å Monday, November 2nd, 2015

One example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is Liam Lynch’s song “Whatever.” In the song he has a George W. Bush impersonator yell, “I’m George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, ‘no’! I say, ‘whatever!’  Sadam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.” The term “whatever” in the American culture is used as a passive-aggressive conversational blocking tool. In Dean’s article she discusses how this “whatever being” has no preferences. In this impersonation in the song “Whatever” we see that this form of communicating does little to help whoever is receiving this message. It goes with Dean’s overall theme of the new form of communication that has permeated this culture. There are more voices in today’s digital media in the form of blogs, social media sites, etc. but these voices seem to offer exposure and anonymity which in some ways the receiver of this message is left saying “whatever” on move on to the next one.

A second example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is the word cloud. A word cloud is “a graphic representation of the content of a text understood in terms of frequency of word use.” With word clouds people have now taken context out of words and how they are said and by whom and why. It displaces the meaning and creates a very different story then the person who said it may have initially intended.

The “whatever being,” in my opinion, could be anyone and everyone. There are millions and millions of “whatever bloggers” out there who post their likes and dislikes and may or may not care about how many hits or views they get. It’s all about getting their content out there no matter who may or may not see it. I am torn a bit on this one as we all have the freedom to say whatever we want wherever we want, but if the content is not up to par in your opinion what does it really matter?

In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean discusses the “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.”  The way that I was able to enter into/access this idea, was by understanding that what she was referring to is the multitude of ways society has had to self-identify traditionally, rather than the ways that self-identification is thought of today.  She used the illustration of the ways in which we identified during the Cold War, between the US and the Soviet Union.  There was a definite “us and them” mentality, that was a collective identity we shared as a collective body.  In American cinema, the Americans were always portrayed as the ones working for the greater good, against the evil Russians.  Our collective social way of life was extolled as being the ideal for the American way of life and the standard that we all are measured by.  This diversity of freedoms, inversely is was formed a unifying identity for the masses within the American culture.  However, the homogenized culture of the Soviet Union is exactly what made them so different and a potential threat to our way of life.

The blogisphere that has become to be a contemporary expression of individuality, has eroded the collective sense of identity provided for society previously.  The measures by which we judged ourselves and in turn, connected with others to embody a like-minded communal self-identity, has been undermined and made a 180 degree change – that now thiese things are exactly what makes our self-identity and experience unique and individual.  We now have the idea that “we are with them, but we’re not really with them.”  The concept has moved to say, “whatever happens to me matters – in and of itself.”

In the essay “Whatever Blogging”, Jodi Dean talks about “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity”. What this means is that eventually we will all have a different community and personality that is no longer tied to what previously defined us. In one example, Dean says that ” if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking to the masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multiple addressees- addresses known and unknown, friends and strangers.” In this assessment, Dean is making the point that traditional mass media previously influenced the collective “us” while the influence of networked technology reaches people in different ways. This made me think of the Vietnam war and how U.S. citizens only knew what was reported to them by the media, whereas in today’s society information is received in a number of different ways, through friends and strangers. Often times, Facebook becomes the means by which we hear breaking news because information has the ability to go viral in a matter of seconds. In the “whatever” society, there is no deep thought process before hitting the send button, no thoughts of the consequences that could potentially be faced. Another example Dean uses is the cinema, which she says ” changed the nature of the crowd by providing an imaginary mass body.” In this section she discusses how ethnic groups, religious, political organizations and racist law worked against the image and goal of a unified political identity. One way that these forces were countered was through the use of film, because it was understood as a collective experience. In this way, the unified political identity was able to get their message across to a large group of people, reinforce their beliefs and set the culturally accepted standards for society. Still, she makes the point that there were forces that attempted to fight against these unified political identities. However, the “whatever being” is portrayed as a passive entity, a being that doesn’t really stand for much, it just passes the same information around to its network without deep thought and reflection.