Model Anina reports that her agency has told her to stop blogging. She’s the latest in a growing list of professionals who face the consequences of their choice to step out of role (if ever so slightly) because by blogging they disturb the uneasy boundary between private and public life.
On a general note, I see here an instantiation of ‘exposure‘, the powerlessness challenge that personal publishing technologies pose to social institutions in general – from family to industry to governments – who can no longer control nor protect people like they just kind of naturally did before. I also think it’s pretty clear that we haven’t even started dealing with exposure on a large scale yet.
Hopefully Anina manages to sort it out with her agency and keep blogging.
Ulla and I were going to Khao Lak this Sunday to stay in a beach bungalow for two weeks. When I woke up to the news a few hours after the tsunami had hit and checked the travel agency web site, a news flash reported that Phuket had been damaged, but that Khao Lak had not suffered as badly.
As it turned out this information was false. Today the representative of the Finnish foreign minitry was quoted in Helsingin Sanomat, the main newspaper, saying that “Khao Lak in effect no longer exists.” Khao Lak now has the highest body count of all the Thai beaches.
In the midst of the chaos, the Finnish Raya Divers guys were going around finding survivors, helping them get medical treatment, and texting their names to Alex (a fellow Aula member) and a group of friends who run a diving weblog at sukellus.fi. While the ministry’s phone numbers were jammed by the volume of incoming calls from worried relatives, the sukellus.fi blog had information that was accessible and up to date. The hobby blog suddenly turned into a kind of Schindler’s list of survivors, and the number of daily visitors rocketed to hundreds of thousands.
To me it is a startling example of the power that ‘we media‘ can obtain in a crisis situation. It’d be interesting to hear what crisis management experts (for instance, folks working on The Information Technology and Crisis Management project) think about the sukellus.fi incident.
Update: On March 30th, 2005 Alex and the rest of the Sukellus.fi guys received the ‘State Prize’ (10,000 Euros) from the Finnish Government for ‘Fast and up-to-date sharing of information about the boxing day catastrophy in South-East Asia.’ In less than a week’s time, the pages served over 900,000 visitors.
– The desire to record one’s own life connects with the desire to hold back amnesia. The anxiety to forget is intertwined with the anxiety not to be forgotten. For the western audience, managing memories has become a prerequisite for maintaining control of one’s life.
– The digital secularization of funerals: displaying digital flashbacks of the deceased person’s life
– Changes in the gendered practices of remembering: In many families, the man wields the camera and operates the equipment, whereas the woman organizes the shoebox. But digital practices may alter this because the ordering and storing also now take place on machines.
– Googlization: the embedding of personal collections in global networks. In commercial visions like Microsoft’s MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artifacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.
Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation. It’s nice to see academics are paying attention.
One of the reasons I post quite seldom is that it takes a while to articulate things; thoughts don’t ‘naturally’ come out in the weblog format. Perhaps it has to do with the shifting relational effect that is “me”, the blog author. Sometimes the effect is not singular but dispersed, diffracted, unstable: I contradict myself or worse, simultaneously enact multiple incommensurable bits of narratives that interfere with each other. What comes out simply isn’t a coherent story.
Blogs, like email addresses, assumedly stand for an individual person. Sometimes they stand for a group of people or an organization, like the Aula POV (sort of) stands for Aula. Much of the configuration work that is required to maintain this setup gets erased in the name of coherency: colleagues, friends, partners, and also machines and other nonhumans contribute to these messages and posts, sometimes even act as stunt doubles and ghostwriters. But more often than not these shifting configurations don’t produce anything postable. I’m looking for ways to practice greater sensitivity to the effacing that’s going on. Perhaps then I’d post more often :)
1) For an independent consumer brand to rise out of the currently bubbling social software stew, consolidation of existing services may be the requisite next step
2) However, the business model of some of the ’small pieces’ out there appears to be a quick exit through acquisition by an existing big player
3) The blogosphere is very US-centric and this is hindering its economic growth
4) Most importantly: to break into the mass market, blogging needs to become less cool. This is, in my opinion, the most interesting challenge because it requires a transformation of the user experience into something that diehard bloggers might no longer recognize as ‘blogging.’ Posts need to incorporate simple objects that require less effort to create and manipulate than freeform text. Moblogs, reading lists, FOAF listings and such are interesting steps in this direction.
Perhaps in the future, blogging could become a convention for expressing object-centered sociality, to borrow a term from the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina.