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å Thursday, November 5th, 2015

Y Prof. Bullock’s response to Hybrid Assignment 08

In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean (2013:) points to the affective spaces that are connected to the world of blogs and social networks, where we “express ourselves, share our feelings, and reach out with little hope that someone will be touched and reach back.” In this sense, as many of you note, Dean is registering an indistinguishable character that is joined to our participation in social networks, where “[t]here is belonging, but not to anything in particular” (2013:169).

As a form of communicativity, whatever blogging is described by Dean as a deflection of the effort to communicate. Dean suggests we consider our status as the recipient of a message such that, as a subject, we are exposed to the obligations of the sender. At the same time, she indicates this status is altered by the affective spaces online as we can alter the direction of the message and where communication has no register of affirmation or rejection. As she (2013:171) writes, “the only affirmation in ‘whatever’ is of communication as such. Another has communicated. This communication in no way obligates me to the recipient of the message. […] ‘Whatever’ asserts no preferences. It neither affirms nor rejects. And it doesn’t expose the subject as a desiring subject to whom something matters.”

If we believe the distinction between public and private life has always been somewhat artificial, as Diami suggests in his response to Dean’s work, a point I’m inclined to believe Dean would agree with, there is a question about the way computer processing and human experience are drawn together, such that cognition is embodied differently. This is a question that N. Kathleen Hayles takes up in her book How We Think (2012). R. Joshua Scannel has recently written a review of Hayles’s book that I think you will enjoy as he touches on many of the same concepts and readings covered in this class.

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% elizabeth completed

Due by midnight Tuesday, November 10th (350-400 words).

Fred Turner (2006:38) writes that “For both the New Left and the New Communalists, technological bureaucracy threatened a drab, psychologically distressing adulthood at a minimum and, beyond that, perhaps even the extinction of the human race. For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” Explain how Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter to a cybernetic vision of the world “built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information” (2006:38).

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% Yesenia Williams completed

The essay “Whatever Blogging” by Jodi Dean discuses the forms of communicativity through the continued use of media, specifically blogging. She explains the notion that by participating in social media sites and engaging by posting, adding, and sharing we are not really formulating a sense of being. She speaks of “whatever being” as a term that describes those who attempt to connect online to anyone who will listen, however has an interaction that asserts a more of a “whatever” attitude. The word “whatever” expresses indifference and Dean believes that although it is not completely ignoring the situation or the words spoken, there is no real relevance for obligation felt for a response to be given. She explains the notion of “belonging” and the writers/bloggers attempt to connect through these social media channels.

 

Dean also discusses Buck-Morss view on the manipulation and influence of cinema to the masses. Dean looks at mass media as an influence however sees bloggers as “individuals who invite singular readers to consider what they have to offer” (175) Mass media unites people into beings, where bloggers do not. She believes that within social media there is this sense of no identity. It is a morphed, commitment –free, fragmented reality of one’s self. Dean does not see blogging as a space for connectivity that creates a sense of unity or a grander sense of belonging.