The Blogging Dialect: A Marxian Critique of the New Media Phenomenon of Blogging

When I wrote my first paper on blogs two years ago (2003), they were a relatively new phenomenon experiencing exponential growth in popularity attributable primarily to their medium, the internet. Today it is nearly impossible to watch television, pick up a newspaper, or walk down the street without encountering a reference to one blog or another. In the span of two years, blogs seem to have undergone the transformation from renegade citizen’s media to legitimate media outlets, and in the process have changed the way people access, communicate, and understand information (MacKinnon 2005). Titles of recent bestselling books like We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing our Culture (Rodzvilla 2002) and Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that’s Changing your World (Hewitt 2005) hint at the transformative power blogs hold in the public consciousness. They have been heralded by enthusiasts as lifesavers in the sea of information on the World Wide Web, the salvation of the masses from the oppressive oversights of mainstream corporate media. Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek fame and a blogger in his own right, colorfully describes the phenomenon in his foreword to Who Let the Blogs Out: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs by blogging pioneer, Biz Stone:

Blogs and bloggers are hitting what marketers call the “tipping point.” In 2003, this guy named Howard Dean wanted to run for president. When nobody in the mainstream media would let his voice be heard, he did an end run around them, and communicated directly with voters through his weblog. Within a few months, he was the Democratic front-runner! (Yearrgh!) In 2004, a Capitol Hill staffer blogged—in lurid detail—about her sexual misadventures with diplomats and congressmen. Her identity was uncovered, and she was fired, but her search for a new job didn’t last long…she just inked a six-figure book deal. Blogs routinely pop up on blogspot.com, claiming to be “secret” celebrity blogs…until the massive armies of keyboard monkeys in the blogosphere use their detective skills to uncover the author’s real identity…. It’s amazing to see where we are now, when you consider where we were just a few years ago …(2003).

Wheaton’s paragraph characterizes the popular rhetoric that frames weblogs—and the bloggers who maintain them—as political innovators, pop-culture icons, and technological gurus; the seem to be the quintessential artifacts of the new millennium, their purpose feeding the very paradox that they theoretically exist to tame: the commodification of knowledge and its subsequent loss of authenticity (Lyotard 1984). With the help of the nearly limitless potential of digital reproduction and through the development of networks across which they communicate specialized, often personalized, information, bloggers attempt to distill the unique and the pertinent from the vastness of the internet. In doing so, it seems, Bloggers create a viable alternative to late-capitalist corporate media.

On the surface, this all seems very promising. After all, according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an American public generally dissatisfied with the performance of traditional media increasingly turns to the internet for its news and entertainment (2005). However, a critical examination of the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon reveals that blogging emerges against the backdrop of unrestrained social and economic forces in a global corporate capitalist economy organized around principles like the perpetuation of artificial scarcity, competition for profits, the marginalization of labor, and the implementation of technology for the benefit of capital alone (Wayne, 2003, p. 3). In this paper, I will consider how blogs function in a capitalist economy by asking: what is the value in blogging? To determine this, I will begin by exploring the brief history of blogging not as the “utopian…new virtual order” proponents claim (Pew Project 2005), but rather as a continuity in the development of technology historically within the capitalist system, bringing to light in the process the material conditions that preceded blogging’s emergence. I will then examine blogging through the writings of others, from Marx to contemporary critics analyzing media as an industry through a marxian lens, to ascertain blogging’s position with regard to capital’s need for monopoly on knowledge. This perspective assumes that within the capitalist mode of production, the forces of production (the tools of capitalism) and relations of production (the human relationships in capitalism) operate in contradiction to one another to form the economic structure, or “base,” of a society. Grossly oversimplified, this base conditions and is reified by the consciousness, or superstructure of that society. In this instance, I will examine the relations and forces of production operating beneath blogging, including the capital, labor, and technology involved in the new media industry in general and blogging specifically before attempting to reveal the complex process of commodity fetishization that reifies these economic relations in the society it shapes and is shaped by. Throughout, to illustrate dialectically this relationship between the base and the superstructure, between the forces and relations of production on the one hand and their representations within the lived experiences of people in the capitalist system on the other, I will intersperse the narratives of various bloggers as gleaned from the content and structures of their blogs as well as personal communications. Additionally, I will draw on my own experiences as a blogger on a blog that I built and authored which welcomed over 10,000 visitors (unique IP addresses) during its existence from 2002-4 (now defunct, archives available online by request only).

The conceptual framework for this study is a basic articulation of Marx’s conception of the labor theory of value, which sees the value of a commodity expressing the amount of socially necessary labor time invested to produce it. Although Bottomore notes in The Dictionary of Marxist Thought that this theory is criticized by many Marxists and non-Marxists alike as illogical, redundant, overly generalized and therefore irrelevant, others argue that, in fact, this concept provides the foundation for any meaningful understanding of the dynamics of capitalism (p. 507). This discussion may be limited by my lack of knowledge of contradictory arguments, yet the labor theory of value nevertheless presents a valuable method for demystifying the complex interplay of social and economic conditions comprising the late capitalist economic system and exposing the inequalities manifest therein. In the words of Marxist scholar I.I. Rubin, “The labor theory of value is not based on an analysis of exchange transactions as such in their material form, but on the analysis of those social production relations expressed in the transactions” (1972). Marx and Engels put forth the broader implications of their method in The German Ideology:

[The] mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are (1978 p. 150).