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Illusions of Freedom (part 1)
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Illusions of Freedom—Kantian Divisions in an Electronic Age
Perhaps the most oft-touted aspect of the Internet (and the World Wide Web in particular) is that it offers unprecedented potential for two-way communication, and that its new communication capabilities will revolutionize our world. According to this school of thought, nowhere will the revolutionary effects of the Web be greater than in the political realm, where the Web’s many-to-many broadcast model will enable real-time communication at dollar costs so low as to be inconsequential, giving us real, pure democracy, for free! In fact, in 1999, Dick Morris declared that the revolution was imminent. In a foreword to his book, Vote.com, Morris (former advisor to President Clinton and the man “often credited with the strategies that led to Mr. Clinton’s move to the center of the political spectrum and his reelection in 1996”1 ) wrote:
This book explains how, by means of the Internet, the Fifth Estate—a new political force—is about to transform American politics. The Fifth Estate is a sort of committee of the whole, made up of all citizens online. The author will probe how the rise of Internet democracy represents the triumph of people’s politics over the power of intermediaries, particularly the power of the press and broadcast media, who make up the Fourth Estate. For the first time since the early nineteenth century, the United States is departing from the Madisonian model of representative government to return to Jefferson’s radical concept of direct democracy.
While the Supreme Court’s selection of the president in 2000 suggests that Morris’s specific claims about the Web’s potential are little more than hopeful hyperbole,2 those claims nevertheless typify the enthusiastic rhetoric of the techno-utopian crowd. Morris joins a loud chorus, for example, in claiming that the Web is poised to topple the Fourth Estate. And while such claims have been made with more and less frequency since the mid 1990s, proponents of the latest focus of techno-utopian Web enthusiasm—web-logs, or blogs—have turned up the heat on what they call the “BigPubs” (big publications or publishers of more traditional media). People who create and maintain blogs—otherwise known as “bloggers”—claim that corporate media do a poor job distributing information, that they are no long trustworthy, that their misleading claims to objectivity lead to vacuous media offerings, and that their days are numbered. Dave Winer, computer programmer and blogger extraordinaire (he claims his blog, Scripting News, receives tens of thousands of hits each week), has gone so far as to wager $2000 that by 2007 blogs will outrank New York Times Digital as a trusted source of information (Davenet 3/5/02).3 Taken together, Morris and Winer claim that the new communication capabilities made possible by the Internet are going to change the ways in which we learn about our world and the ways in which we act upon that information, and that these changes will not only be somewhat radical, but, from their perspective, radically positive as well.
The potential power of the web, for both Morris and Winer (and countless others like them), was perhaps best expressed by its “creator,” Tim Berners-Lee, who sees the web as something like a step toward utopia. Berners-Lee writes:
My vision for the web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds. (1-2)
Like Morris and Winer, Berners-Lee envisions the web as a tool for social progress—by potentially connecting anything with anything, the web will provide us with “new freedom” and allow us “to grow faster than we ever could” before. But if the web promises to free us from the tyrannies of corporate media and money politics (among other things), why, after nearly a decade, does this potential remain unrealized? Why hasn’t the web delivered on its progressive promise?
In this paper, I argue that whether the Web changes the form of our elections (which is doubtful), or whether we get our daily “news” from a trusted blogger instead of a compromised corporate media outlet (which, again, does not seem to be in the cards for the majority of Americans, let alone the rest of the the world’s population), is largely irrelevant. Neither of these developments will change the underlying fact that the web has been unable to deliver on its socially progressive potential because it has been “born” into capitalism, a socioeconomic system that creates and depends upon the same “hierarchical classification systems” Berners-Lee would like the Web to eliminate. Further, I will argue that the crucial “hierarchical classification systems” upon which capital depends—the great divisions between public and private spheres—can be traced to, and are authorized by, Kant’s Enlightenment thinking. Using blogs and bloggers as exemplars, this paper will explore the implications of the Enlightenment’s divided worldview to demonstrate how starting from this division only deepens and perpetuates the problems the division purports to solve.
