What you see before you is my third attempt at a personal weblog. The first, "This is not a Blog," began as an experiment with this new medium and derived its inspiration from what can only be called a fundamental need for catharsis. The second Gulf War had just begun, and the media coverage of the buildup and prosecution of the war seemed so appalling, so dreadful, that I had to do something more than simply choose to consume or avoid it. My biggest problem with the war, which seemed unjustified on the merits presented in the most obvious ways, was its failure to register as an event in the way that other wars appeared to have registered. Here was a government starting a war against the backdrop of global protests and severe doubts about its necessity at home, here was a military so obsessed with the prospect of bombardment and invasion that they could only giddily describe the onslaught as "shock and awe," and here were tens of thousands of civilians being destroyed under the hygienic auspices of the term "collateral damage." And yet the advent and conduct of the war seemed to resonate with no more authority that would a season finale of Friends. I authored about a hundred posts before my interest began to wane, but I had a few of them that I particularly liked. My readership was slight if consistent, but the small group of loyal patrons who stopped by were eventually overwhelmed and overrun by spambots, which flooded the site, Agent Smith style, and overcame my capacity to fight them. I abandoned the site and chose not to renew the domain license, and "This is not a Blog," as its title might have predicted, was no more.
I worked on my dissertation for a while, finished and defended it. I had some time on my hands and the siren call of blogging began to ring distinctively in my new, Ph.D. ears. My dissertation, Spectral Mediations, focused on media ecology and philosophy, and in keeping with my thinking at the time, which centered heavily on countering the more pessimistic appraisals of technological change, I dubbed my new blog "Broken Letters." It was a lovely little place, with a fresh Movable Type install, and I posted on anything that struck my fancy, from politics to media studies to random thoughts on the world. I attempted to cultivate a more academic air, to keep with my newly minted academic status. The blog read reasonably well, and while it had its lulls, my reader base grew far beyond that of "This is not a Blog," and all was well with my little blogging world. And then, in a flash of hacking magic, the hosts were cracked, the service pulled, the posts were (with only one or two exceptions) suddenly lost, and again as its title might have predicted, "Broken Letters" ruptured beyond repair.
The election of 2004 came and went, with anticipated if entirely lamentable results. Contacting some of my colleagues and friends, people who I respected as intellects and writers, I started a group blog that could explore issues of rhetorical construction and progressive politics. With some discussion as to its mission, we dubbed it Progressive Commons and sent it off into the world. It is still there, doing exceptionally well, though still evolving into something greater than I envisioned when we began. This summer, we will begin the transition from a group blog to a certified non-profit organization, and after that I expect Progressive Commons to take on a whole new trajectory. Still, as much as I enjoy my work there, something has been missing. Progressive Commons allows me space to write of politics and rhetoric, but it leaves little room for personal ruminations or discussions of media ecology and theory. The room it does leave is largely practical, and as fundamentally important as the practical questions of political economy and news cycles are, I found myself wanting to explore different ways of talking out theories of media in the abstract, but doing so in a way not bound by the stringent and often stifling conditions of the academy.
And so, here we are, you and me, at "Ghost in the Wire," my latest and I suspect longest lasting experiment with personal blogging. Here I will discuss a lot of things, from the specific attributes of different media to the tenets and limits of media ecology, from some exposition of different media theorists to some disquistion on the more interesting issues raised when we think about mediation - issues that go by names like time, mimesis, and of course, the ghost.
Comments (1)
i noticed you forgot to mention how cool your sister is. loser. like the site though. let me know when you start podcasting. also let me know what that is so i know what to do to hear you when you start podcasting.
Posted by Ann | June 14, 2005 6:08 PM
Posted on June 14, 2005 18:08