First post so some quotations by way of orientation:
“Parasite: one who obtains hospitality etc. by obsequiousness XVI; animal or plant supported by another XVIII. – L. parasitus – Gr. parasitos one who eats at the table of another, toady, f. para beside, PARA- + sitos food. Cf. F. parasite (Rabelais).” Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966).
“PARA … form of Gr. para prep. by the side of, alongside, past, beyond, as in PARABLE, PARADIGM, PARADOX, PARALLEL, PARENTHESIS, PAROCHIAL, PARODY, etc. Also in numerous techn. comps. in which it had cogn. advb. and adj. uses, as ‘to one side’, ‘amiss’, ‘irregular(ly)’, ‘wrong(ly)’. ibid.
And then Steven Johnson commenting on the proliferation of meta-forms, the “shift from story-telling to commentary”, in postmodern culture:
“… the defining characteristic of the parasite form is neither hall-of-mirrors delusion nor dissident irony. What unites the diverse strains of the emergent species is a shared belief in the need for information filters – data making sense of other data. The parasite forms thrive in situations where the available information greatly exceeds our capacity to process it. Metaforms prosper at those threshold points where the signals degenerate into noise, where the data sphere becomes too wild and overwrought to navigate alone” (Johnson 1997: 32)
The blog functions as a parasite then in various senses:
1) a form of writing-as-commentary which ‘eats at the table of another’. The ‘other’ being Big/mass media, but also the blogosphere itself. The parasite is also alongside itself, is both guest and host.
2) a form of writing which demands constant feeding in order to sustain a network identity.
3) a techne which transforms experience into blog-fodder, just as in 19th-century Paris, dinner at Magny’s acts as a techne that turns experience into anecdote. The guest paying for his or her meal with talk – transubstantiation (Serres).
4) the parasite-as-filter analogy becomes even more explicit with the advent of user-driven search engines such as Stumbleupon.
4 responses so far ↓
Paul Caplan // September 4, 2008 at 2:49 pm |
I think we need to be careful of creating ‘Blog’ or ‘Blogging’ as an over-unified entry. Commentary and story-telling on Blogs and social spaces are very different practices – often interweaved but sometimes separate. The pundit Blog is different experience (reading and writing) to the diary or ‘open source content’ space where the aim is to show and tell. Parasitism certainly, carnival too but as a wise man once said ‘performance’ too.
meanwhileinmokum // September 4, 2008 at 3:34 pm |
True enough, this is in danger of essentialising ‘blogging’ – however, I still like the idea of blogging as a practice-upon rather than a practice. Whether a practice upon big media or the info-sphere, or on ‘experience´. A form/techne which makes demands upon the blogger.
I also note that I operate with an essentialised vision of blogging when it comes to the strategies of the host media in dealing with newmeeja. A Guardian journalist blogging from the floor of the RNC is an adaptive strategy, not a ‘true’ blogger, or rather the blog as parasite has parasitically produced this adaptive strategy…..
Performance is interesting: some of the most successful incorporations of blogging into big media that I can think of – (yes ok, the Guardian blogs on the Apprentice and Champions’ league nights at Anfield) – become para-sitic events in Johnson’s sense. Certainly at Anfield the blog can be more enjoyable than the football.
I know you’d argue otherwise, and Johnson’s distinction between storytelling and commentary may be too easy, but I do feel that blogging as a form of social practice (tagging, comments, hits, clarification, elaboration) shifts discourse away from story-telling to commentary. Stories are better told in other media? Or the story/commentary division is indeed being replaced by one of performance or discursive event.
raymond // December 13, 2008 at 4:20 pm |
Liking this.
I am syndicating this blog into my LJ after reading your links on flickr psychogeography
What do you think of blogging’s connectionto older historical practices like common placing?
http://robinsonner.livejournal.com/2172.html
I like the double-edged use of “feeding”.
meanwhileinmokum // December 13, 2008 at 4:42 pm |
Hey, thanks! I knew absolutely nothing about ‘common placing’, so that is absolutely fascinating. I’m going to have a good look at your blog.
I’ve been thinking about modernist poetics in terms of an assemblage of heterogeneous materials against Romantic organicism, so the common place idea is very interesting. It also makes me think immediately of Aby Warburg’s attempts to invent a history of art using just images in Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE. also a form of common placing, which might be interesting with respect to psychogeography – certainly to Sinclair’s take on Hawksmoor and his “risky quotations”.