Reading the selections for this week I cannot help but ask: while Blogging represents a new and rich mode of communication, one that is returning us to traditional dialectic, how will our emotions find new viability within this new communication landscape?

Blogging is a rich form of communication. The frequency and intensity of this modern invention surpasses classical limitations. Blogging (what has been argued to be the present day “commonplace book”) has taken us by storm. Combining journal writing, email correspondence, and research into one practice, I feel that it is the mode of communication we have been waiting for. The journal writing aspect of blogging appeases the exhibitionist in us (something that has been created by our “confession”-based culture). Reading other blogs allows us to satisfy our voyeuristic tendencies in an “unmediated” way, as Miller and Shepherd describe. Researching various topics with no set agenda gives us the power to mediate our own material. Each individual imprints a unique style of design (within limits), writing, and linking. We can browse thousands of blogs, ultimately tuning into and becoming part of those that suit our specific interests. Between creating, researching, reading, and browsing, both sides of the brain are used. Essentially, for the new blogger generation, boredom is highly improbable.

Is it possible that through blogging we may return to the fundamental conventions of dialectic? According to Socrates, dialectic – a system based on the search for “transcendent truth” – is not possible “when the written word separates a speaker from the living presence of an audience” (Gage 716). Blogging’s personal-“face-to-face”-real time style of communicating brings the author and audience closer together than do other modes of communication. Take academic writing, for example. Up to this point, scholarly/academic writing has worked to sever the reader/writer bridge. The immediacy is lost, giving the mechanics of writing undue emphasis. It is, in a sense, a rehearsed construction. Furthermore, Mortensen and Walker suggest that the “ritualized form” of academic writing “limit[s] readership to those who are rigorously trained to read a certain style of writing” (261). This has its place, no doubt, but this separation of the speaker from the “living presence” of the audience may be what blogging seeks to change. Through blogging, dialectic is made “authentic” again. Blogging also allows us to employ Aristotle’s view of “writing…as a means of discovering knowledge,” not as an obstacle (as Socrates believed) or merely as a source of power (as the sophists believed) (Gage 718). According to Mortensen and Walker, “[w]eblogs are written in order to share experiences rather than just display them…” (261).

I will now express a few related thoughts and pose a few questions. I see Blogging as an extension of post-modernism. We can pretend that we are real without necessarily having to be. Have we, by escaping into the fantasy and “reconstructed” history of post-modern art forms (i.e. music, television, film), unwittingly created a new outlet for our pathos? The personal nature of blogging (by facilitating flaming and perhaps other as yet undefined social phenomena) heightens the pathos in which we communicate. I’d like to explore how the virtual nature of this new mode of communication provides bloggers with a safe space to express their emotions. Furthermore, how may Spinoza’s idea of ethical vs. unethical frame our views of emotion within the context of blogging?


WORKS CITED

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