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November 21, 2005
The blog and neo-democracy: the semiotics of the web
The world is a vast place, and limiting myself to just Swedish and English here on Techne is problematic. There is simply too much material in other languages that just has to be commented.
For instance this marvellous article by Paolo della Sala, Blog e neo-democrazia. Semiotica del Web. It is in Italian, go Babelfish it if nothing else.
Della Sala traces the semiotic citizenship, starting from an image given by Campanella in The City of the Sun and Charles Babbage he traces how the way we communicate has changed our self-image. The web has well reshaped the way we work , making the local economy ever more global but it has also made society more visual in its creating a virtual simulacra of reality.
Della Sala traces the resistance against the virtual through the iconoclasm of islam and Jean Baudrillard and in a way their iconoclasm could be understood. The excessive offer of cultural information earlier has produced redundancy and disinterestedness. Culture could loose appeal since it took too long time to relearn.
The interaction with the virtual, of which the blog is an example, is a liberation from the "nostalgia of the herd" of the 20th century man of Ortega y Gasset and instead creates "a nation of scribes" united in cultural interaction and two-way communication.
I think that Della Sala has a good point, though the specifics could be discussed, but he is particularly interesting when pointing out the need for an interactive society instead of a bureaucratic one.
Posted by Waldemar at November 21, 2005 12:12 AM