The Culture of Blogging: At the Crossroads of Narcissism and Ethics

Abstract

Numerous critical accounts of blogs and social networking portals, such as MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger, position these newly emergent media forms as clever market devices, through which naïve, self-indulgent and narcissistic users provide international conglomerates with precious marketing data and thus fulfil the neoliberal imperative for individualized productivity. Offering an alternative reading of such online media, I will argue that they can facilitate the development of a new form of media ethics, an ethical framework for being with others in global or transnational media spaces. I will also suggest that blogging and social networking enable the self to establish an active relation to its own life and the processes of its management. This is why I propose to describe this form of media ethics as bioethics — not in a medical sense but rather in the sense of an ethics of life, relating to both political and material aspects of life (i.e. what Aristotle termed bios and zoe). The argument of my chapter is organized around one key question: What if Foucault had had a blog?KeywordsSocial NetworkingEthical PotentialOvereducated WorkerConversational ScholarshipEthical InjunctionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.