In other words, if the Web holds positive progressive potential, that potential is neither natural, inherent, nor immanent. Furthermore, if that potential can be discovered or created, the problem remains how to activate people to use the web in progressive ways. Meanwhile, the danger is that such use may already be a form of participation in capitalist hegemony. Therefore, this paper asks: Why is the web, which seems almost by definition to be socially progressive and anti-capitalist, so easily appropriated by capital? A simple example of this problem might go as follows: I could publish the “Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century” on my website today, and it might be brilliant and contain viable solutions to all the problems in the world. However:
1) No one would read it.
2) If people read it, it wouldn’t speak to them; they either would not care, or wouldn’t understand, or would disagree because they’re so immersed in capitalist consumer culture.
3) If people did read it, understand, and agree, they still might not do anything about it (take any action) because they are already deeply colonized by the underlying logic of capital. Specifically, they are divided as subjects and think in divided terms about themselves and the world.4
I will argue that this situation will not change (and that, therefore, the web will not produce progressive changes in society) unless and until we recognize the connections between the public and private worlds, and thereby acknowledge our particpation in, and responsibility for, the problems in our world.
What is a blog?
For our purposes here, blogs are important only insofar as they provide an example of the kinds of techno-utopian arguments that have been made about nearly all forms of communications enabled by the Web. Be it the basic web page, email, mailing lists or listserves, instant messaging, or chat, the Web has enabled many new forms of communication, each with its own possibilities and pitfalls. What all of these Web communications share is that they are means that appear to create new opportunity and potential; however, as means, the ends of these communication forms remain open. While each potentially enables people to find new ways of living through new ways of communicating, those utopian dreams have yet to be fulfilled. As the latest (or at least a more recent) iteration of web communication, blogs have been the focus of a great deal of recent techno-enthusiasm. Looking at the latest iteration of “the promise” of technology allows us to see how the Web’s progressive potential repeatedly gets channeled into more or less status quo ends.
So just what are blogs, and why are there nearly half -a-million of them on the Web today? The exact definition of a “blog” is somewhat contested. According to Winer’s “History of Weblogs,” blogs are:
often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also camaraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
As this broad definition suggests, the content, quality, and purpose of blogs varies wildly, as does consistency and maintenance: some people update their sites once a month, while others make a dozen or more entries each day. Some bloggers think of their sites as a sort of diary to record random thoughts. Others simply offer a list of links to other sites (frequently news stories from all kinds of sources) that seem interesting to them for some reason. Still others combine personal diary-type entries with opinions on developing news stories or cultural productions (books, movies, music), while yet another group of blogs focuses narrowly on specific topics in which the blogger is an expert, such as wireless internet technology (Wi-Fi), the “war against terrorism,” the performance of a particular media outlet,5 the law, or libraries. As Eric Grevstad notes, while some blogs aren’t worth the time it takes for them to load in your browser, “others are well-written and addictive, close-to-real-time counterparts to newspaper columns, or rich exchanges for Internet programming info. Teachers are using Weblogs for their classes. Small companies are using them as intranets—there’s a fledgling push for ‘k-logs’ or knowledge management resources accessible from anywhere, in ‘new economy’/The Cluetrain Manifesto style.”
Blogs bear many resemblances to other uses of the Web that have come before them. At first glance, blogs may seem to be little more than a sort of evolution of the personal vanity sites that exploded on the Web in the mid-1990s. And while some blogs are precisely that, several factors combine to encourage blogs to be something else altogether. First, blogs are easy to create, so they’re making web publishers out of people who know little more than how to connect to the internet. A new generation of web publishing tools make publishing and updating a personal web site as easy as typing up an entry and clicking a “submit” button on a web page. For example, Blogger.com, allows you to publish a blog through an online interface, while UserLand Radio 8 is software that you download to your computer to do the same thing. Prior to these tools, publishing a website of any kind required, at a minimum, basic knowledge of HTML and FTP, as well as space on a server to store your pages. However, tools like Blogger and Radio have enabled and encouraged thousands of people to publish online for the first time. (Both Blogger and Radio boast that users can go from zero-to-website in five minutes or less.) And according to Leslie Brooks Suzukamo of The St. Paul Pioneer Press, people are taking advantage of this opportunity in droves: “People used Blogger to create 41,000 new blogs in January alone.” So, while quality certainly varies, the rate at which the blogging world is expanding certainly increases your odds of finding something worth reading and following.
