The internet promised revolution, but it hasn’t happened yet. The purveyors of such a promise continue to proseltyse and move on to the next ‘killer app’. Yet, there is a reluctance to critique their ideas. A reluctance perhaps based on a need to believe not in technological determinism but in technological hope. Men landed on the moon because we hoped for it enough.

In Chapter 1 of ‘Zero Comments’ Lovink however, shows no such reluctance and whilst recognising the merits of blogs is quick to remind us that ‘the internet is not a place apart’; that the zeitgeist in which blogs reside is amenable to cultural critique. But before the critique, what are the merits of blogs?

1. Blogs are a phenomenon that post-date 9/11. Blogs didn’t emerge in the counter-cultural, anti-state and pro-market era of the early development of the internet when bulletin boards and email were used to propagate a broadly libertarian philosophy. Nor did they grow out of the the dot com boom. Their emergence just after (or as a response to?) 9/11 was not only a cry for comment, a desire to voice, but also represented a desire to connect. Posts, link lists, RSS feeds, and comments mobilise and legitimate a desire to belong. The social network (that later morphed into My Space and Facebook) began with the software architecture of the blog. Its early developers and adopters laid a blueprint as influential to informal news ‘n views as Powerpoint has been to corporate presentations.

2. ‘Blogs were the actual catalysts that realised democratisation, worldwide, of the internet’ (4). The fact that blogs priviledged content over code meant that though never a particularly fashionable vehicle for the geeks, they did have massive, widespread popular appeal. This democratisation roughly equates to visibly engaged citizens but also to a certain normalisation (the ‘template’) and banalisation. One of the effects then of democratisation of the medium has been standardised banality.

3. Blogs are vague media. They stand in a liminal space between public and private, the intimate diary and online publishing. They stand there not for any progressive reason but because they ignore the boundaries and rules of the (publishing) game. In that sense they are social experiments from the ground up. In that sense they also raise important questions about the status of privacy.

4. Blogs do relate to mainstream media and arguably find a comfortable fit with mainstream media. In acting as gatekeepers and gatewatchers (Bruns, 2006) they provide a feedback channel for mainstream media without challenging it directly. Less alternative than supplementary. More focus group than subversive.

5. But blogs have changed the dynamic of media diffusion from broadcast to narrowcast; from lecture to conversation. Whilst not engendering a new form of writing, blogs as personal voice(s), have extended story-telling into the digital fray and joined it to communities.

Lovink places the rise of blogs in a cultural zeitgeist that he describes as cynical. This cynicism is part of a post-political cold enlightenment where truth has become an ‘amateur project’ and where ‘knowledge is sorrow’. The nature of blog architecture manifests the imperative to exhibit. Exhibitionism in blogging is empowerment – but the empowerment of individualism and not of collective solidarity. Whilst some bloggers claim to be creating a public space most do not. Instead they maintain a ‘salon’ culture where a collection of ideas, links and modes of self-presentation perform a Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’.

We are operating in a post-deconstuctivist world in which blogs offer never-ending streams of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known 20th categories. Blogged cynicism emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity with interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurances can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis and gender perspectives. (17)

This takes Lovick to the idea of the nihilist impulse in blogging. Although understanding themselves as the purveyors of the death of mainstream media, blogs offer no alternative to it. Participatory media may, according to the blog utopians, sound the death knell of mainstream, top-down media, but the blogosphere has yet to move from a self-referential environment where debate, when it does occur, does so in closed web-clouds of like-minded people. Dissent is discouraged – we don’t spit in the living rooms where we’ve been invited to sit. Blogs are a reacting against rather than a creating of. In their ubiquitity, always-on state, blogs provoke more a stream-of-consciousness feeding from than a feeding to. Lovick uses Cornel West’s categorising of nihilism into evangelical (Bush), paternalistic (the democrats) and sentimental (a staying on the surface of things, a refusal to recognise the complexity of issues) to explain the kind of nihilism blogs manifest. This last, sentimental nihilism, is built into the architecture of blogging – it is the techno-social condition. It is the blog ‘post’, the clever ‘aside’, the post-as-link, the filter, the gatewatcher … watching, filtering but rarely delving deeply into the substance. The blogosphere then is less a cloud than a whisp of smoke.

Lovick then asks; can it be otherwise? Can blogs become insurgent or do we need another kind of software to harness the power of the networks? Seeing blogs in the wider landscape of technological experimentation and change he thinks not. When the ‘sphere’ leaves the ‘blogo’ there will be nothing left but self-reference and empty comments on rumours and news scoops.

Blogs express and map micro-fluctuations of opinions and moods. In an era of rapid change, crisis, fear, and uncertainty, we can all indulge in such a pool of internlinked human resources. But at some point it is time to shift gears and change scene. It is hard to accept that the course of human-kind is bound for irrelevance. The technology caravan moves on and as do Internet users. (38)

Lovink provides a nuanced, critical appraisal of blog culture and its environs. Neither dystopian nor utopian, he doesn’t bracket easily in the Clay/Benkler versus Carr/Keen debate. Instead, he leaves nuggets for thought and materials for creative re-mix.

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