[Air-L] the banality of blogging

[McLaughlin, Lisa M. Dr.]

The following piece was posted on the nettime listserv a few days ago. Brook (whose dissertation has to do with 'power in blogging') and others might find it interesting (the piece addresses issues of 'private' and 'public'). Click on the link to access the full article.

Regards,

Lisa


The banality of blogging or how does the web affect the private/public
dichotomy

by Helen Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=165


When it comes to debating how gender intersects with digital realities, it
is as if the by now mythical term ' digital
divide<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide>'
subsumes everything under its wings: in the case of gender one simply needs
to point out the disproportionate access to digital goods and services that
'women' experience and the issue is settled. Or, is it? Not that these
gendered forms of inequality should be brushed aside, but the downside is
that they obstinately stick to a limited horizon. And this horizon
obfuscates the more radical, interesting, and difficult questions that the
focus on gender might raise for the analysis of the net society. The rise of
digital technologies does not invite us, in other words, to rehash existing
political concepts, but rather to, at least, engage in their reformulation.

We will try to engage in such a reformulation by unpacking the following
question: how is the private/public distinction re–structured on the web?  The
problem, here, is not that this question is somehow ignored, but that when it
comes to analyses of the net society it is seldom addressed from a gender
perspective. All the 'radical' calls for 'participatory journalism', for 'user
generated information', for 'being the media', encompass -whether this is
voiced or not- a challenge to the private/public dichotomy which is profoundly
gendered. How, then, is gender an intrinsic part of that picture?  In order to
address this problem, we will try to go back to Hannah Arendt's stubborn
insistence<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13662.ctl>on
keeping the limit between private and public strong, not in the name of
maintaining the marginalized, undervalued character of the private, but in the
name of preserving the rich multiplicity of the public. To use Arendt's
metaphor, the web often acts like a vanishing act: the table that existed
between people that brought them together, united them and differentiated them
seems to have suddenly disappeared. Instead we are all brought together closer
without any table in between us to connect and separate us.
[more...]

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