Hybrid Assignment 08
Due by midnight Tuesday, November 3rd (300-350 words).
In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean (2013:169) articulates 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.” Choose at least two examples used by Dean to elaborate on this notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to.
I will start with the new forms of community as I look, and find that there is a vast amount of gentrification around where I was born and raised, and the new craze is “Brooklyn”. People have a need to belong, and when they are part of a new community and have called it home; although they have “no mileage” they will claim it as a representation of who they are, and for that matter that they have always been. Therefore the “whatever being” term is when people see “whatever” they belong to at the moment, as being the identity that they’ve formed on who they have become. It is funny to me when I see a person born and raised in the mid-west and come to move in a community like Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn; they now represent Bed-Stuy and are attending Brooklyn Nets games, wearing Brooklyn logoed clothing and opening restaurants and shops with the tag “Made in Brooklyn”, when they don’t know anything about its history, its stories or people who called the borough home for many years since birth. Therefore, “whatever” is wherever I am, or whatever I do that I represent, I am a part of its community and its following. The same holds true with it comes to internet blogging. I find that bloggers tend to focus on the less important things and form opinions on that of which are trending and have the audience’s attention, that makes for a less than meaningful discussion in order to feel like part of a discussion of a story and or being a part of a group who has an opinion, even if it’s not that important.
