Entries tagged “nihilism”

Friday, March 2, 2007

Blogging and nihilism, again

A bit further down the same piece, Geert Lovink writes (emphasis mine):

In Cornel West’s 2004 Democracy Matters is a chapter called “Nihilism in America”. West distinguishes between the evangelical nihilism of the neo-conservatives around Bush and a paternalistic version practiced by Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. A third form, the so-called “sentimental nihilism”, prefers to remain on the surface of problems rather than pursue their substantive depth. It pays simplistic lip service to issues rather than portraying their complexity. This tendency to remain on the surface, touch a topic, point to an article without even giving a proper opinion about it apart from it being worth mentioning, is widespread and is foundational to blogging.

Heh. Go, read it, really.

  1. 6:08 PM
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Friday, March 2, 2007

Blogging and nihilism

Geert Lovink on blogging as the nihilist impulse:

… The eyeballs that once patiently looked at all reports and ads have gone on strike. According to the utopian blog philosophy, mass media are doomed. Their role will be taken over by “participatory media”. The terminal diagnosis has been made and it states: closed top-down organizations no longer work, knowledge cannot be “managed”, today’s work is collaborative and networked. However, despite continuous warning signs, the system successfully continues to (dys)function. Is top-down really on its way out? Where does the Hegelian certainty come from that the old-media paradigm will be overthrown? There is little factual evidence of this. And it is this state of ongoing affairs that causes nihilism, and not revolutions, to occur. …

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. …

We’re faced with an “accomplished nihilism” (Gianni Vattimo) in that bloggers have understood that the fulfillment of nihilism is a fact. Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of the plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms, with blogging being one of them. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism would be an ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws and that “truth” is inescapably subjective. In media terms, we see this attitude translated into a growing distrust of the output of large commercial news organizations and the spin that politicians and their advisers produce. Questioning the message is no longer a subversive act of engaged citizens but the a priori attitude, even before the TV or PC has been switched on.

The full text is well worth reading.

  1. 5:40 PM
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