Subjectivity and Identity
One of the things I find most fascinating about blogging is the personality of them. Of all the sources of information, news, and tidbits of opinion on the internet, blogging is one form that has as its very spirit a personal touch. Bloggers post in the first person. Their opinion is evident in everything presented and the language is often colloquial and appeals to a sense of familiarity with its readers despite being not only publicly accessibly but also targeted to reach a wide public audience that the author cannot expect to know personally.
Blogging can be seen as symptomatic of post-modernity, as it is highly subjective and attempts to connect with the wider world of the “information superhighway”. In contradiction to Gray and Driscoll’s comment that modern communication technologies will ‘destroy subjectivity’ (Gray and Driscoll 1992:39 in Escobar 94:216), blogging has become a way for people to have an individual voice, express it through modern technologies, and have these expressions received by audiences that they would not have been able to connect with previous to such technology. Similarly, blogging goes against Roland Barthes’ (1974) postmodern predictions of the death of the author as the text of blogs retain the personal touch of authorship.
I think this subjectivity and familiarity is the very reason that blogs have become so popular in internet culture. It is the human voice which lends authority to these blogs. Sheila Lennon (2003:77) argues that to be interesting, ‘the blog must have a discernible human voice. A blog with just links is a portal’. Blogs show that peoples participating in internet culture do not want objectivity in information or news; people want opinions, views, preferences and even biases. Information Week quotes Adam L. Penenberg, a New York University journalism professor:
‘I think the public's appetite for consumer-created content on the Web (like blogs) mirrors its taste for reality shows, celebrity gossip magazines, talk radio, and cable TV shows… The public craves intimacy. We want to feel like we know the people we read and read about, listen to on the radio, watch on TV, and click to on the Net.’
Lennon argues that ‘[e]ven when bloggers don’t editorialize much, their interests and bias will be evident in what they choose to point to’ (2003:77). So it is not just familiarity that is being created or fabricated. Identities of bloggers are being created, constructed, and perhaps even contrived.
By expressing their voice in the content of blogs, bloggers are also creating an identity and an online presence. Mortensen and Walker describe blogs as existing on the border of public and private (2002:256). So is a blogger’s ‘virtual’ identity different from their ‘real life’ identity when it is both private and public? The subjective voice of the blogger in fact creates a new subjectivity of the blogger. The blogger creates his/her subjectivity and identity through blogging, so that their online or ‘virtual’ identity is an aggregate of all of the personal information, world views, and experiences that they present in their blogs. Miller and Slater (2000:4) argue that the ‘notion of ‘virtuality’ … suggests that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to ‘spaces’ or ‘places’ that participants can treat as if they were real.... But by focusing on ‘virtuality’ as the defining feature of the many Internet media and then moving on to notions such as ‘cyberspace’, we start from an assumption that it is opposed to and disembedded from the real’. Miller and Slater go on to add that ‘We need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces … that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness’ (2000:5)
However, the question remains of to what extent is the virtual identity of bloggers embedded with their ‘real life’ identity. The ‘real life’ identity of the blogger can sometimes be anonymous. It can also be purposely made apparent. If the identity is made known to the blog’s audience, then there are possible implications for contortions of that ‘real life’ identity through the medium of the blog. In the electronic panopticon of the blogosphere, bloggers are aware of their own visibility and even encourage surveillance of themselves through choosing to expose something of them selves to a public audience.
Blogging can be seen as symptomatic of post-modernity, as it is highly subjective and attempts to connect with the wider world of the “information superhighway”. In contradiction to Gray and Driscoll’s comment that modern communication technologies will ‘destroy subjectivity’ (Gray and Driscoll 1992:39 in Escobar 94:216), blogging has become a way for people to have an individual voice, express it through modern technologies, and have these expressions received by audiences that they would not have been able to connect with previous to such technology. Similarly, blogging goes against Roland Barthes’ (1974) postmodern predictions of the death of the author as the text of blogs retain the personal touch of authorship.
I think this subjectivity and familiarity is the very reason that blogs have become so popular in internet culture. It is the human voice which lends authority to these blogs. Sheila Lennon (2003:77) argues that to be interesting, ‘the blog must have a discernible human voice. A blog with just links is a portal’. Blogs show that peoples participating in internet culture do not want objectivity in information or news; people want opinions, views, preferences and even biases. Information Week quotes Adam L. Penenberg, a New York University journalism professor:
‘I think the public's appetite for consumer-created content on the Web (like blogs) mirrors its taste for reality shows, celebrity gossip magazines, talk radio, and cable TV shows… The public craves intimacy. We want to feel like we know the people we read and read about, listen to on the radio, watch on TV, and click to on the Net.’
Lennon argues that ‘[e]ven when bloggers don’t editorialize much, their interests and bias will be evident in what they choose to point to’ (2003:77). So it is not just familiarity that is being created or fabricated. Identities of bloggers are being created, constructed, and perhaps even contrived.
By expressing their voice in the content of blogs, bloggers are also creating an identity and an online presence. Mortensen and Walker describe blogs as existing on the border of public and private (2002:256). So is a blogger’s ‘virtual’ identity different from their ‘real life’ identity when it is both private and public? The subjective voice of the blogger in fact creates a new subjectivity of the blogger. The blogger creates his/her subjectivity and identity through blogging, so that their online or ‘virtual’ identity is an aggregate of all of the personal information, world views, and experiences that they present in their blogs. Miller and Slater (2000:4) argue that the ‘notion of ‘virtuality’ … suggests that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to ‘spaces’ or ‘places’ that participants can treat as if they were real.... But by focusing on ‘virtuality’ as the defining feature of the many Internet media and then moving on to notions such as ‘cyberspace’, we start from an assumption that it is opposed to and disembedded from the real’. Miller and Slater go on to add that ‘We need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces … that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness’ (2000:5)
However, the question remains of to what extent is the virtual identity of bloggers embedded with their ‘real life’ identity. The ‘real life’ identity of the blogger can sometimes be anonymous. It can also be purposely made apparent. If the identity is made known to the blog’s audience, then there are possible implications for contortions of that ‘real life’ identity through the medium of the blog. In the electronic panopticon of the blogosphere, bloggers are aware of their own visibility and even encourage surveillance of themselves through choosing to expose something of them selves to a public audience.
posted by Alida van Klink @ 6:50 PM
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