Blogging: Kind Of Like Tron, But Not Really

Great post and comments on Tim's blog about blogging culture vs 'established' culture. Which got me to thinking that even though I've just written 17,000 words on that very subject, I still feel like I'm no nearer to understanding what blogging 'is'.

Of course it would be wrong to think that blogging is simply one thing; it's clearly lots of things all at once. It's a new form of communication, a new way of socialising, a new form of media, a new way of establishing and controlling one's own identity.

But the more I think about it, the more I get a nebulous sense that all of these different aspects of blogging have an overarching characteristic: the fact that all this new stuff takes place inside the machine*. The 'machine' being, obviously, the internet. You might think that is stating the bleeding obvious, but I'm not sure that many people have properly grasped the implications of this.

For a start, inside the machine is very different from the physical world. An individual person can be many different people, with many different names and personalities. People socialise with people whom they would never have met in the physical world. People who are nothing but avatars and pseudonyms hold earnest, frank, funny, confessional discussions with each other without knowing, or even wanting to know, 'who' the other people are**. In a way, one's physical-world identity and attributes cease to matter, which I think is nice, but also fairly fucking revolutionary when you think about it.

But I think that what blogging *really* is is representations of people in virtual space. To my mind, my blog isn't something I write and publish, but it's essentially me, or at least my representative in cyberspace. Me, in a different dimension, but definitely me, rather than just something that was created by me. So Patroclus doesn't just write stuff, but also has conversations with people, visits people, entertains people, and so on.

And what's different about that is that not only am I lots of different people inside the machine (Patroclus being one of several), but that everything that I do in here is theoretically visible to everyone. Whereas in the physical world you can have a conversation with someone in private, and those words disappear into the ether and no one knows afterwards what you said, inside the machine those words and conversations are stuck there forever unless you delete them or ask the other person to delete them. As if we're characters in a comic and everything we say is fixed in a speech bubble forever. So I suppose the thing that freaks people like Janet Street-Porter out is that she can *see* us now, whereas before she couldn't. We're in the room with her. Like monsters. Or zombies. And there are millions of us.

And the thing with, say, Tron, or Neuromancer and the other early cyberpunk stuff, is that there weren't very many people inside the machine. The ones that got inside were like pioneers, like the first people on the moon, or the first settlers in the Wild West. It was all kind of individualistic and heroic (which is why women aren't supposed to like cyberpunk), because this is the way computers were, then - they were individual, isolated things, rarely connected to a network, and that's why we still have to put up with the image of the 'internet user' as a sad, sociopathic loner.

By the time you get to, say, Snow Crash, there are more people inside the machine, but they're still kind of marginal, edgy types, and the internet (metaverse) is still a marginal, edgy sort of dangerous underground where right-thinking people fear to enter, and I suppose that's why we still have to put up with this image of the internet as being a lawless place populated by criminals.

But now...now there are millions of us inside the machine, even people who don't wear black vests and mirror shades and consider themselves to be lone outlaw fugitives from the real world. So, in a sense, virtual reality has become real reality. And all of the ground-breaking things about virtual reality - the collapse of space and time, the unimportance of the physical self, the ability to be lots of different people in lots of different places; the whole thing about being essentially a brain in a jar, plugged into a machine...that's what our lives are like every day now.

We try to make sense of blogging by applying real-world analogies (blogging is like the media, blogging is like keeping a diary, etc.) but it so clearly isn't like the real world that if you stop for a second and think about what it's *really* like, it's just totally freaky. But it's lovely to see people adapt to it so quickly and totally, and start to create new rules and mores and codes of conduct, and cultural pursuits (e.g. memes and games and ritual practices that play with - and help us to make sense of - the fabric of the blogosphere itself) in what is essentially a completely different dimension.

Ahh, humans are so great.


* I totally nicked this phrase, and most of these ideas, from this fabulous article in Wired. And this book. And this one. But I'll lay claim to the zombie analogy.

** An idea that's always tickled me is that two people who know each other under a particular name in one online domain (say the blogosphere) may also know each other under different names in a different online domain (say a chat forum), and not know that they are the same people. How Philip K. Dick is that!