Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Michael Keren: bloggers are melancholic, politically passive and can't connect with society, March 13, 2009
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.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally an explanation I understand, July 24, 2007
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!
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ludicrous., February 16, 2007
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.
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