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.
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