WIRED SELVES: THE FEAR AND ATTRACTION OF BLOGGING
WIRED SELVES: THE FEAR AND ATTRACTION OF BLOGGING

Summary/Abstract: Fueled by the spread of free blog-creation software, the proliferation of blogs has been remarkable over the past ten years. To paraphrase Beth Snyder Bulik, author of “Who Blogs?” the entire world, not just America, “is going to the blogs.” But what does this mean exactly? Is blogging some kind of “epidemic,” a testimony to the encroachment of technology upon the realm of the “spirit” (Donna Haraway, 193), or rather an antidote to the demise of the “real” and to powerful global forces threatening to wipe out local, individual, and private distinctions? Does blogging, even more so than face-to-face conversation, foster the illusion of meaningful communication? Put differently, do we blog, as we dream, alone? Then why are so many people drawn to blogging, and what is the self that comes into being through this medium? Who or what do we enter in dialogue with when we blog? In pursuit of these questions, I will focus on academic blogs not only because I can relate to them more easily, but also because they allow us, people in the academia, to better understand the role of blogging in our culture, both as a vehicle for self-fashioning and as a way of living with one another in an increasingly wired world with ever more virtual/simulated aspects of experience.

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