Blogs also differ from the traditional personal site in the ease with which they can be updated. With blogging tools at hand, new web publishers, or bloggers, can update their sites with new information in less time than it took to type this sentence. This means that a healthy blog gets regular, perhaps daily, injections of new content, giving readers a reason to come back day after day. The form also discourages the kind of drivel often found at vanity sites or online diaries (i.e.: “here’s a picture of my cat” and simplistic versions of “I had a bad day”)—the goal of blogging is to start conversations, to get people to link to what you say, and to say something about it themselves; people (generally) won’t link to vanity-page drivel.
Links and and conversation are the essence of blogging, and this conversational community created by blogging is another way in which blogs differ from vanity sites. A prominent feature of most blogs is the “blogroll,” a list of links to other sites the blogger reads on a regular basis. This means that if you visit a blog and like it, you can take that blogger’s recommendations to find other sites you might enjoy as well. Furthermore, if Blogger A links to Blogger B, chances are good that Blogger B will check his/her referral statistics and link back to Blogger A. This reciprocal linking creates the ability for bloggers to easily carry on conversations with each other; if I write something you like or don’t like, you might link to it and explain what seems good or bad about it. When I see you’ve linked to me, I’ll link to you as I respond to your comments, and so on. For this reason Winer often characterizes blogs as conversations.
In many ways, blogs also resemble listserves, instant messaging, or chat rooms. For example, two bloggers linking to each other in a back-and-forth conversation can often sound much like participants in a listserve discussion. And, like listserves (but perhaps to an even greater extent), the blog form encourages extended dialogue on topics important to the participants. Blogs that feature a “comments” link at the end of every entry (an increasingly common feature) invite anyone—fellow bloggers or just random readers—to respond to that entry, or the blog as a whole, or to say anything else that might be on the respondent’s mind. Thus, although they tend to encourage more thoughtful and substantive discussion, blogs can also mimic the spontaneity and freedom of internet chat or instant messaging.
Where blogs differ most from these previous forms is in the sense of ownership and freedom the blog form provides. A listserve requires participants to send their thoughts off to an impersonal email address where each post will likely be archived on an unknown server over which the participants have little control. Meanwhile, chat is, almost by definition, ephemeral and spontaneous. In contrast, blogs create instant and permanent archives, and are “owned” and controlled by their creators. When a blogger creates an entry, he or she can send it to his/her own server. Bloggers can control how their blog looks, how often its updated, and have almost unlimited power to guide the “conversations” that take place there. In other words, blogs carve out a piece of individual digital turf which the blogger can develop in any way he or she sees fit.
Finally, while blogs still face one of the main challenges of previous forms of Web communication—basically: getting people to read and/or respond to their content—bloggers are working hard to find ways to drive traffic to their sites. In addition to the ubiquitous blogrolls, which encourage cross-linking and conversation, sites focused on blogging give bloggers ways to connect with each other and to enter or start conversations. For example, both Daypop6 and Blogdex7 track popular links in the blogging community, while Weblogs.com tracks popular and recently-updated blogs. Meanwhile, for bloggers who use Radio 8 to create and maintain their blogs, structural mechanisms like easy XML subscriptions (which allow you have another blog’s daily content delivered to your desktop with one click) and easy access to referrer logs (so you can quickly see who is linking to your blog and what they might be saying about it), combine to give Joe Six Pack and Jill Minivan some of the same powerful audience-aggregation tools that larger, corporate sites have had access to for years. At their best, blogs have the ability (or at least the potential) to combine the most promising features of former iterations of Web communication, while giving bloggers a far greater sense of freedom and control over what they say, when, how, with and to whom, than any of their predecessors. According to Rebecca Blood (author of an authoritative history of blogs), freedom is exactly what’s so great about blogging, and it’s built right in (naturally): “Blogger itself places no restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box into which the blogger can type...anything: a passing thought, an extended essay, or a childhood recollection. With a click, Blogger will post the...whatever...on the writer’s website, archive it in the proper place, and present the writer with another empty box, just waiting to be filled.”
What Do Blogs Do?
