Alex Golub‘s response to the topic of linking was a bit predictable.
There are some who say that content-heavy blogs are more ‘personal’ or more ‘expressive’ of the blogger’s personality than link-heavy blogs. This seems to make a certain sort of sense: link-heavy bloggers don’t talk about themselves and their emotions and stuff.
I disagree. I think that link-heavy blogs are as much about who the blogger is as a content-heavy blog. The web and linking reveals with a startling clarity the way we connect ourselves to others.
This is the perspective of an anthropologist, to be sure. As is also quite predicable, I disagree. What linking behavior reveals is the habitus of the blogger, in Bourdieu’s terminology, not the personality. How we connect ourselves to each other does not constitute what I consider ‘personality’; in Bourdieu’s schema, these things are largely involuntary, entirely socially constructed, and not in the least a gesture of expression or personality. It’s a strategy of indirection, hiding personality beneath the waves of cultural doxa. It substitutes pointing to capital for possessing it.
It is refreshing to me that most of the online writers I read do not merely shout and point. I have no interest in studying positions within the fabric of society, because this activity reduces everything to a set of well traveled maps. Old news, I say. The congruence of this method of analysis is easily demonstrated, as in the wonderful map near the opening of Practical Reason:
This is a useful way of looking at things. Chances are, most people’s social opinions, preferences, political views, etc., can be determined by this sort of mapping. But does it really tell us who they are? Not in my opinion; it merely relays social predilections that have nothing to do with any real constitution of ‘self’. But then if you adopt the position of social constructivism, there are no relevant parts to the ‘self’ other than these involuntary choices; we literally do not exist outside of our conditioned responses. This is something that I refuse to believe.
This map takes some heavy interpreting. Are the locations wholly subjective? Farmers have very little cultural capital? Are we speaking of pre-industrail farmers are farmers in the industrial world? Why are mountains listed next to teachers? This map is meaningless without a legend of some kind. I suppose I can go read Practial Reason, but I haven’t yet been sufficiently enticed. “ But then if you adopt the position of social constructivism, there are no relevant parts to the ‘self’ other than these involuntary choices; we literally do not exist outside of our conditioned responses. This is something that I refuse to believe.“It would be useful to me to hear how you feel that my placing a link on my site to a weblog that I like to read amounts to an involuntary choice, pre-determined by my social conditioning. It is especially interesting to see this line of reasoning extended to a new activity like weblogging, an activity I clearly was not trained to have a response for when I was a small child. Of course we have all carried over our pre-existing social conditioning into the new world of cyberspace, but such an adaptation strikes me as a creative act, not an involuntary or automatic one.