Blogs as "post-informational"
Monday, October 24
1:50 PM
Some interesting thoughts in Kate Raynes-Goldie's
First Monday article "
Pulling sense out of today's informational chaos."
She's all about LiveJournal, and I don't find the analysis of that blogging community very interesting (my usual problem with most things LiveJournal) but I do like some of her broader points on the landscape:
LiveJournal and other blogging services have developed out of what can be best described as a synthesis of the current post-modern and increasingly post-informationalist society.
It is post-modernism's subjective view of truth as being multiple, combined with post-informationalism's rejection of modernist notions of information as truth in favour of knowledge as useful, that informs an understanding of LiveJournal as a knowledge-creation system. In other words, it is not that there is absolute truth as modernism would suggest, or that there is no truth as post-modernism holds — rather that in this informational chaos, the question of truth is not really a useful one.
After mulling that paragraph over for a day, I'm starting to wonder whether readers of diary blogs really do think in terms of the useful (up to and including the sublime observation and the witty remark?) instead of the truthful.
Cite for the article:Raynes-Goldie, Kate. "Pulling sense out of today's informational chaos: LiveJournal as a site of knowledge creation and sharing," December 2004. First Monday, volume 9, number 12. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/raynes/index.html
Alles Wird Gut
