blogging restructures consciousness?

The following story suggests that it does. Last month, Chris Bowers of the progressive political blog MyDD, underwent a small existential crisis brought on by a ham-fisted report on public television about political blogging that bungled a number of basic facts, including Bowers’ very existence on the MyDD masthead. The result was a rare moment of introspection in an otherwise hyper-extroverted medium:

…I admit that the past three years of blogging have altered me in some rather dramatic ways that do, in fact, begin to call very existence into question. I am not referring to the ways that blogging has caused a career change, granted me political and media access that I still find shocking, almost entirely ended my participation in old social circles and presented me with new ones, allowed me to work from home, or otherwise had an impact on the day to day activities of my life. Instead, I am actually referring to an important way in which blogging has altered my very consciousness. After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage–the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.

First off, I’m reminded of something Sebastian Mary was saying last month about moving beyond the idea of “authorship” and the economic and political models that undergird it (the print publishing industry, academia etc.) toward genuinely new forms of writing for the electronic landscape. “My hunch,” she says, “is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.” Little is understood about what the collapse of today’s publishing systems would actually mean or look like, and even less about the actual experience of the new writing — that is, the new states of mind and modes of vision that are only beginning to be cracked open through the exploration of new forms. Bowers, as a spokesman for the new rhetoric (or at least one fledgeling branch of it) shines a small light on this murky area.
OngReading.jpg This also brings me back to Bob’s recent excursion into Walter Ong territory, talking about the possibility of a shift, through new networked forms of creativity, back toward something resembling the collectivity of oral cultures. Bowers and his blog might suggest the beginnings of a case study. Is this muting of the interior monologue, this waning sense of self as a “distinct individual,” the product of a kind of communication that is at once written and oral — both individualistic and collective?
Ong called the invention of writing the “technologizing of the word,” a process that fundamentally restructures human consciousness. In this history of literacy, the spoken word is something that wells up directly from the human unconscious, whereas written language is expressed through artificial (i.e. human-made) frameworks, systems of “consciously contrived, articulable rules.” These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. Literate cultures are thus cognitively different than oral ones.
Bowers’ confession suggests that this progression is being, if not reversed, then at least confused.
The kind of communication that he and his fellow rhetoriticians have been orchestrating in recent years in the blogosphere — not to mention parallel developments elsewhere with wikis, message boards, social media, games and other inchoate forms that feel as much like public spaces as documents — has a speed and plasticity that approaches oral communication. A blog post isn’t so much a finished opus as a lump of clay that readers and other bloggers collectively shape through comments and discussion. Are these new technologies of the word (and beyond the word) restructuring consciousness?
Bowers concludes:

We political bloggers have spilled a great deal of ink on analytical, meta-blogosphere commentaries, and on how we would like to se the political process be reformed. I think we can do an equally great service–both to politics and to blogging–by spilling a little more ink on ourselves.

6 thoughts on “blogging restructures consciousness?

  1. KF

    Thanks for this reference, Ben; that, as you put it, blogging restructures consciousness — or at least epistemology — is part of the argument I’m making in my new “book.” As Nancy Armstrong argued in Desire and Domestic Fiction, the rise of the novel was crucial to the philosophical and political shift whereby readers came to understand themselves as “individuals,” I’m arguing, in part, that newer forms of networked narrative (and personal blogs foremost among them) have helped facilitate a sense of the self as a networked subject, always functioning in a profoundly socially situated and highly interconnected fashion. (An utterly inadequate one-sentence summary, meant only to say, yes, exactly! And here’s evidence of that interconnection…)

  2. Gary Frost

    Two observations on formats for conceptual thought.
    The emergence of language and conceptual thought (posing one thing in terms of another) is much earlier than the advent of writing. (see J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World, 2004). Writing is a much later technology, albeit dependent on such kenetics and haptics as the scribe drawing the word.
    Secondly, has any consideration of blogging on consciousness considered cyborg relations (interdependent machine/human expression)? These play an increasing role with the emergence of the keyboard interface at the beginning of the 20th century. They are well demonstrated by the Linotype machine and Linotype operator that enable daily news publication.
    Walter Ong did visualize dominance of orality in contemporary communication, but, I believe, only in context with modern media. In other words, he did not visualize reversions of consciousness. Such layered assembly of consciousness is also described in the works of Antonio Damasio.

  3. jeff

    Another thing Ong poses at the end of Orality and Literacy is the open-nature of the electronic (as opposed to Ong’s understanding of the closed nature of a printed text). The wiki/weblog/portal of online writing, with open-editing, circulation of ideas through multiple spaces at once, links, comments, responses, etc. does tap into that idea. To extend Ong’s idea, “agency” (as suggested in the quoted excerpt above) itself is open; not in a hypertext fiction sense (alternative paths) but in a Matthew Fuller/Kate Hayles/Bruno Latour media ecologies-actor/network/theory way (whew, what a mouthful). Agency is based on relations – adding to, and subtracting from.

  4. Jamie

    I think Chris is either just getting older or slipping into solipsism, though these two things are not mutually exclusive. Of course, he could just be working too hard in the real-time environment of the Internet. I often forget that I exist only to find that I have just wandered into a meeting I was late for and everyone is waiting for me.

  5. Gary Frost

    Another diffusion of persona as a result of screen based projection of self is relentless typographic rendering. The easily displacement of handwriting or typewriter copy by the typography of computer display has disguised the fact that most on-line presentation is still in flux and not the author’s final word. Most on-line publication activities and applications are still presenting writing, editing and revision associated with collaborative authoring.
    Why is on-line publication referred to as “posting”? Perhaps it is because “publishing” is still the threshold between manuscript and print and the on-line presentation, however final, is associated with traditional broadside posting on the great billboard of the web.
    Today relentless, typographic rendering has made a holographic, authorial document indistinguishable from any other copy or republication. There was an ambiguity between writing and publishing in the manuscript era, but it was due to distinguishable copies.

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