Hybrid Assignment 8
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.
