Who is responsible for comments on blogs?

I just read in the Frankfurter allgemeine, that a journalist was sentenced because of a comment a visitor posted on his blog. The court in Hamburg seemingly makes no distinctions between blogs and old-school printed newspapers, which is certainly a bizarre notion: expecting that everybody that has a blog takes responsibility for everything that is said on it, limits the possibilities of the net severely. This precedent makes writing blogs by "citizen journalists" either infeasible (moderating all comments is certainly a full-time job if the blog reaches readers beyond the authors friends and family) or severely limits the functionality of blogs (the easiest solution is not to allow comments at all).

What can Schiller tell us about the world we live in?

Not many people know that apart from being a great poet, Schiller was also a very lucid thinker - one wonders what his philosophical achievements would have been had he not occupied such a marginal position in Weimar (doubtlessly because of his radical ideas), being short of resources his more fortunate colleagues (one thinks Goethe) had. He completed a remarkable tractate on aesthetics, where he attempted an analysis of his time through a modified Kantian philosophical system. The main pathology he saw was that the Sinntrieb (the sensual drive) and the Formtrieb (the formal drive) were not in harmony. The Sinntrieb makes us receptable and responsive to the world, but does not give us any control, while the Formtrieb gives us the possibility of forming abstract ideas and the world according to transcendental principles. The Formtrieb, while being a "higher" capacity, can never suspend the Sinntrieb or act against it (as Kant noted at the beginning of his critique of pure reason: all cognition starts with perception by the senses). The mediating principle for Schiller was the Spieltrieb (the play drive) which puts the other two drives in harmony so that the two pulling forces equal each other, giving the subject freedom. This play drive is expressed in aesthetics, and in aesthetic education Schiller sees the path to a truly enlightened society.

At this moment I must thank the patient reader for having bothered to make it through this very abstract introduction, and reward her by telling what brought this contemplation about. In the introduction to What is internet studies David Silver nonchalantly puts internet studies on the disciplinary pedestal. This is a very clever bluff, but it is still nonsensical, since internet studies do not have an object of study that is not already covered by disciplines proper (communication, informatics, psychology, sociology ...). Of course internet studies are a very interesting and vivid interdisciplinary field, but the pretension to disciplinarity is nonetheless preposterous. My main concern lies elsewhere, though: proposing in all earnest that a discipline can be founded upon a completely empirical object is only a symptom of radical empiricism that is permeating contemporary societies. Researchers (and those doing research on new media especially) have become all too accustomed to thinking that the mere accumulation of empirical data will somehow produce knowledge. Grounded theory then degenerates from collecting data that will inform theory to presenting the data as if it were self-explanatory.

What has this got to do with Schiller? It seems we are moving into the era of Sinntrieb domination. If philosophy was once the prime vehicle of the Formtrieb, the modern scientific subsystem of society is ever more becoming a pure manifestation of Sinntrieb. In this development humanity is progressively losing its power of agency: as noted earlier, the Sinntrieb allows us to react to the environment, but not in an autonomous manner, but rather instinctively and, what is most important, without the ability to understand the environment as malleable. The Sinntrieb is in itself completely passive. We are reduced to mere observers of a reality that - as I have noted in my post about Marx and agency - we are daily recreating ourselves. Seeking to be free from natural constraints we have locked ourselves in a steel casing (Weber's term "Stahlhartes Gehäuse" is often mistranslated as iron cage, missing the point that Gehäuse is something that at once enables and constrains) and now we are coming close to permanently throwing away the key.