In the end, what, exactly, a blog is, is perhaps less important than what bloggers think their blogs are doing. For many, the answer is simple: they’re changing the world by challenging the status quo—especially the media status quo. Dave (Doc) Searls, another prominent blogger whose site gets thousands of hits each week, echoes Winer’s claims that blogs are gradually replacing what he calls “the Grande Discipline of Journalism” because bloggers are free to say anything they like, and to use anyone they like as a source. “We’re all sources for each other here, and don’t have the pressures of space, deadlines, commercial agendas or formats to restrict who we source or the stories they tell us.” Not only are bloggers free of the commercial pressures of traditional print journalism, but, according to Searls, they also produce more trustworthy material because important ideas must be run through the community editing mill before they can be considered valid. “Here we not only link endlessly to countless other sources (which far outnumber those in the average BigPub piece), but we can vet ideas about what might be true, in faith that others who know more will correct us, or pick up the story and carry it forward.”
Conservative pundit and prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan (perhaps the only blogger who claims to be making a profit directly from his blog8) agrees with Winer and Searls: blogs are taking journalism where journalism has never gone before. Writing in The Sunday Times of London, Sullivan proclaims, “What bloggers do is completely new—and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It’s somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It’s genuinely new. And it harnesses the webs real genius—its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder.”
Still, Winer is far and away the leader of the “blogs are revolutionizing media” school. According to him, blogs are a return to
what I call amateur journalism, people writing for the public for the love of writing, without any expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry which is employing fewer reporters, editors and writers. But the Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea-change that the NY Times and other big publications face—how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won't. (Davenet, 3/05/02)
But whether they believe blogs are challenging traditional media or simply changing it, bloggers and journalists alike seem to think that something new is happening here. Seattle technology writer and blogger Paul Andrews thinks that, via the communal editing function Searls describes, as well as bloggers’ ability to say whatever they like, “blogs are making it safe for mass media to be more independent and investigative...indeed, blogs may end up saving mass media from themselves, which is their only future.” In a similar vein, Jeff Warren concludes a recent article in the U.K.’s The Globe and Mail on “the Web’s new intellectual hothouses” (including blogs) with a typically enthusiastic summary of many of the claims made on behalf of blogs. He writes: “Today’s on-line readers are part of an experience that goes way beyond the passivity of reclining in your easy chair to read the weekend book review. They have more control over content, access to a wider range of opinions, and in many cases they are expected to contribute opinions themselves. Today’s Web readers have become their own editors and writers, without the intervention of any central authority. Intellectual Web sites hoping to survive will pick up on that cue, and open themselves to the chatter of many active voices.”
So, although bloggers might emphasize slightly different angles as they describe what they think they’re doing, their common points of emphasis—the democratizing power of blogs, the challenge blogs represent to traditional media, and the freedom and control blogs give to both bloggers and their readers—demonstrate that bloggers share a common vision that they are changing the way people receive, process, and act upon information in important, and positive, ways. Like so many iterations of web communications before them, blogs appear to promise to improve the world by distributing power and information in new ways. As one of Blogger.com’s slogans claims, blogs are “Push-Button Publishing for the People.” But to what end? Can blogs really accomplish all that bloggers claim?
Works Cited
Andrews, Paul. “When Weblogs Precede News.” The Paul Wall. Feb. 27, 2002. Mar. 12, 2002. <http://www.paulandrews.com/2002/02/27>;.
Berners-Lee, Tim and Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999.
Blood, Rebecca. “weblogs: a history and perspective.” rebecca’s pocket. Sept. 7, 2000. Mar. 11, 2002. <http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html>; .
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Garnham, Nicholas. Emancipation, the Media, and Modernity: Arguments about the Media and Social Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Grevstad, Eric. “Radio UserLand 8.0 Review: The Artsy Mac Folks Are Onto Something.” WinPlanet. Jan. 24, 2002. Jan. 28, 2002. <http://www.winplanet.com/winplanet/reviews/4024/1/>;
Hartman, Stephanie. “All Systems Go: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’ and the Reinvention of Modernist Poetics.” “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping.” Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 155-167.
—. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Patricia Waugh. London: Edward Arnold,1992. 89-96.
Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. 26-52.
Morris, Dick. Vote.com. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.
