Information Overload: Undercutting the Blogocracy

Decentralized dissemination of information may be a boon for the democratization of public spheres; however, it also undercuts the power of the texts produced in those spheres, creating a problem of recognition of the critical discourses occurring in blog communities. By critical discourse, my scope is limited to the use of the blog in realms that are not the ego-centric, day-in-the-life, dear diary, entries. I do find these entries interesting to the way that 'self' is defined using the blog as a dialogic tool and the necessity of a perceived audience, which allows the writers to enter into a phase of pseudo-self discovery by entering into a Hegelian Dialectic, but I see these blogs as more intimate in nature not effecting the conversations of critical-rational debate.

Democratization of access pulls the "proverbial rug" of credibility out from under the texts produced in this setting, which in many ways is the issue for most on-line publications. Blog sites do not promote rational debate so much as they do navel gazing. For a critical-rational debate to occur, blogs taking part in the conversations of particular debates need to be centralized or given nodes within the network of the specific debate. There are so many blogs varied in mode and topic that it overwhelms and saturates the amount of discourse in the community, that trying to distinguish a particular thread within the blogging community seems near impossible, especially finding credible blogs not run by conspiracy theorist schizophrenic psychos.

Another aspect of the blog that worries me, is that writers of strictly the "dear diary" mode rely on an audience, or, in the very least. a concept of an audience. But who or what is that audience? Who controls the perception of that audience? Blogs can be accessed by anyone, but it seems that these perceived audiences are faux constructions developed by marketers and advertisers, whose desire is to use the blogs as havens for Internet promotion and consumer demographics.