Blogging Again

Another blog post about blogging, apologies, but blogging seems to be the only type of digital activity I've been actively engaged in for some time. You'll notice I didn't manage to write another post, tag anything else etc as I had hoped; digital promises seem particularly hard to keep. I will be completely honest and confess my ignorance on the subject (and all things digital), up until last year I had never even bothered to read a blog let alone write one. I continue to be amazed by the seemingly infinite array of blogs populating the internet, and it seems that the blogosphere shows great promise. If we were to take Habermas' view of the public sphere, then the blogosphere would seem to be an almost Utopian arena for democratic political voice. But will it fulfill that potential? It seems that in the blogosphere, as with most digital developments, where there is great promise there is also a problematic reality in equal measure. A key case in point would be political blogs. Very generally the concept of the blog could prove to be an aide in change in politics. Individuals may have greater agency to speak their own mind and get their thoughts and opinions disseminated among a much larger audience via blogs than may have ever been possible in the pre 2.0 era. But as the technology has been taken up and utilised we have seen that rather than being a means of more democratic political change, political blogs have tended towards being echo chambers, simply reinforcing existing ideas among groups of like minded individuals. Of course this is a gross generalisation and there have certainly been instances where blogs have delivered on their potential helping people to exact change, but this seems to be a mere drop in the political blogosphere ocean, a blip on a vast radar. Their potential is further undermined by the social economics surrounding them. At the end of the day, with the number of new blogs emerging at any given moment, the majority of blogs will garner little if any attention, and simply be lost in the endless flow of the internet. When I add to this the final and most crucial problem with blogs- that many are simply seemingly pointless, vacuous textual noise (Perez anyone?), my hope for the real world value of the blogosphere becomes almost nullified. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but very generally speaking there are a lot of blogs about a lot of nothing getting lost in a lot of information out there. Does this mean they aren't a valuable tool? Certainly not, many people enjoy the entertainment value of the fluff floating about the blogosphere. I myself have even become addicted to seedy world of the cupcake blogosphere- a dark underground movement of sugared dainties all exposing industry secrets in the hope that the rest of the world will make better cupcakes. But I have this feeling that perhaps the fantastic possibilities of the blogosphere will largely remain just that, vain possibilities, and wasted resources.javascript:void(0)

See: works by Jurgen Habermas.