Reply to comment

The link between blogging and the looping idea is great. Just as we look at things and people through categories we bring to them, so too other people look at us through categories they bring with them. And often we help the other person to know which categories to use in relating to us by making some of those categories salient for them. This, I think, is what it is for people to identify themselves as X, Y or Z; as a scientist or a romantic or a heterosexual or an Indian, etc. When a person identifies with something, they are telling the other people to look at them from such and such an angle so that the other people can see and organize our activities in the way in which we ourselves organize them. Here there is a wonderful looping between the categories I pick up from texts to make sense of the world, and the categories I create so that I can be seen as a part of the world and as a text for someone else. The world creates me and I create the world, and in this way both me and the world (and others) coevolve.

The appeal of blogging and of a web presence in general, it seems to me, is that it enables new ways to pick up on salient features of each other and thereby create new identities and meanings. For example, on the traditional conception of a professor, a professor is someone who is part of an inner circle of fellow intellectuals and who communicates her thoughts through articles or books deemed appropriate by that circle. This is the normal expectation reinforced by hundreds of years of use of the concept in books, culture, families, etc. That is, this is what we expect because this is the concept of professor we are unconsciously carrying around from the literary and other media texts surrounding us. I sense the power of this archetype being applied to me when people act as if they know who I am, how I think and what I care about just because they know that I am a professor. Indeed, more than that: they act as if they know how I should be, because they know how the stereotypical professor is supposed to act. And I do this to others as well when I treat them as professors or lawyers or engineers or artists or athletes, etc. (Is this why Jesus said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged”?...)

Blogging, however, gives one more control over how others might look at them and over what their identities mean. I think this is part of the reason why people blog, twitter, do facebook, etc. It gives them control over their identities. They are no longer just a teacher or a husband or a mother or an artist or a daughter – all of which are abstract categories which don’t distinguish one mother from another, or one teacher from another. But through blogging the persons shows that they are a teacher in this way, a father in that way, an artist who cares about this but not about that, and so on. Is an academic being an academic when they reflect on their personal lives? I think the traditional concept of an academic suggests not; the traditional concept requires something more like talking about people in general, rather than about one’s own personal life. But what if someone is a professor but writes about his personal life publicly in a blog, and writes about it in a way which mixes together his personal and academic interests? Is he being schizophrenic? Or has he not grasped properly the concept of an academic? Or is it that he is reorienting and transforming the notion of an academic? By embracing new modes of expression such as blogging, the person acquires a tool to stretch the concepts in new ways, to change it to incorporate new meanings and resonances.

Perhaps people don’t judge others because people are mean. Maybe they judge others because that is the only way they can understand others. They apply to others the concepts they have picked up from the culture, and if they are not familiar with new applications of the concept, they have no choice but to apply the old and well worn applications to people. This means that if I am tired of how people apply concepts to me, then simply bemoaning that fact accomplishes nothing; it means that I am unwittingly accepting the idea that concepts are unchangeable and set in stone. But concepts aren’t set in stone. An novelist creates a new concept when she creates a new character or a new situation or a new dynamic. An artist creates a new concept when she creates a new dance or a new method of representation or sings in a new way. A scientist creates a new concept when she discovers a new fact or reinterprets an old fact or comes up with a new theory or mode of analysis. A young person creates a new concept when she dresses in a new way, organizes her room in a bold way, when she questions elders in a new way or when she applies her studies to her life. Similarly, a blogger can create new concepts by blogging when she might otherwise have kept quiet, when she writes about two experiences which are normally thought of separately, and indeed by the very fact of blogging. Just like the novelist creates new concepts in her novel, so too a person who writes about her life creates new concepts which she can use for self-identification and for understanding others.

It seems to me that, in the long run, blogging can have the kind of impact reading or writing had in the past. To have access to concepts is to have the ability to create new concepts. A person who can write is not beholden to the categories created by other authors; she can create categories herself. Likewise, a person who blogs is not beholden to categories created only in special contexts such as education, art, science, etc. Blogging is itself a new context and so a mode of developing new concepts, and so is a method for proliferating an unimaginable diversity of concepts. If every person in a town blogged, just in virtue of that the town would become a thousand fold more self-conscious. For they would then have a plethora of new concepts to play with, new distinctions to appreciate and new identities to use in understanding each other.