Weblogs link content.
To and about cultures, news, studies, thoughts, concepts, immediate reality, and practically all digitally inter-connected spheres. They allow glimpses into ambigious time and space coordinates, mostly personal and opinionated they speak out and invite to understand, define forms of digital being – enabling the self to re-think itself, writes Mortensen. They have the capability of linking the digital with the physical and challenge our notion of publication while re-defining news specialists. Intertwined in comment loops of foreign faces. Sharing a culture of real virtuality, which Castells describes as
a system in which reality itself is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience.
These experiences are as diverse as the audiences themselves that oppose the idea of Mass Culture as Eco describes,
one thing we do know is that there doesn’t exist a Mass Culture in the sense imgained by the apocalyptic critics of mass communications because this model competes with others.
It is a nano culture that gained mediasphere visibility during the main offensive of the Iraq War, partly because netizens used this highly democratic publishing technology to make sense of war propaganda in times when the press cheers for the home army;
even in modern-nation states with supposedly free, democratic news media, writes Macarthur.
As a higher goal in any democracy is self actualization, the weblog is a supplement to this aim and
becomes yet another cultural form in which its representations (how it is perceived or thought about) can be viewed as a political position.
Mortensen, T., & Walker, J. (2002, April 8). Blogging Thoughts, pp. 265.
Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society (Second ed.), pp. 404.
Eco in Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society (Second ed.), pp. 363.
Trend, D. (Ed.). (2001). Reading Digital Culture, pp. 296.
Macarthur, J. R. (1992). Second Front – Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, pp. xi.