The inimitable Inspector Lohmann brings forth another essay (Building Invisible Comic Community Through Interdimensional Travel, Part 1) in which he explores one of the central reasons why (IMO) blogging and connecting with each other to work at building new relationships is so important now, and why it will grow in importance.
Blogging has been roundly criticized for offering the Internets so much junk, crap, verbiage, commercialism, etc.
It does that … and I believe you will find the same thing if you wander around in the world and eavesdrop on conversations, where in the street, in a group activity somewhere, in the home, at work … wherever. On the other hand .. there are many examples of fine thinking, analysis, reporting, poetry, satire and so on that likely never would have been (or will) be discovered had it not been for blogging. Humans express themselves, that’s what they do … it’s a necessary prerequisite to communicating with someone else about something they may or may not want to do something about.
To me, blogging is the representation of daily social life on the Internets, accompanied by the fascinating never-ending currents of human interpretation put on display. It matters not that there is so much detritus .. I don’t believe the Internets and blogging were conceived primarily to offer competition to the formal, protocol-bound worlds of mainstream newspapers and television. They are not technologies in search of a (new) business model, although that is an important element that drives some areas of development now.
It’s always been about the sociology .. the sharing of points of view, hopes, aspirations, disappointments and the construction, together, of meaning and sometimes knowledge .. and I submit that increasingly it will be more and more about the sociology.
Personally, I think this is an important point. We have all by and large been trying to understand the phenomenon of interlinked expression and connection on the Web using previous, less-than-fully-pertinent idioms. We are trying to understand, mainly, how it fits into our models of the world as we have come to know them, rather than look at how the phenomenon may shape how we think, act and interact after some of the socio-cultural impacts have become pervasive, ubiquitous or just in a more mundane sense how things are now done.
There are likely to be moves made by corporations and governments to control this force and capability that sits squarely in the hands of mostly be-numbed, mediated citizenries. If this happens, thanks to the Internets it will be seen, known and understood for what it is .. social control through the autocratic regulation and management of information flows.
Hierarchies have always worked through the control of information and power, hence the well-known adage "Knowledge Is Power". It is the core of how hierarchy works (don’t believe me ? Take a quick look at any work design methodologies in use by corporations around the world, and you’ll quickly see that almost all decisions are guided by assessments of hierarchically-arranged knowledge).
Wirearchies work (or will work) through the purposeful connection and facilitation of flows of information that lead to the construction of friendships, alliances, negotiated relationships to accomplish a task or an activity … but will depend upon using the bridges that have been built to create fields of practice, where we can learn individually and collectively to move more purposefully towards progressive social and economic justice (as opposed to colluding in the sustenance of a horribly imbalanced set of arrangements whereby we compete with our fellow humans more than we cooperate).
What we are seeking is a kind of psychosocioimmunology — we seek to create a bridge between our society/mind, though vision, faith and trust to see us through our social crisis.
Justice Progresses — In The Long View
The truth is, Injustice is always destined to fail. Perhaps not in one’s lifetime, nor even in a few generations. But at some point a culture reaches a critical mass at which it refuses to abide its systemic injustices any longer. ("Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrongdoing which will be imposed on them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." —Frederick Douglas.) It takes a lot of effort to keep the majority of the population in fetters, and the greatest fear of the power elite is that one day the subordinate population will remove the rheum from their eyes and see the ways in which they are manacled, and they will see that they have the power of numbers on their side.
Social justice is inevitable. In our time, the world cannot sustain corporate globalization’s grotesque injustices and insane exploitation of people and land — humanity will not permit it if it seeks to survive. There’s only so long a society can continue to enslave and repress the vast majority of its citizens before they rise up and demand that they be allowed to live their own life.
Christians are no longer fed to the lions. Witches are no longer burned at the stake. Slavery eventually ended (in the US at least). Tortures and public executions are no longer acceptable. (The current outcry against these practices by the USA bears witness to this.) Humanity is evolving. But, as Gramsci says, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born." The economist John Maynard Keynes understood this when he presciently said "For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still." He understood that Capitalism’s "detestable…love of money", and the grotesque conflicts of interest inherent to it, must continue until the economy has grown enough to satisfy human wants and provide the potential means for removing poverty. As despicable as the current phase is, it has succeeded in bringing the world together in a complex interdependence where people increasingly understand the need for harmony and cooperation — against the wishes of their political handlers. As such the new must be born quietly from within, hiding behind the paranoid defenses of the vicious vorocrats who will use any means at their disposal to protect their pathological quest to slake their insatiable greed.
If human society can progress past these uniquely difficult times then we will have surmounted our greatest challenge. The world is smaller now. The world is connected now. We cannot but see how we are all connected, and that we have a responsibility to each other. Any system built upon inherent injustices containing such glaring internal self-contradictions must inevitably fail.
Things cannot continue along the path of neo-liberal corporate globalization — it is an ideology and a system destined for failure. But a flame is always brightest before it goes out, and what we are witnessing is a universal madness to maintain a system that the world can no longer bear.
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