morphologies of attention
Is anybody studying whether attention moves in patterns -- waves, pointillism, or building cumulatively, or some sequence of such -- and what effect this can have on vectors of influence?
E.g., while the concerned citizens of the US appear to be resigned to four more years of White House Ecstatics, Terrorist Faith Healers, Crystal Children Economists and more, others, poor saps, seem unable to let the election thing go. So there are days of linking and pointing and commentary, then from out of nowwhere come entire directories of links, mini libraries, overviews, round ups, and so forth, e.g.,
I don't know who studies things like this, if anyone. We hear famous bloggers predict that blogging will do all sorts of things - I believe at one point it was even rumored to be going to influence the recent presidential election. But the people who thought that don't seem to be focused on it much now. Looks like we're back to blogging about how important blogging will be in more diffuse ways.
E.g., while the concerned citizens of the US appear to be resigned to four more years of White House Ecstatics, Terrorist Faith Healers, Crystal Children Economists and more, others, poor saps, seem unable to let the election thing go. So there are days of linking and pointing and commentary, then from out of nowwhere come entire directories of links, mini libraries, overviews, round ups, and so forth, e.g.,
- Evidence of Electoral Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reading List
- Election Guide
- Never say Die-bold: So you don’t think the Bush campaign stole this election? Think again
- All I know is what I don't read in the papers (Keith Olbermann)
I don't know who studies things like this, if anyone. We hear famous bloggers predict that blogging will do all sorts of things - I believe at one point it was even rumored to be going to influence the recent presidential election. But the people who thought that don't seem to be focused on it much now. Looks like we're back to blogging about how important blogging will be in more diffuse ways.
posted by Tom Matrullo at Friday, November 19, 2004
5 Comments:
Blogging now will influence blogging in the future immeasurably, the cumulative force of blogging today as it moves forward - gaining momentum and inertia from the increasing weight of blogging tomorrow, and Monday, will create a gravitational pull, which will in turn create a stronger gravitational pull, which will cause more bloggers to blog about blogging, and that will result in an exponentially increasing accuracy of posted and commented reflections of blogging, on blogging, by bloggers, and commenters, some new some old some young, some extremely distasteful, but mostly just people like you and me everybody else, doing this, and then doing it some more, until the blogging singularity is reached, that moment in/outside time when the reflective aspect of blogging, its semantic albedo, exceeds its epistemological resource, its mirror-input sucked in more quickly than it can be generated online, thus creating a kind of vacuum of...
...calligraphy and font and XTML, void of content, shrieking keyboards beginning to stutter on their own, books beginning to lean and fall and skitter toward humming scanners, and all the words in the world flowing toward the wormhole that was once blogging, blogging as it was for a few months in 2002. And a week or two before the November election.
Any serious discussion of blogging should perforce include a capsule history of Jorn Barger's efforts and subsequent alienation from that amorphous landscape.
He had one before he coined the word.
It's like "hippies".
What that was already existed, and people were getting uncomfortable because they could tell something was happening but they couldn't name it.
Some journalist from Look magazine came out to the Haight in San Francisco in '66 and dug around and decided that was going to be it, so then when the story broke nationally finally people had something to call it. "Hippie" had been a jazz put -down of wannabe hipsters.
It was the beginning of the end of what that was, as many were quick to realize. Not that naming blogs changed much, but certainly lots of writers-ahout-blogging insist on their own (necessarily limited) experience as definitional.
What it is is bigger than anyone can say, it's too atomized and it's growing too fast, and it's too full of information to be pinned down in any final way. It's alive, a new thing. Mutant... Help! It's eating me!
Before we have any idea what is going on, we know something is going on. Babies know there's a world out there. Later on, they think they've mastered it because they have words. I am sympathetic to thinking blogging has potentialities beyond what has been thought, but all the thought about blogging, about what it is and should be, as if it had reached some plateau, some stasis, could tend to limit that which is being described. That shift - from description to prescription, and onwards christian soldiers to proscription - the bollocks of that.
Amen so too say I. Exactly.
Like speech resolving from vocables, with its earliest utilitarian boundaries expanding to the most arcane Castalian exegeses, so to speak, as we watched. Over the years. Speech hasn't delimited, no reason to expect prosthetic speech to, either.
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