Romancing the Blog

I know that our next exercise for Blogging class was to reflect upon our relationship to information--I'll get to that, I swear, 'cause God knows I love to navel-gaze and I'm very, very excited to address this--but leaving class tonight, Spazeboy's comment about changing his blog's icon to Fabio made me vastly concerned that people had misunderstood my parallel of the blog phenomenon with Romanticism and Sentimentalism. Here: let's set the record straight by acknowledging that a) I was making reference to the Romantic literary movement, not waxing nostalgic about candelight dinners, men with rippling pecs and long hair, and lacy underthings; b)I rather deplore Romanticism and the tendency of its canonical writers to heedlessly careen into self-righteous emotional hedonism; c) I'm a huge proponent of precisely the kind of detached, critically processed and reflective Enlightenment thought Sara was saying she turned to BBC news to obtain. With that said...

What I was trying to articulate in class is that the Blogging movement seems to be doing for communication, writing, and perhaps eventually the literature of our generation something similar to what the European Romantic movement did in the middle of the 18th century. Emphasis that had been traditionally placed upon Englightenment processes (such processes being the value for carefully vetted ideas constructed with a keen eye toward objectivity, attention to societal expectations and norms, and the practice of approaching all literary production, acts of authorship and thought with a critical lens) is now being shifted to the highlight the individual's unique perception, feelings, and experience.

In the Eighteenth century, critical essayists like Johnson, Addison, and Dryden championed a disinterested, detached, intensely objective and philosophical approach toward cultural productions with emphasis upon presenting only the general--the "just representations of general human nature" (see Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare for more on this). However, with the influence of the French Revolution and the general populace growing weary of this dry, removed manner of experiencing the world, first Sentimentalism, then Romanticism came to the forefront as alternatives to (even replacements for) Enlightenment thought. The traditionally venerated emphasis upon the general and the respect for the critical lens was placed instead upon individual experience and peculiarities of each human man and his feeling. This shift in attitude is evinced even in literary subject--novels like Fielding's Tom Jones and Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling along with myriad sentimental poems swirled around the particular experiences and good feelings of the common man.

Sentimentalism (a predecessor of Romanticism) has its roots in an aspect of Lockean philosophy that maintains a belief in the "natural sociability of humankind and the importance of impulsive, spontaneous sensibility."* This meant that these new literary trends placed all of their trust in the basic goodness and innate desire to do right, be right, and act in a righteous and socially sensitive manner possessed by every individual.

So what does this have to do with blogging?

Well, with the quickly ascending visibility of and import placed upon blogs, a shift in the ways in which we expect our information to come to us is occurring. The authority to be an information sorter is being removed from the hands of the bureaucratic "many" that may find, revise, editorially review and decide upon what is shareable and what is not, and placed instead into the grubby, work-worn paws of the common man. This means that the value placed upon the detached and far-seeing critical lens that we've long hoped and expected our mainstream media would utilize is perhaps in the very early stages of being replaced by trust in the instincts of the individual to differentiate between what information is right, what is good, what is acceptable and worthy of dissemination. With blogs having such a low entry barrier and being so personal in nature, oftentimes without any sort of higher authority or censorship, the individual blogger is given Most Supreme Executive Power.

That the ways in which we vet and present our information may be changing in this manner is at once elating and, quite frankly, terrifying--maybe even dangerous. With so much trust in the basic goodness--even the basic intellect--of the common man, we have to wonder: is the common man basically good and is each man intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing "good" from "bad" information? This brings us to a basic Lockean and Hobbesian debate--is man basically good, or basically bad? Can we trust individual bloggers' ethics without a system of governance that will sound their moral core and decide for us whether or not they've got moral fiber of teflon or of cheese cloth?

Ultimately, it becomes a question of whether, (should this trend develop and manifest itself in the same ways Sentimentalism and Romanticism did--and I know that's a reach, and maybe I'm totally off my rocker--fine), we as untrained individuals really have a grasp of how to read with a critical lens and how to write with a nod toward social responsibility. The prescription for behavior that Locke intended with the above statement attributed to partially birthing the Sentimental movement presumed that individuals, though acting upon their own naturally good feelings and urges, naturally possess a critical enough eye to make choices that are sound for society as well as for themselves. In the case of bloggers, this would mean each blogger maintaining an internal code of ethics that force him to ask before posting something inflammatory or polemical whether the information he is about to share is something he's propagating in good faith with clean motives and whether it might serve society in some manner, or if it is in fact something he may be presenting out of carelessness or self-interest. I'm not sure that we're ready to self govern this way, but I'm excited to see if we can try.

(This quasi-philosophical rant brought to you by Caitlin's thesis).


*Quote taken directly from page 1 of the book Framing Feeling by the brilliant Trinity professor, Barbara Benedict (who is also my idol).