FW: <nettime> A Rift Among Bloggers...

[Miguel Caetano <MiguelC@casadosbits.pt>]

>A Rift Among Bloggers
>By DAVID F. GALLAGHER

>t is one of the enduring cycles of the Internet: the techies build a=20
>utopia and then complain when noisy crowds crash their party.

>This time it is happening to Weblogs. Five years ago a few=20
>programmers pioneered this form of hyperlinked online journal,=20
>posting their thoughts on technology matters and personal musings.=20
>Later they built Weblog publishing tools for nontechies, and a vast=20
>spectrum of Weblogs - blogs for short - quietly bloomed.

Despite the momentary hype and all the folklore, trendism and hysteria
that surrounds them, we must reckon thar blogs are here to stay. In my
mind, they embody - often in primitive ways, for sure - the concept of
Collective Intelligence coined by Pierre L=E9vy. The problem with the
debate about blogs is that normally the discourse is very basic, centered
in questions like: Are bloggers journalists? Is the information that they
publish accurate and ethical? Are blogs compared to a news outlet?

These questions are useless and vain if we don't dare to go beyond the
surface level and explore new ways of blogging, enlarge the range of
cultural and political options offered by these new technologies that
help us create in half an hour our own information channel. Here we have
in front of us the chance to materialize complete freedom of expression in
a time were culture and communication are being bought by big multimedia
corporations. Is there anything more DoItYourself than blogs?

On the other side, I see blogs as the personal diaries of the 21st
century.
The big difference is in the openess of the information stored in each
"media", compared with the closeness of the manuscript diary. Blogs are
something like a collective construction, albeit personal in its essence.
And that is profoundly post-modern, sorry for the clich=E9. Its core ideas
are the same of open-source software and Peer-to-Peer Networks.

In the end, it doesn't matter if blogs are journalistic publications,
gossip-makers, joint collections of essays or even confessions of a
teenager. We do what we want AND what technology enable us to do with 
media.
Blogs should be more examined in their technological, aesthetical and
cultural terms, taking in account its durable effects and long term
context in media history. As like other communications technologies, if
they are considered as a temporary trend, the analysis is going to be
short-sighted and trivial.

Miguel Caetano

Casa dos Bits - Edi=E7=F5es, Lda.
Av. Miguel Bombarda, n=BA 70, 4=BA andar=20
1050-166 Lisboa - Portugal=20
tel.: +351 1 21 780 31 70
email: miguelc@casadosbits.pt
website: http://www.casadosbits.pt

Visite o canal de Tecnologia: http://tek.sapo.pt



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