Blog Theory

Beschreibung

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media.Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Deanexplores the ways new media practices like blogging and textingcapture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production,and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysisextends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through mediahistories, to newly emerging social network platforms andapplications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought byneoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporarymedia theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, JeanBaudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Throughthese engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis thatreflexivity in complex networks is best understood via thepsychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, thatreading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp theirreal, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embedus in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivialand transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet tomore fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everydaycommunicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to textmessagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not onlyundermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuitsof domination.

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Jodi Dean

Themen in »Blog Theory«

Communication & Media Studies Kommunikation u. Medienforschung Media Studies Medienforschung

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"Dean is asking the right questions about online life ... Wecertainly need vigilance and critique to help us resist dotcomcharisma, and no one is fiercer or smarter than Dean on thisfront." LAReview of Books "Jodi Dean's Blog Theory takes as its proximatesubject the eponymous blog--and its living death ... whatis offered is both simple and, oddly enough, also hopeful." Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory "If Ballard invited the 20th century viewer to witnesstheir own mass atrocity exhibition, we now have the update for the21st century: Jodi Dean's demolition job of the Internet as we knowit. With Blog Theory we can finally terminate the hype ofblogging and seriously engage the deeply distracted condition ofthe networked present. The incestuous relationship betweenjournalism and bloggers is exposed to make way for criticalreflections on techniques of self-management for ourall-too-fragile identities." Geert Lovink "Blog Theory is refreshingly free of received ideas aboutthe wonderful new world of media. Jodi Dean manages the difficultart of being critical of new media without becoming a crankycurmudgeon. She uses psychoanalytic concepts to produce a synopticview of the decline of symbolic efficiency under communicativecapitalism, and the way the blogosphere participates in thisdissipation of the totems and tokens of what we once thought of asthe public sphere. She clears the way for imagining the politics ofmedia by other means." McKenzie Wark, The New School University
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