The fact

When reading Gauntlett's introduction to the second edition of Web.studies, which is composed mainly of anecdotal evidence, I remembered this great episode of Dilbert, which analyses the changes "the fact" (also the title of the episode) is going through in modern society in part because of the influence of the internet:

part1

part2

part3

The problem of spatial metaphors

Metaphors can be a useful tool for communicating theory when they are used correctly. I have already mentioned Marx's metaphor of the vampire-like existence of capital. It concisely conveys the very core of his theory, at the same time shedding light on the concept of commodity fetishism and his theory of value. But metaphors can also be misleading. One such case is Plato's metaphor of the cave, which is in itself quite clear, but tends to be taken out of context. The distinction Plato was trying to make was between opinioning (doxa) and knowing (episteme), where opinioning refers to the things as they appear to us in everyday life and knowing refers to the realm of ideas. It is not the contrast of true and false knowledge and has certainly nothing to do with stereotypes. Indeed both true and false knowledge exist in the realm of ideas, only opinioning is excluded - one can not have an opinion in the realm of pure reason Kant noted later. But the popularity of this metaphor seems to indicate that we are more comfortable thinking in spatial than abstract terms - the paradox here being that Plato himself brings us the ideas, which he values above all, in the form of a shadow, a fleating picture of the world, indeed mimesis.

Then we have spatial metaphors that are essentially misleading. One of those is "public sphere". This is an awkward translation of the German word "Öffentlichkeit", which in itself has no spatial connotations. Indeed Habermas (the term public sphere was first introduced in the translation of his Structural transformations) writes about Öffentlichkeit as specific circumstances of communication that allow citizens to form their opinions in reasoned exchange.

And then we have cyberspace, of course, the non plus ultra of nonsensical terms. I analysed the prefix cyber in an earlier post, so I won't go into detail here. I want to argue that the metaphor of space is highly problematic. It conceals the embeddedness of computer mediated communications in society - it makes us think that cyberspace is a separate time-space that exists parallel to the analogue time-space. This is particularly visible in early utopian visions of the democratic potential of the internet, where cyberspace was seen as a democratizing factor of unheard of proportions, while it was ignored that this democratizing factor was being introduced into existing social relations and was not suspending them. One need not wonder then that the internet has not brought us the golden age of democracy.

Another process that the spatial metaphor conceals is what I would like to call - following Anthony Giddens- disembedding. According to him sociology has been preoccupied with the problem of order and has neglected the transformations of time-space that abstract systems of modernity have caused. Disembedding is the process in which social relations are made independent of local time-space in which they were firmly embedded in pre-modern times through the workings of abstract systems. Abstract systems are symbolic media like money and power (for example the emergence of money means that trade is possible on a global scale, not confined to local time-space as was the case with commodity exchange) and expert systems (the systematized production of expert knowledge). The mass media have played an important role in the process of disembedding and were constitutive of modernity - they made it possible that individuals connected on a national scale, and were no longer confined to interact and identify only among those they had face to face contact with. And this aspect of the internet is what the metaphor of cyberspace conceals. If the internet is itself a space, it is hard to envision it being a medium that is transforming space. It is the medium which is bringing us in contact with disembedded time-space which might be even on the other side of the globe and it is the medium which gives a feel - and no more than a feel - of uniformity between all the different interactions it conveys among disparate locations. It does not suspend the world or form a separate world, but is rather in a dialectic relationship with it, where it is at once embedded in existing social relations and is transforming them.

The epistemic value of metaphor or Marx and agency

This summer I had an interesting conversation about whether there is any space for agency in Marx's theory. I was confronted with the idea that there is none, since he seem to envision a one-way determination of the superstructure by the base, and even if this determination can be indirect as Engels later noted, it is still true that the determining factor (the base) is determining the determined (superstructure). The fallacy of this argument is that it conflates this distinction with the one that separates structure and agency. The point is that agency is hard to be seen with Marx, because for him in society there exists nothing but agency. One of my favourite metaphors in the whole of philosophy is the one found in The capital, claiming that capital leads a vampire like existence: it is dead labour that can survive only by sucking up living labour. The whole point of the idea of commodity fetishism is that, although economic forces certainly seem abstract and objective to us, they are in the end expressions of social relation, of relations between people, yes, of agency . Capital is nothing more than the expression of social relations. Marx put this notion forward most bluntly at the beginning of the eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (the title refers to the date of the coup d'etat by Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis' famous uncle):

"Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte, aber sie machen sie nicht aus freien Stücken, nicht unter selbstgewählten, sondern unter unmittelbar vorgefundenen, gegebenen und überlieferten Umständen. Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden."

