ZKM and the Poverty of (German) Blogging
Posted: September 16, 2007 at 6:37 pm | 3 Comments
On Thursday I spoke at a blogging/Web 2.0 event that took place at ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany), the institution known for its baroque new media art installations. Ever since its inception in the early nineties the hierarchical ZKM, preoccupied with high art 3D interfaces, has had a problematic relation with the decentralized and ugly, txt-based Internet with its unruly users. Fifteen years later this deliberate inability, unfortunately, hasn’t changed. Peter Weibel might have thematically interesting approaches and collaborations (for instance with Bruno Latour), but when it comes to Internet culture, he fails to initiate or support interesting initiatives.
The agenda of “Ich, Wir und die Anderen” (Me, You and the Others) event was unclear and mixed up blogging with social networking sites. Even if it was a bloggers event (looking at the CVs of the speakers), it did not deal with blog theory or critical Internet research. The event did not celebrate blogging either. It is important in this context to know that Germans hardly blog, and this statistical fact made it a difficult topic to talk about. Ich, Wir und die Anderen was not a bar camp and had a pseudo-critical, typical continental-European ‘pessimism’ and showed that ZKM was neither informed nor really engaged in the topic. This was demonstrated by the fact that the main speaker at the opening evening, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, did not show up and ZKM director Peter Weibel did not even bother to come down from his office.
Similar to other events it proved difficult to solely depend on (famous) blogger who do their spiel. Outside of German institutional politics and tribal differences there are also a number of general reasons why it is hard to organize intellectually challenging blog conferences. I am certainly not the first to list them:
- Blogging seems primarily a national, inward-looking activity. There is hardly a global bloggers scene (with the exception of sites such as Global Voices), perhaps outside of those that blog in English, but even there I doubt the networks go beyond the known Anglo-Saxon context (with a few Scandinavians, Dutch and so on).
- After a euphoric phase the ‘A-list’ group of leading bloggers scene is about to fall apart in Germany, or already has, such as in other countries like the USA.
- Technologically, blogs are not further developing. There may be new widgets and even better ways to integrate audio and video, and even finer ways to measure traffic and ranking, but that’s it. As an easy-to-use Internet publishing platform blogs will no longer appeal to the techno-imagination (if they ever did in the first place…).
- Blogging is going still going through a high growth phase, but this time without leaders/best practices that appeal to the (national) blogospheres as a whole. Related to this is ‘genre question’: is the blogosphere about to fall apart in a thousand a one distinct genre that have nothing in common?
- On the user level there is a growing competition between reading and writing blogs and the participating in social networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Hyves (the Dutch site). Where will people hang out if they have a limited time online? If social networking sites are forbidden at work, it might be the case that blogs are used during work hours. This fact alone changes the way how people relate to blogs, in that they are likely to respond and merely read, leaving their interactive time to email, their cell phone, social networking sites–and perhaps friends in real life.
At some later stage I will discussion the expropriation of Google, a proposal that I developed together with Pit Schulz in a yet unfinished text on Netzkritik (net criticism) 2.0.
Here are some quck links to reports, in German, about the event:
andreas schepers
oliver grassner
http://www.uninformation.org/weblog/56/
http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress/archives/824
http://www.sozlog.de/?p=579
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September 18th, 2007 at 8:29 pm (#)
Probably you where trying not to be perceived as an unpleasent guest, otherwise you would have stated your points of critique during the event. On thursday night, when I attended the event, you mentioned the ZKM has been and currently still remains in disregard of major online-topics and left it at that.
Also I would habe very much liked a discussion in order to frame the question at hand - each of the lucky 4 on the podium had his or her own translation of the agenda, spanning from hard-core Habemas´ theoretical ideas to a numbers driven report that you gave. I believe the chance for the kick-off event to frame the overall discussion was missed, and poorly so, also due to the sub-par moderation by a clearly technically challenged but somehow interested person with the very very very legacy german public dinosaur broadcaster WDR.
Your finding concerning the irrelevant nature of blogs can not surprise students of german lecturer Claus Leggewie with Giessen University, who amongst others stopped praising \”the internets\” as a new digital agora back in 2002 or even earlier and went on to perceive the whole thing as just another channel besides phone, fax or else, that makes communicating, mobilizing (where was THAT during Thursday nite) agenda setting etc just a little more easier or cheaper to achieve - while enabling an endless stream of fringe opinions and agendas to pose between and besides large and legitimate civil society interests. Some perceive this as more democratic - mostly those who emphasize on the input-aspect of democratical processes - others might argue that even the \”Teil-Öffentlichkeiten\” are clogged by too many (but what is \”too\” ?) voices. I tend to lean to the latter position, I also believe that the politically active public is overwhelmed by the total amount of goals, agendas and groups and hence not many groups can align too many followers behind themselves and are therefore ill-legitimized, trying counter that effect with modern shock-marketing à la Greenpeace only delays that effect. To cut it short: the political internet (what about IRC) existed before Radio userland and RSS and ws not so revolutionary before, and nowadays it is marginalized .This holds true only for the case of Germany - other countries like Iran, China or Brazil may produce interesting results, but also not just due to blogs but due to overall exploding internet usage.
Next year in the ZKM: please frame your questions - and get yourself some decent host who knows his or her s**t.
September 21st, 2007 at 2:44 pm (#)
Hm, I never had the impression that Germany needed more A-Bloggers who showed the \’how to blog\’ and that thus more eolple would start. I rather think it is some \’learned\’ behavior (KNigge or such) that you are better quiet in public lest you damage your reputation or whatever.
As you know there were enough times in Germany, where this was advisable and it seems to have \’seeped in\’.
On the other hand there is the media who treat bloggers like zoo animals or junkies or such and write and write about how silly bloggers are.
It is really hard to say.
I found your idea interesting to put the \’german negativity\’ to use in online discussions/dialogue. I\’d be more interested in your ideas on that.
I\’d also found it appropriate to voice your concerns on the second day after you had shown your polite side on the first day
I also found it strange that Prof. Weibel came down from \’above\’ to summarize something he did not or only fleetingly take part in.
Next time we could just hand out the abstracts and move on to the discussion right away
(and we should have some people from France, the Netherlands, the USA and maybe Japan on the panel 
)
October 27th, 2007 at 3:33 pm (#)
[…] As examples I used three distinctive blog cultures: the shocklogs in the Netherlands (see the postings on the Masters of Media blog), the debate around the presumed German reluctance to start blogging (see my previous ZKM posting here) and the emerging Hindi blog culture in India, a research that Ravikant presented at the Pedagogical Faullines workshop in Amsterdam on September 22 2007. The Closing Panel […]