Hybrid Response #8 – “Whatever Blogging” Jodi Dean
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.”
