Blogs don't have to speak with a dissident voice, but they owe much of their value and potential to the fact that collectively they have been speaking with a dissonant one - cutting against the grain of more traditional channels.
For this reason alarm bells started to ring when I read The Catalyst Group's report on blogs and usability. The term usability has obvious connotations of utility, or what Marxists refer to as use value. You don't have to be a Marxist though to spot how the Catalyst report insistently ties usability to "consumer acceptance", a would-be synonym for exchange value.
Theodor Adorno famously referred to high art and popular art as two halves of an integral freedom which don't add up. He distinguished autonomous creativity, undertaken privately, with commercial creativity which tended towards commoditisation. It seems to me that up to now blogs have straddled this divide quite nicely. Yet Adorno warns us that mass culture is hell-bent on crushing all insubordination to the logic of exchange value and works continuously to re-absorb discordant strands within communications culture.
It's probably no coincidence that I began blogging myself at a time when I became fascinated with the fragmentary observations of Jean Baudrillard and the astute and autonomous journal entries of Samuel Pepys, and I sincerely hope however that blogging can maintain its distinctive stylistic form as it comes under extreme integrative pressure from 'the mainstream' in the next year or so.
In his introduction to Adorno's The Culture Industry, J.M. Bernstein writes that:
"Fragmentary writing is modernist, it's logical and syntactical dislocations the cognitive equivalence of dissonance in music. Fragmentary writing functions through the multiplication of logically distinct perspectives, each one of which is something of a theoretical caricature."
If this sounds at all like this blog, then I'm doing something right!
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