blogspeed, engage! ~ [or why I cannot keep up]


[musings on the vicious speed of the blogworld]

So AOL is introducing blogs (errr, "AOL journals," sorry). I was about to write some commentary on the speed of the bloggers I have encountered. Anne Galloway appears to be reading several books a day. Abe Burmeister has several divergent lives. & to a certain extent I fit the pattern. When I introduced myself at IASPM as a "sound & net.artist, techno-turntablist, writer & academe" there were more than a few raised eyebrows. The blogworld is accelerated in a fashion in which the early-90's pomo "hyperreal" and "hyperraccelerated" theorists (ie Arthur Kroker) did not fully anticipate--CTheory feels molasses slow compared to the blogsphere. Yesterday my community server, 1104 , went down, and within hours an email from Anne was asking where I was so she could blog me (and she did).

With the introduction of AOL, I think we're going to see... well: let's think. While maybe this will spurn the same online energy that propelled the "everybody should have a homepage era" (which led to such increased dot-com speculation, for one thing), I also think the speed at which the massive accumulation of blogs will slow down the whole operation will be increased. Thus the entire blog phenomenon will crash & burn much faster than even the dot-bomb. Which is too bad--because for years I've been toiling away on the Net without feeling much response anymore. Netnumbness. Mailing lists are still the best bet, but "online communities" like Rhizome.org have failed to create a cohesive connectability--in part because the digerati have been somewhat resistant to such attempts (perhaps the bitterness over previous online communal failures still rings to close). But blogging is reversing that trend. In only just under two weeks of getting my feet wet in the blogworld, the response has been exponential. I guess the responsibility now lies on me to keep up with the pace.

Too bad I am using iBlog-- it would be nice to add comments to this site. I'll check around, maybe third-party apps are coming out for this type of thing.

posted. Tue - July 8, 2003 @ 02:01 PM           |

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