Blogging as cybercultural practice
Many claims have been made for the utopic potential of blogs and blogging. They have been hailed as a revolutionary expansion of the electronic agora, holding the potential to reinvigorate the public sphere and thus foster a new participatory democracy for the young century. They have also been acclaimed as a unique tool that will improve efficiencies in everything from marketing to education.
Blogs come to us as the latest in a series of technological innovations that have been hailed for their revolutionary potential (Mitchell 1999). They share in the utopic aura of the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, the wireless network and most recently the ipod.
On the other hand, blogs have also been dismissed as just another software program that encourages the internet equivalent of vanity publishing. Hailed as citizen journalists by some, bloggers are rejected, as just the latest incarnation of the scandal/attack instincts of tabloid journalism, by others. In education, blogs are pitted against their predecessors, (primarily discussion boards and email) which are now seen as “traditional” technologies.
While this is a simplistic overview of the blogsphere and its representations it begins to signal the complexity of the field in which blogging occurs and tries to understand itself. It signals something of the “it” moment in which blogging is currently being introduced to a wider public. However it is also indicative of the mechanistic way in which blogging is being explored and understood. Too many people are asking what blogs can do before they really understand what blogs are. I believe this is particularly true in the two spheres that concern me most as a journalism educator.
Although there has been some wonderfully innovative uses of blogging by both journalists and educators I believe that the media and the academy as institutions are still asking the wrong questions about this phenomenon. The standard questions are most often posed in terms of productivity: how can this technology enable us to do what we already do but more efficiently? How can we reach more people? How can we encourage more discussion?
Ulises Mejias (2004) reminds us that technologies influence not just what we do but how we think and that a mechanistic exploration of new communication technologies will not help us harness their real potential.
Each communication technology in fact reshapes our relationship with the world: how we describe the world through language affects how we think about the world, and vice versa. This process has become more complex as technologies appear more rapidly, leaving little time for reflective assimilation. Furthermore, new communication technologies bring about not just additive adjustments to already existing options to communicate, but complete changes to media environments and ways of knowing the world.
I believe we will only unleash the full practical potential of blogging when we pay due attention to its place in this complex field of new communicative practices. We need to look at blogging, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a broad palette of “cybercultural” practices, which provide us with both new ways of doing and new ways of thinking.
David Bell (2001:2) suggests that cybercultures are best understood through an integrated investigation of their “material, symbolic and experiential dimensions”.
We experience cyberspace in all its spectacular and mundane manifestations by mediating the material and the symbolic…thinking about what cyberspace ‘is’ and what it ‘means’ involves its own hypertextuality, as we mingle and merge the hardware, software and wetware with memories and forecasts, hopes and fears, excitement and disappointment. (2001:2)
At the material and experiential level participation in cybercultures occurs along a continuum that begins with activities which are now almost ubiquitous such as web surfing, email and googling, the use of more specialist techniques such as RSS feeds, instant messaging, peer-to-peer file transfer and podcasting through to participation in emergent movements such as those centred around open-source software or creative commons, “copyleft” initiatives. Further immersion in cybercultures would include experimentation with a range of virtually augmented realities and the cyborg amplification of the human body.
Martin Jacobsen (2002) argues that these cybercultural practices have given rise to new discursive norms that distinguish it from both literate and oral cultures.
Where oral rhetoric is embodied and literacy is disembodied, a cyberdiscursive rhetoric is virtual, characterized by remotely centred interactivity and instantaneousness…the concrete rhetoric of orality and abstract rhetoric of literacy become dynamic in cyberdiscursivity via the continuous, productive nature created by virtuality and user agency…oral rhetoric's aggregative structure and literacy's hierarchical structure give way to an emergent structure in CMC, pieced together by a user who does not recognize a structure until it develops before her through a random choice of fragments which seldom, if ever, remain cohesive, and which usually become impossible to trace…the communal nature of oral rhetoric and the individual nature of literacy move toward an idiosyncratic rhetoric in which reader/user agency transforms the textual experience into an epistemologically challenging game which shatters rules as basic to print texts as one word following another.
From: O’Donnell, M., 2005, "Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology," Blog Talk Downunder, 19-21 May 2005, Sydney, Australia. (Download pdf)
