Save the Alienated Humans: Blogging and the New Public Sphere
Written March 23, 2005

I like to think that a recently landed interstellar visitor would be quite tickled by the surge in globalization that’s been sweeping our planet. There would be strange alien laughter. I can hear the questions now:

“But flesh-beast, if your world is shrinking, then surely all of the units of your species are brought closer together? The physics demand it. And a transmission that I saw on your television device ensured me that ‘we are all connected.’ Is this some sort of filthy human treachery?”

Rather than awkwardly trying to explain cultural tensions and Bell ’s idealistic advertising (I barely get it myself), I would turn to the internet, our other great communicator. I would show our visitor blogs from all over the world: ideas and dialogue written by anybody with the will to share their thoughts with others. I would explain that, while not every flesh-beast has access to this system just yet, we’re working on it. I would argue that we are all connected, not necessarily by corporate jingoisms, but by an immense public sphere that we accidentally stumbled into while searching for free music.

And while our alien friend would likely guffaw at humanity’s comparatively crude linkage – “My species developed telepathy several light-years ago!” – I would still be right. We might not have telepathy, but at least we can talk to each other again.

Blogging, or web logging, is currently experiencing a massive surge in popularity amongst flesh-beasts. During the recent U.S. presidential election, bloggers policed the mainstream media’s coverage and contributed enough original discussion to take the national spotlight. The enigmatic ‘Farouz Farzami’ recorded his life in Iran, raising awareness of Muslim gender policy and offering outsiders a valuable glimpse behind the curtains of a very different culture. Even documentary super-pundit Michael Moore has jumped on the blog bandwagon.

But blogging isn’t about celebrity – it’s about everyone. It’s about the networks and links that people choose to construct, the opinions that we select out of the great sea of available information and see fit to trust. It’s about the ability to talk back, to discuss, to reclaim the public sphere and once again engage in debate about the policies and ideologies flowing around us. It’s a virtual version of the historical town hall meeting where any citizen could raise a question or call for change. It’s a circumvention of the one-way mass media that has dominated our dialogue for years.

Just four years ago, Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and human priestess of the burgeoning anti-globalization movement, was criticizing a lack of community connection in the Western world. “There are times when radicalism means standing up to the police,” she said, “but there are also many more times when it means talking to your neighbour.”

While I doubt Ms. Klein had the internet in mind as she wrote about the need to connect, it has boldly stepped forward to serve her purpose. Online communities have formed around topics as broad as international debt, and as focused as repairing the shattered economy of infamously auto-wrecked Flint , Michigan . People are starting to talk again, gathering ideas and opinions from across the world and building a global narrative independent of sterilized corporate media.

Like any fledgling system, blogging isn’t flawless. It’s still growing as a communications medium, experimenting, finding a good fit between the behemoths of television, radio and newspapers. There’s the language barrier, for instance. What good is a cross-cultural means of discussion if we can’t understand each other? There are also questions of privilege and poverty – world blogging seems simplistic until we realize that a vast majority of the earth’s population lacks access to computers. But these are key roadblocks in the globalization debates, cultural issues still outstanding as we struggle to wrap ourselves around the idea of a shrinking world.

If we can’t have a truly globalized public sphere just yet, at the very least we’ve got a space where we are free to voice our views to the linked world. And until the rest of the globe can join us, it’s our responsibility to develop this open space. It’s our job to flex the system, to criticize the pitfalls and praise the advancements and expose the ideologies which prevent us from truly connecting worldwide. We may be crude flesh-beasts lacking the very basics in telepathy, but we need to start being informed citizens again. We need to talk amongst ourselves.

This was for my Politics of Writing and Publishing class, and never actually got printed or anything. I thought about the lazy way out and possibly submitting this as my FINAL CORD COLUMN of the year, but decided against it solely because I thought Pimlott (my prof.) might disapprove of duplicity.

Anyways, I actually took a stab at writing something semi-conventional (for the sake of the marks, you see) and I think it turned out sorta aight.