chapter 3: p2p journalism

In the first chapter, we examined the ways in which digital artifacts replicate and aredistributed. In the second chapter, we examined the ways in which digital artifacts can be broken down and recomposed into new artifacts, often with the consequence of illegality. In this chapter, we will look at digital artifacts in conversation with each other in weblogs, which could be said to be microcosms of the internet in general, as they provide ecosystems in which artifacts interact and respond to each other. A weblog consists of a website presented with journal entries in reverse chronological order. Journal entries can contain a wide variety of content, including text on a variety of topics and images. What makes weblogs unique is the comment function, by which people may respond to weblog entries, appending their own text and image, including links to other websites and weblogs, to parent entries. In this way we can call weblogs a form of peer-to-peer journalism, as it involves literally journals that link to each other, forming a network of texts and images, as well as a social component of the network that form the
connections between partial objects. Those connections are what Deleuze and Guattari call
machines, as we saw in the previous chapter. To recall another Deleuzoguattarian concept,
from the first chapter, smooth space is space in which machines are allowed to connect, and
striated space is space in which mixture and connction is contained and made predictable.

However, even in the case of weblogs, hierarchical institutions have imposed overt control and attempted subtle, smooth control. Once again, the focus rests on the strategies employed both in capture of territory and flight from territory. In this case, the territory in question is what has been called the blogosphere, that is, the territory of the internet comprised of weblogs.


Weblog as Smooth Space

A weblog seems to be the site at which a collection of heterogenous flows and materials intersect. Steve Himmer, in “The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature,” an article in an online book featuring academic investigations into blogging called Into the Blogosphere, compares the blog to avant-garde art in its ability to bring together various elements into one space. He describes this in terms of weblogs as a collapse of different types of writing into a space that one could label as smooth space if one were to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology:

In general […] the content of weblogs actively collapses many of the distinctions that traditional commodity journalism (or, for that matter, fiction and memoir) relies on, mixing the deeply personal with the factual and the interpretive. While this collapse serves, over time, to allow authors to develop and deepen the public persona presented through their work, incorporating more and more of the personality traits and quirks which would not, typically, emerge in public writing—the equivalent of Andy Rooney, say, opening one of his Sunday night rambles through nostalgia and curmudgeonry by mentioning how much he drank the night before and how much he’s been enjoying the newest album by the White Stripes.⁸⁰

Therefore, weblogs allow connections and flows, whereas "traditional commodity journalism" blocks them, or at the least, channels them into predictable texts. If a book is a little machine that forms a rhizome with the world, made of variously formed matters, as Deleuze and Guattari say, then a weblog is even more so because of its mixture of different kinds of writing. In addition, the comment feature on weblogs gives them another point of connection with computer-social networks.

Comments on Weblogs as Marking Territory

In the previous chapter, I discussed détournement, recuperation, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization as marking territory, and I gave examples of illegal art that employ various strategies for pushing the boundaries of the legal conventions of the intellectual property system. I would like to provide weblog commenting as another example of such territorial marking. It has similarities to another unpredictable and unsanctioned form of territorial marking: graffiti.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, published in 1972 "Requiem for the Media," a work in which he discusses the structure of the techno-social networks of media. What he proposed is needed for a decentralized media is not merely the ability to produce and consume (as opposed to only consume), but the ability to respond as in the case of graffiti. He describes the mass media as a space in which nothing is exchanged, a

non-communication—this is what characterizes [the mass media], if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange). We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission-reception of a message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through feedback. (290)

In reference to graffiti as a powerful force during the events in Paris, May 1968, Baudrillard writes, "Graffiti is transgressive, not because it substitutes another content, another discourse, but simply because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of nonresponse enunciated by all the media. Does it oppose one code to another? I don't think so: it simply smashes the code" (287). We see then that, even if the weblog is "just so much graffiti" (Hebdige 3), that such graffiti, such marking of territory is a form of unpredictable resistance in the same way as peer-to-peer file sharing and illegal art.

