I Would Have Linked to Geert Lovink, But I Had Too Much Recast Postmodern Techno-Subjectivity

Link: re-public: re.imagining democracyRe-public : re-imagining democracy - english version » Geert Lovink - Theses on wiki politics.

Pavlos Hatzopoulos: Are wikis the opposite of blogs? The creation of collective intelligence vs. solipsism?

Geert Lovink: It is interesting that you position blogs and wikis as antagonistic players. Usually, within the Web 2.0 craze, blogs, wikis and social networking site are portrayed as complimentary applications. It is true that blog culture, as it exists right now, facilitates the idea that ‘I am the only mind that exists’. In my essay Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse, I have analyzed the blogosphere as one that is by and large introspective. Blogs recast postmodern techno subjectivity in a way that has not yet been fully researched. Why? Because the outcome would be straight-out boring. The fact is that most blogs have a two-month lifespan and contribute little to the liberal myth of our time which proclaims that bloggers are ‘citizen journalists’. This is a sad state of affairs, in particular for the first and second generation of bloggers who believed in linking and responding to each other’s postings. However, by 2004 the collaborative atmosphere in the blogosphere had vanished. The original values disappeared and the blogosphere became noisy and self-promotional.

Whether wikis recapture the lost ‘collective intelligence’ remains to be seen. Blogging has become a self-referential project. If we leave out the Wikipedia debate here, wikis are much more tool-like and are more open than the rather restrictive blog software that most people use. Having said that, it is obvious that both blogs and wikis have a hard time including one’s antagonist into the picture. In the same way as you do not link on your blog to one’s enemy you also rather not like to have your competitor or stalker mess around with your wiki. This is the general problem of the ‘collective intelligence’ concept that has grown out of the ecstatic 90s culture of geeks and nerds who of course discuss but always within the framework to reach consensus on a commonly shared project. In real life, most people lack such a shared project to work on. We can only discuss the nature of blogs and wikis within limited social networks and thus have to reconcile with the limited validity of its knowledge and ethics.

P.H.: How does the proliferation of online collaborative methods affect political subjectivity? Does it mark the dawn of the multitudes as political subjects?

G.L.: It might be known that I do not overestimate the role of new media technologies on the rise of political formations....