change, blogoacknowledgement

True. It’s a good idea to remember that the US isn’t necessarily where available democratizing media is being used to harness political power to its greatest subversive potential. It’s also important to remember that the US isn’t where it’s all happening, en general.

I’ve been thinking more about Lovink’s cynical take blogs, and reading Landow’s mini-history of the shift from manuscript to print technology in the introduction to Hypertext 3.0.

As I initially pointed out to you, the point of my post wasn’t necessarily to say that blogs aren’t avenues for political subversion, but that their ubiquity and availability somehow cues us to read them as so.

Landow’s writing has pointed out two pertinent points here:
1) Technology can have contradictory and simultaneous effects on and uses in culture, which will invariably shift as time passes, and
2) Our collective memory of the historical transition from manuscript to print technology, in which an elite art became available to the masses, can shed some light on the way an even further disseminated technology of publication (i.e. the internet) is being read.

Basically, based on the democratizing effect that print technology had in re-mediating the manuscript, it makes sense that we would initially (and still) view blogs and other web tools for self-publishing as intimidatingly, perhaps anarchically democratizing (and therefore, politically powerful).

However, as Landow points out, there is no reason that media developments should follow the same patterns or expand upon the effects of previous media transitions. I tentatively believe, therefore, that we are experiencing (in “Western” blog culture, if it makes sense to make that geographical distinction) a new kind of political and cultural effect of new media.
In the case of blogs, simply, proliferation ≠ democratization.