Les blogger seraient des nihilistes

Bloging the nihilist impulse

Whereas the email-based list culture echoes a postal culture of writing letters and occasionally essays, the ideal blog post is defined by snappy public relations techniques.
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Blogging in the post-9/11 period closed the gap between Internet and society. Whereas dot-com suits dreamt of mobbing customers flooding their e-commerce portals, blogs were the actual catalysts that realized worldwide democratization of the Net. As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits. According to Jean Baudrillard, we're living in the "Universe of Integral Reality". "If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption." If you can't cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won't be your cup of tea.
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Blogging comes close to what Adilkno once described as "vague media". The lack of direction is not a failure but the core asset. Blogging did not emerge out of a movement or an event. If anything, it is a special effect of software, constituted especially by the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue.
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It is not easy to answer the question of whether blogs operate inside or outside the media industry. To position the blog medium inside could be seen as opportunistic, whereas others see this as a clever move. There is also a "tactical" aspect. The blogger-equals-journalist might get protection from such a label in case of censorship and repression. Despite countless attempts to feature blogs as alternatives to mainstream media, they are often, more precisely described as "feedback channels". The act of "gatewatching" (Axel Bruns) the mainstream media outlets does not necessarily result in reasonable comments that will be taken into account. In the category "insensitive" we have a wide range, from hilarious to mad, sad, and sick.
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Blogs will tell you if your audience is still awake and receptive. Blogs test. They allow you to see whether your audience is still awake and receptive.
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"People are getting bored with the given formats; they don't catch up with the news anymore, it no longer sticks to their cervical memory stick. It is like a song that you have listened to too often, or a commercial advertisement; you hear it, you can even sing the words, but they are without meaning. Mainstream media is starting to grasp this. They have to search for new formats in order to attract readers (read: advertisers)" – and blogs are but a small chapter in this transformation. ( Cecile Landman, a Dutch investigative journalist and supporter of Iraqi bloggers with the Streamtime campaign)
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Net cynicism no longer believes in cyberculture as an identity provider with related entrepreneurial hallucinations. It is constituted by cold enlightenment as a post-political condition and by confession described by Michel Foucault. People are taught that their liberation requires them to "tell the truth", to confess it to someone (a priest, psychoanalyst, or weblog), and this truth telling will somehow set them free.
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A cynic, so Sloterdijk says, is someone who is part of an institution or group whose existence and values he himself can no longer see as absolute, necessary, and unconditional, and who is miserable due to this enlightenment, because he or she sticks to principles he or she does not believe in.
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We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurrences can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis, and gender perspectives. However, blogging arises against this kind of political analysis, through which a lot can no longer be said.
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As Justin Clemens rightly states, "nihilism often goes unremarked, not because it is no longer an issue of contemporary philosophy and theory, but – on the contrary – because it is just so uncircumventable and dominating." The term has dropped almost completely out of establishment political discourse. The reason for this could be the "banalization of nihilism" (Karen Carr). Or to rephrase it: the absence of high art that can be labeled as such. This might have changed with the rise of writers such as Michel Houellebecq. Andre Gluckmann explained the 2005 migrant riots in the French suburbs as a "response to French nihilism" What the revolting youth did was an "imitation of negation". The "problem of nihilism", as Clemens notes, is the complex, subtle, and self-reflexive nature of the term. To historicize the concept is one way out, though I will leave that to the historians. Another way could be to occupy the term and reload it with surprising energies: creative nihilism.
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