Thank You, Thank You, You’re Too Kind

By Linh Dinh

Solipsism n. 1) the theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its blog. 2) the theory that nothing exists or is real but one’s blog.
In 1984, there’s a telescreen in each room that can never be turned off, only dimmed. A sort of two-way mirror, it studies us as we watch it. Before writing his diary, an act punishable by death, before he could blog, so to speak, the protagonist, Winston, had to hide in an alcove, out of view of the telescreen.
In 2008, we love to stare at a screen as we share with a bored, restless and concurrently blogging universe an endless stream of our disconnected, autobiographical factoids; political, philosophical and literary half-thoughts; reading and publication announcements; digital self-portraits, sometimes crotch shots; and hasty poetic skits to be ignored if not sensibly deleted a day later.

But blogging is also generative and allows for certain forms of expression unimagined or impossible in older media, not that anyone is paying attention.
A karaoke box is a smallish, rented room where people take turns singing, fixated by a screen. Blogging is like being in a karaoke box alone, performing your ass off, thinking you’re a star in 1984. Look, ma, I’m sort of on television, for an eternity if I wanted to, not just 15 minutes.
When not blogsearching my name, I read my own blog.
Sometimes I glance at other people’s blogs, to see if they’ve mentioned my name. (Blogsearch isn’t always reliable.)
In a counting culture, quantity is all that matters, the number of comments after a post rather than their quality.

Remember JenniCam? Jenni had a camera installed in her room 24/7. Subscribers could check in at any time to see Jenni at the computer, watching TV or sleeping with her boyfriend, etc. Most of the time, Jenni wasn’t even there. More attractive women soon got into the act, all showing skin more regularly, but none came close to Jenni’s popularity. The whole point of JenniCam was banality, artlessness and tedium. More wistful and nostalgic than horny, Jenni’s fans got a peep into normalcy as their eyeballs intruded into her domestic space. Jenni was blogging with her entire body, including its absence.
We’ve always craved attention from the media, their broadcast and sanction, and now we have it in form, if not substance. Self published, we become celebrities on our own blogs.
[Top image: a karaoke booth in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. Bottom: Angela Genusa's "bots named for random CAPTCHAs."]

2008-08-30

Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 by Linh Dinh.