ENTRY 38

Blogs are a political animal

3月31日 (水ー木) 12:30 am JST

Aristotle once said, “Man is a political animal.” Political in this case doesn’t mean “a fan of talking head debate shows,” but “of the polis.” That is to say, a city dweller. I think what he was getting at is that people are naturally social creatures. We create self-identity based in large part on our group identity. That said, ours is an era in which old parts of the social order are undergoing upheaval and a new order is coming into play. This is constant process. For example, before Aristotle’s day, a person’s primary allegiance was to the family/tribe. Then, the primary allegiance shifted to the city-state and then the nation-state. Now, transnational, multiethnic allegiances are being formed in various parts of the world. The importance of race to the formation of identity has waxed and waned. Nationalism begat WWI, racism begat WWII, and ideology begat the Cold War. Now, the importance of each is decreasing.

However, along with these welcome disappearances, we have also seen the disappearance of the union, the guild, apprenticeships, and inherited titles. No longer are we tied to a job for life. This gives us freedom of choice on the one hand, and the burden of choice on the other. No longer are we stuck in a job handed to us by fate, but no longer do we have the security of lifetime employment. The fickle market determines our status, but at least, we have the illusion of control.

Marriage and the family have also undergone shifts, as the idea of love has gone from a romantic ideal to relational necessity. This is based in part on the shift of sex from the engine of fertility to a personal source of pleasure. Basing marriage on induced pleasure and felt emotion has led to its instability, and once again we are both freed from the burden of life long commitment, while also left to face the winds of uncertainty.

4月5日 (月ー火) 1:30 am JST

The chaos of the social order is partly the fault of American idealism. American thinking is still partly underpinned by a romantic sense of individualism and rejection of authority. You can see this in how politics is sold. Republicans are opposed to the East coast, elite, liberal snobs who want to take away the common man’s business, religion, and guns and give them to activist trial lawyer judges who write for the New York Times about the UN. Democrats are opposed to big money plutocrats (in theory), fundamentalist religion (except for Catholicism and Judaism!), the White Man, and others with economic power. Both parties sell themselves as much for their opposition to outside authorities as they do for their own right to authority. (Incidentally, this is part of the reason that the Republicans have had such difficulty dismantling the state they claim to hate. Hatred of authority is a key to their sales, not their product.)

The slow erosion of the power of authority can be seen in everything from casual Fridays to the increasingly colloquial rhetoric employed in public speech. Virtually every sitcom father is outclassed by his wife and kids. Police chiefs are always too hard on their loose cannon underlinings. Even real kids define themselves through their opposition to authority, either that of the teachers (as the cool kids do) or that of the popular kids (as the geeks do).

Given that everyone is against everyone over them and beset by all those beneath them, it’s no wonder that people feel cut off from each other.

4月6日 (火ー水) 1:36 am JST

Just as the death of authority has resulted in the fracturing of identity into isolated subgroups that live together but share no ideals with the general populace, the internet has strengthened bonds within those subgroups. For those in my generation and beyond, the internet has proven to be a key realm for identity creation. While our parents all learned about the Beatles simultaneously on the Ed Sullivan show, we each individually downloaded Wilco on different afternoons and on the recommendation of different sources. While television built a mass culture, the internet aids the creation of micro-culture.

The number of people who live in a certain area and know one another is always limited by physical reality. Even the greatest university butterflies have trouble knowing the names of more than a few hundred or thousand people. In such an environment, interests that are obscure and only participated in by say, one in a thousand, cannot be entertained. However, the internet through its shear weightless interconnection links millions of people together effortlessly.

My ‘maturation’ process can mostly be plotted as my movement from one online community to the next. When I was very young, I read BBSes about Star Trek, which were replaced by websites about “Windows 96” (no, for real!), and on and on from one dorky site to another until the present day in which I’m torn between news blogs, macintosh rumors, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and Teach Yourself Japanese. It never ends. For better or worse, for most people physical community is going to be partially supplemented by virtual community.

Some have expressed fears that the shift to an online culture will lead to the spread of extremism, as orthodox views echo in hermetic chambers. However, I think that these fears are misplaced. Broadcast media did create a kind of orthodoxy (while simultaneously abolishing authority due to its non-written nature), but blogs for the most part exist in order to amplify controversy through interaction. The point of online communication is to get “comments” from readers, which in turn generate more reader comments, and eventually comments on other sites and on and on. In order for this process to be of interest to anyone, the comments must form a kind of debate, which requires that opposing viewpoints be present. For this reason, I think that while the internet will on the one hand allow for much more single issue communities to emerge, those communities will also be forced to understand their topics in greater depth, if only to move the conversation forward. Combined with the natural American distaste for authority, it is clear that unchallenged assumptions cannot last forever. In such a frightening democratic medium, orthodoxy is inherently unstable.