Blogosphere: The New Political Arena [Paperback]

Michael Keren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2006 | ISBN-10: 073911672X | ISBN-13: 978-0739116722

Examining the web logs, or blogs, of individuals from a variety of continents and cultures, this book highlights the nature of 'blogosphere,' the virtual public arena of the early 21st century, which alters the traditional world of media and politics. It characterizes this new arena by the unique combination of a fresh voice of emancipation and a deep sense of melancholy and isolationism. This journey through blogosphere highlights major forces operating in today's politics: apathy toward political affairs, resistance to globalization, a quest for redemption through religious fundamentalism and terrorism. Michael Keren compares bloggers to terrorists, arguing that while the methods advocated by the two groups are obviously very different, they both represent a similar trend, one of diversion by respected but disenchanted citizens from the norms of civil society to a fantasy world in which the excessive use of words_or bombs_would make everybody listen.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Blogosphere, Michael Keren examines nine blogs posted by individuals from exceedingly different backgrounds, and draws some provocative conclusions about the emerging nature of virtual public space-a place where emancipation meets melancholy. Do political bloggers actually participate in politics? How are individual voices and online communities faring at a time of the increasing corporate commodification of cyberspace? And how do geographic region and personal circumstance affect the potential impact of blogs on offline lives? Keren poses and explores these and other questions in this timely, intelligent, and engaging contribution to political science, lifewriting theory, and cultural studies. (Craig Howes )

In this fascinating book, Keren illuminates a new online dimension of civil society. But, unexpectedly, life here is not a collection of vibrant, active citizens, pursuing their individual interests and acting cooperatively. Instead, Keren finds a politics of melancholy on the Internet, which demonstrates 'a fetishism of ideas rather than a presentation of interests, solipsistic discourse rather than an orderly exchange, and a lack of clear frameworks of social obligation and political responsibility.' Portraying a colorful variety of bloggers, Keren brilliantly dissects the emerging political life of the twenty-first century. (Joel S. Migdal )

About the Author

Michael Keren holds a Canada Research Chair in Communication, Culture and Civil Society at the University of Calgary and is visiting professor at Haifa University. He is the author of many books, including Zichroni v. State of Israel (Lexington Books, 2002).

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Lexington Books (September 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073911672X
• ISBN-13: 978-0739116722
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,166,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Michael Keren: bloggers are melancholic, politically passive and can't connect with society, March 13, 2009

By 

Jill Walker Rettberg (Bergen, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Paperback)

At first I thought the title of this book must be wrong: I thought it would be about political blogging. But the introduction says that the book looks at blogs from the perspective of life-writing and autobiography. The bulk of the book is in the middle nine chapters, where each is a close reading of a single blog: kottke.org, megnut.com and Lt. Smash are the ones I'm familiar with, but the selection is lovely and broad, including blogs from India, Africa, Iran, Israel and Canada in addition to the US, and the gender balance is good too. None of these blogs is particularly political, and the chapters I've read so far do not seem to deal with politics, other than the complaints that the sites aren't political enough, which makes the title misleading. However, the author is a political scientist - so perhaps he sees politics more broadly than I had imagined?

Unfortunately, the introduction makes it clear that Keren looks at blogs through a very limited perspective. He argues that blogs are melancholic, in the sense of the narrator of Dostojevski's Notes from Underground - this man lives in a mouse hole and feels fundamentally outside, excluded from society - and in Freud's sense:

In "Mourning and Melancholia", Sigmund Freud defined the distinguishing features of melancholy as profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings "to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (12)

Well, that sounds just like blogs, don't you think! Keren further notes that melancholics need to talk about their melancholy all the time. But they don't do anything about it - they're fundamentally passive (p 13). So the idea of the melancholic blogger fits nicely with the image of bloggers as bizarre exhibitionists. Keren quotes Freud:

It must strike us that after all the melancholiac's behaviour is not in every way the same as that of one whoe is normally devoured by remorse and self-reproach. Shame before others, which would characterise this condition above everything, is lacking in him, or at least there is little sign of it. One could almost say that the opposite trait of insistent talking about himself and pleasure in the consequent exposure of himself predominates in the melancholiac. (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia", p 157, qtd by Keran, p 12)

Interestingly enough, Keren (who doesn't blog himself) notes on page 14 that when he attended conference panels on blogging, he was "probably the only melancholic in the room". No wonder his glasses are rose-coloured, sorry, melancholy-coloured. Keren saves his argument from this apparent paradox by claiming that he's not labelling individual bloggers as melancholics, he's talking about the blogosphere (or "blogosphere" without a "the" as he insists on calling it) as a whole. The point is the "norms apparent in [the blogosphere's] thought and action, and those emerging in blogosphere are often norms of withdrawal, not of enlightenment" (14). On the next page he's even clearer: "The withdrawal and rejection identified wtih melancholy, I would like to argue, is not a personal quality of bloggers but a systemic attribute of blogosphere."

In his analyses, however, Keren does not maintain this separation of the general politics of the blogosphere and the individual disposition and life of bloggers. Actually, in the paragraph right before that last quote, he already confuses the two: "Millions of individuals write their lives while giving up on living them" (14). And although he argues that he's only analysing the "characters (whether fictional or real) that emerge from these diaries" (11), in his analyses there is little awareness of this - or at least, any such awareness is not expressed explicitly.

So Jason Kottke, for instance, is for Keren a melancholic who is characterised by "political withdrawal" (30) who lives "on the edge of urban life" (31) based on the lack of discussion of political issues on kottke.org (which is after all a blog about design and technology) and on a couple of posts where Kottke describes feeling out of place among all the designer-clothed people on 5th avenue and another where he describes rules for ignoring each other on the NYC subway - hardly unusual New York experiences. Keren's interpretation is broad and absolute, though: "The perception of life on the edge makes political activity seem futile - something others are engaged in" (31). Kottke.org, for Keren, is the center of an internet "cult", where readers respond only to issues that deal with cyberspace and "virtual reality" (26). In summary, Keren finds Kottke.org is characterised by "withdrawal into virtual reality, cult-like relations forming in blogosphere, and an overall political passivity" (35). "The cult seems generally disinterested in anything happening in the world unless it is related to the cyber-world" (30) - yes of course! It's a blog about technology and design!

There are some reasons to read the book. I enjoyed Kottke's analysis of Lt Smash's site, where he doesn't go on about melancholy but instead sees a transition in this soldier's writing from everyday descriptions of a civilian thrust into the army to a way of presenting the war that is far closer to shiny media portrayals in movies and presidential addresses. This is an interesting argument.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally an explanation I understand, July 24, 2007

By 

D. Bercuson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Paperback)

This book finally explains what is going on out there in the so-called blogosphere. By using real examples of actual bloggers and showing the general patterns of behavior they reveal, I can now see what "real" blogging is - exhibitionism and entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with that!

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ludicrous., February 16, 2007

By 

A. Lowe "lowea" (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Paperback)

It's clear that this "academic" does not understand the purpose of personal weblogs and assumes anyone writing online is doing so for reasons beyond simply communicating their thoughts and opinions. I'm particularly offended at his completely misguided and slaphappy bashing of Pamela Ribon, whose professional and personal successes on- and off-line are well-known and appreciated by thousands of readers.