Thursday, March 25, 2004
(7:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
There is nothing outside the blog
I coined the title. Here's my proof. But already my proof calls into question the statement itself -- is not Google outside the blog? Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. It is already well-known that Google relies heavily on blogs in its patented, black-box "PageRank" system. Blogs themselves have used this technology to produce "googlebombs" (my favorite was "miserable failure"), which are orchestrated by blogs, the results of which are directly linked by blogs and discussed by blogs. Google is in some sense a concensus of bloggers' opinions of web sites, and in turn, Google is often integrated directly into blogs through the advertisements on blogspot and through site-specific searches. Google is not outside the blog.
But what of the news articles and punditry on which bloggers comment? A story of significant import is heavily quoted in all manner of blogs -- any given story is likely quoted hundreds of times over, in its entirety, throughout the blogosphere. Is that fair use? Take my recent post about David Brooks. I quoted almost the entire article. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have done so. Is that fair use? Are bloggers hijacking these articles? What of Atrios' site, where 90% of the text is quoted. Is that fair use? Is Atrios a plagiarist, and all of the rest of us his apprentice plagiarists, some of us even getting paid to plagiarize? What does it mean when we link to an Atrios post rather than to the article itself? What if we cannot link to the article without also linking to Atrios, as the one who gave us the heads-up? We would not have known the article existed without Atrios, or without the blogger who read Atrios and told us what Atrios had found.
The article is more real -- has more effects -- in the blogosphere than outside it, and may even continue to have effects without anyone going back to the original. The original only becomes important in terms of the ongoing debate in the blogosphere. The reference to the original takes place in the blogs, in the form of quoting the other stuff that Andrew Sullivan "conveniently overlooked," and continues to propagate throughout the blogosphere.
Was there an article before the blog? Or was the article in some sense already blogged? Already blogging itself in the play of blogging and hyperlinks? Trying to get to a "before" of the blog, we find ourselves continually confronted with the primordiality of the blog. Newspapers were already blogs in all important senses of the word. Books were already blogs, already thoroughly plagiarized, going over the same words again and again -- the Bible is a blog, the blog of the people of Israel. Human conversation was blogging already. The world of human meaning was a blog, divided up into packets of meaning, haphazardly quoting from something that I think I heard somewhere -- from mother? from Atrios? but where did they find it? The world was a blog as soon as it was divided up into night and day, perhaps even light and darkness. A future essay: on blogs, and internet blogs in particular.
So when we try to get back to what we're blogging about, to the real life on which we are commenting, we find that there was never anything there. Any attempt to get behind the blog to the real reporter, the real commentator, the real David Brooks, the real Adam Kotsko, the real Atrios is doomed to failure. There was never a "real life," and this is not by accident, not some problem inherent to the Weblog or to Atrios or even to the Internet. There is nothing outside the blog. Any belief to the contrary is a nostalgia for something that never was, a melancholia that never allows itself to become mourning. Our task is, precisely, blogging, and ever will have been.
