
  • Self-referential
  • Blog as body, self, avatar
  • COMPARE TO BODIES / PEOPLE
  • Importance of style
• 3 Styles
  • Taxicab
  • Journalistic
  • Bathroom Graffiti

Genre and Hegemony

• There are good reasons for "vulgarity" -- blogging is something like orality
  • But orality is always code for community

Websites as Traps

• Pre-blog

Web as Kula Ring

• See exhibits

Art objects as technologies of enchantment

• Similar to Bateson
• Focus on the art as a kind of "agent"
  • something that produces real effects
  • remember our model of communication? The signal is a thing that has effects--not a "message in a bottle"

Genres of web site

• Correlates aesthetics and meta-messages with target audiences
  • Like flowers and bees
• Personal
  • Nationalism as a resource for personal identity
  • Vehicles for forming a relationship
  • The need to control the effects of the site -- "moving too fast"
  • Not end-points
  • Teenage sites -- screaming for MySpace (you can understand the demand)
  • COOLNESS
• Business
  • No nonsense and plain -- why?

Traps

• Aesthetics have social efficacy
• Metamessages matter

Space-time

• All of this activity creates a web of social "space time"
  • EXPLAIN CONCEPT

Objectifications

• Web sites as avatars
• Avatars are the external devices by which people participate in society-constructing institutions and acquire identity through recognition (fame)

Blog as Self

• "My Blog is Me" -- literally

Blogs as Avatars

• Also follows Gell
• Blogs substitute for self, as web pages do
• Like magical figures -- explain idea of sympathetic and contagious magic
• Elements
  1. "Index": the art object; Colby's "cultural model"
  2. Artist: Sender
  3. Recipient: Receiver
  4. Prototype: Message, Colby's "template"
• KEY: The "index" carries the imprint of all three items [DRAW]

What kind of person is a text?

• Blogs are self-consciously constructions of self
• How does this relate to the vulgarity debate?
• In addition, the content is subordinated to connections -- text as exchange item

== The Great "I Am"

• The ethic of authenticity
• "Brain dumps"
• Do they do it for personal reasons, though?

Visitors

• Contradictions -- concerns about self-representation
• Not for friends
• For other bloggers
• Inversions in the pub -- person as substitute for the blog (!)
• Blogs have a life of their own ...

Conclusion

• Bloggers have a folk theory of text that is not without merit, despite lack of sophistication about theory ...