Orlwoski, Andrew. “Back in the Bloghouse.” The Register UK. Mar. 2, 2002. Mar. 12, 2002. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24263.html>;
Poster, Mark. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
Searls, Dave (Doc). “Consider the Sources.” Doc’s Radio Weblog. Feb. 15, 2002. Feb. 15, 2002. <http://doc.weblogs.com/2002/02/15#considerTheSources>;
Sullivan, Andrew. “A Blogger Manifesto: Why Online Weblogs Are One Future for Journalism.” Feb. 24, 2002. Mar. 03, 2002. <http://www.andrewsullivan.com/print.php?artnum=20020224>;
Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Suzukamo, Leslie Brooks. “blog.craze.” St. Paul Pioneer Press. Mar. 22, 2002. Mar. 26, 2002. <http://radio.weblogs.com/0105048/2002/03/25.html>;
Warner, Michael. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 377-401
Warren, Jeff. “Point and Think.” The Globe and Mail. Mar. 2, 2002. Mar. 12, 2002. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/dot-com/>;.
Winer, Dave. “The History of Weblogs.” Mar. 4, 2002. <http://newhome.weblogs.com/historyOfWeblogs>;.
—. Davenet. Mar. 05, 2002. <http://davenet.userland.com/2002/03/25/longBetWithTheNyTimes>;
—. Scripting News. Mar. 12, 2002. <http://www.scripting.com>;.
1 Vote.com, page 237.
2 The table of contents of Vote.com even claims that chapter three will tell us how, “in the election of 2000, America will have its first Internet presidential primary” and “”how Internet voting will usurp the media’s role in handicapping elections and annointing front-runners.” Perhaps Morris was living in another universe when he wrote this book, but more likely the hyperbole was intended to drive traffic to his website (www.vote.com). Although someone like Morris is difficult to take seriously, his rhetoric only emphasizes the lengths to which techno-utopianism often goes, as well as the dubious motives that often lay behind it.
3 Like Morris, Winer’s techno-optimism is economically motivated (at least in part): Winer is the founder of UserLand Software, the company behind the second-most-popular blogging software, UserLand Radio 8. So while Winer influences thousands of people daily via his blog, his motives are neither innocent nor atruistic (although they may have an altruistic component). But again, as with Morris, while Winer’s economic investment in technology might tempt us to ignore what he has to say, I would argue that we must listen precisely because of his influence and motives. In other words, we dismiss the techno-utopian rhetoric of capitalists at our own peril.
4 A fourth reason my “Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century” might have zero impact is that capital already has various structural means of shutting down content it doesn’t like, including, but not limited to, restrictions imposed by local, regional, or national ISPs; ownership/control of the physical structure of the Web; and ownership/control over the code that might make my manifesto intelligible (or unintelligible) to the rest of the world. These limits are described much better and in greater detail in Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas.
5 A group of self-proclaimed “war-bloggers” is currently putting together a book of blog entries about the “war on terrorism”—see http://blogbook.blogspot.com/. For Wi-Fi news, see: http://80211b.weblogger.com/. For a daily analysis of the New York Times, see SmarterTimes.com. For an example of a law-focused blog, see: http://radio.weblogs.com/0104634/. And for a blog dedicated (primarily) to libraries, librarians, and information technology, see: http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/.
6 http://www.daypop.com
7 http://blogdex.media.mit.edu
8 Sullivan explains that, although most bloggers don’t care about making money, others do, and have achieved their goals the old-fashioned way: “Webloggers simply begged. They put little buttons on their sites that allowed readers to donate money to keep the blogs going. Slowly, cash dribbled in. In 2001, $27,000 came into my site via donations. Almost all of it went to pay for design and bandwidth costs, but before too long, a modest income source began to make blogging less like charity and more like minimum wage labor. Most major blog sites now have electronic begging bowls—although for most, the income is chump-change. Another option was what's called ‘affiliate advertising.’ The blog runs ads from, say, J.Crew.com or Home Depot or the Gap. The companies pay nothing for the ad, but if someone clicks through the ad to buy something from the Gap site, the blogger gets a small cut of the proceeds. In effect, the blogger becomes a sort of web shop-window. He gets readers to stop and look, and a few may go on to buy things. The commissions are small, but if the volume is sufficient, the income can grow.” Like many bloggers, Sullivan is a tireless (and tiresome) self-promoter.
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