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

This means there is nothing solid about the base, it is nothing more than yesterdays agency, and it seems so solid just because we have been so accustomed to think in terms of commodity fetishism.

One must not forget Marx's utopian vision: we have lost sight of the long-term consequences of our actions, thinking of them as ossified structures, when they were once organic products of social relations. And the ultimate goal of history (history being very much a conscious human endeavour) is to understand the seemingly ossified base as just that - the expression of social relations - whereby we can once again reappropriate our own forces that have been scattered, bringing them under our sway and in the end truly being masters of our destiny.

Lukacs and postmodernity

I am perplexed at how much theory nowadays is born of ignorance, or to be more precise, a sheer blindness towards history. My favourite is this strange notion of a postmodern epoch. Now the first question is what does the mere fact that something comes after modernity tell us? Not much if anything that is for sure. It seems to be somehow related to the word dark in physics which also connotes not knowing exactly what one is talking about. Baudrillard concisely defined postmodernity as scepticism towards all metanarratives. The other day I was reading Lukacs' History and class conciousness and I came across this interesting passage: "On the one hand the bourgeoisie acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its own needs. On the other hand, it loses - likewise progressively - the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership." It certainly seems that postmodernism is a distinctly modern phenomenon.

What's so new about new media?

As I am reading literature about new media I can not help but notice that references almost exclusively date post 2000. What I am wondering is whether this is the consequence of an epistemic big-bang, a cataclysmic impact of the internet that has rendered all prior knowledge irrelevant, or is the truth more banal, as I indeed fear it is. I will be true to my name and start by exploring some of the buzzwords that are often associated with new media. The one that perplexes me most is "cyber"; the origin in the word "cybernetics" is obvious, but what do cybernetics have to do with the internet? I can easily imagine the word being used to describe air conditioning, since it employs a self-correcting feedback loop to keep the temperature in a room constant. Strangely enough nobody seems to be talking about air conditioning when using the prefix cyber. I can also imagine it being used to describe the autopoiesis of biological systems and - if I use my imagination to stretch the concept of autopoiesis to social systems - describing social systems as being steered by cybernetic loops, as Luhmann does. It is therefore obvious that there is nothing particularly cybernetic about the internet and that most of the authors that use the prefix cyber could not care less about systems theory. Why this confusion of terms? The cynic gives a simple explanation: cybernetics are obscure enough that not many people have a conception about the meaning of the word, yet it has a connotation of theory, making it a perfect empty signifier. Why do we need it? Because if we just talk about the internet - again the cynic replies - someone might notice that if we look at it theoretically, it really isn't as specific as it seems at first glance. Communications over the internet are anonymous, but so where a lot of newspaper articles in the 18. and 19. century, it enables synchronous communication, but so does the telephone. The question that arises is whether the internet is so specific that it warrants the binary classification of old/new media. This seems problematic since the distinction between old and new is completely arbitrary: the radio was a new medium a century ago and it won't be possible to defend the notion that the internet is new for much longer. That something is new does not mean that it is profoundly different from the old, and that something is old does not mean it can not go through profound changes. If we argue that the internet is so profoundly new that it warrants the term new (which is a radical proposition if I have ever heard one), it would be much better to say which characteristics constitute it's newness, giving us something more tangible to hold onto than the mere fact of being of recent origin. We can say that the emergence of mass media constituted a major break, and that they are indeed constitutive of modernity, but I can not see that the internet or other "new" media are part of - or even cause of - any profound social transformation. That is, if we don't go so far as propose we are moving to a new epoch called cybermodernity.