The fact that weblogs allow comments is what gives them an added dimension of the potential for a diversity of thought—for a living discursive graffiti ecosystem to grow like a rhizome. Baudrillard notes the importance of "response" in an emancipatory media:

[the media] speak[s], or something is spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere [emphasis his]. This is why the only revolution in this domain—indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court—lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media. (281)

His point rings true. To look at weblogs put out on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, one notices that the blogs exist in an enfeebled form. Stripped of the ability to display comments in full view of everyone, the blog lacks the ability to create new "life"—viable culture. Instead of functioning as part of a media ecosystem, these pseudo-blogs feature the same structure as newspapers, television, and other traditional media, in that they mark territory, but do not allow themselves to be marked. The impotent and barren blogs of Big Media allow for response, but via email, which is the current version of what Baudrillard refers to as the "formal 'reversibility' of circuits (letters to the editor, phone-in programs, polls, etc.), without conceding any response" (286). This is his "practical" example of "decentralized totalitarianism" (Baudrillard 286) that seems congruent with Deleuze's "control society," or in Alexander Galloway's words, "how control exists after decentralization."

Because weblogs feature these two characteristics: containing a multiplicity of kinds of writing, and allowing themselves to be marked upon, they conflict with the traditional centralized and hierarchical media. As in the previous chapters, we looked at the strategies used in making flows of materials predictable, centralized, and hierarchical, and the strategies by which such flows decentralized, smooth, and become unpredictable. We now turn to examples of banned weblogs.

Internation Olympic Committee as Centralizing Institution

In August of 2004, the International Olympic Committee banned those associated with the Olympics (athletes, coaches卐tc.) from posting their Olympic experiences in weblogs. According to a CNN.com article, "The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists -- and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first."81 One could argue that it would be more beneficial to the IOC for them to allow weblogs and recuperate them as a kind of free publicity. In the same CNN.com article, Robert Bliwise is quoted as saying just that: "I don't understand what the International Olympic Committee might be concerned about. It's a way to engage a wide audience with reporting from the field and therefore generate excitement and interest in the games."82 Such a response from the IOC would be a more decentralized method of control. However, the IOC preferred, in that situation, to consolidate its power and make media concerning the Olympics predictable by disallowing peer-to-peer journalism. (We should note that the IOC colluded with NBC to keep internet users in the United States from accessing online streaming video of the Olympics.83)

AOL-TimeWarner in Iraq

We can examine other instances of weblog banning by looking at journalists' adventures in weblogging while working for AOL-Time Warner owned news media outlets in Iraq. Both Kevin Sites, a freelance journalist working for CNN at the time, and Joshua Kucera of TIME magazine were made to stop their blogging by their employers. Christine Boese, in "The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution," also from Into the Blogosphere, describes how Josh Kucera was forced to end his blog by his employer, TIME, after an article in The Boston Globe:

appeared to mock TIME, suggesting that the writing and topics on Josh's site were more immediate and compelling than what TIME was publishing from him. […] After TIME shut the blog down, Josh was clearly disturbed by the anti-mass media ranting and the level of anger against big media corporations in the comments field of his blog. He strongly resisted becoming a poster child for the independent journalism movement. Josh said he had been trained to focus on the story and not to become the story.84

Interestingly, Kucera, despite having a weblog that featured the chracteristic mixture, being "more immediate and compelling than what TIME was publishing from him," still advocated the position of AOL-Time Warner (and the IOC) that journalism should be produced by hierarchical and centralized institutions rather than peer-to-peer techno-social networks.

"Decentralized Totalitarianism": Decentralized Control of Blogs

As we have explored before, in the work of both Deleuze and Baudrillard, control exists that is decentralized and smooth. Corporations are now seeking to exploit and counter the information about them posted in blogs.85

see "The selling of the Blogosphere—Technorati's big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs". . .helping corporations control their message

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/07/the_selling_of_1.php

this is where we'll pick up next time.