My early entry about who writes your blog has raised a couple of very useful responses from Mark and Lilia. Lilia observes that:
Links as relations have at least two parties (more if it’s true hypertext as far as I know :), but links are only indications, not relations themselves. Yes, I don’t have control on links to my weblog. Yes, those links can influence who I am – by creating opportunities for a contact or creating an impression that there is a relation. Yes, my identity is constructed in interactions. But all these doesn’t mean that there is less me in it…
Links are not only indications. They are, to be abstract for a while, vectors of force that effect incorporeal transformations. There, got the Deleuze beast out of me. What does that mean? A link can change, qualitatively, what a node means. It can do this quite independently of the content of the node, to the extent (and only to the extent) that it can make this change without having to change the content of the node itself. In simpler terms, a link (just like a film edit) can make something mean something else. This is work I’ve done in the past in hypertext theory, as has Susana Pajares Tosca. I can link to someone else’s content on the web, insert that into a new syntagmatic chain, and as a consequence change its role. This is, very fundamentally, the way major hypertext fictions (Afternoon, Victory Garden) work – you return to where you’ve been but it is never a return – good hypertext is always Heraclitean (sp?).
Therefore links effect qualitative change. The more links in to this blog, for example, from other blogs, my technorati rank changes. Now rank may appear here as a quantitative measure, but that’s a category confusion. Rank indicates authority, and what rank is attempting to indicate is the authority of a blog. Authority is a quality, not a quantity (when we say you have more authority than I we don’t mean that I’ve got a kilo of it and you have two!). So in this plain good old everyday sense, links that I cannot control, affect this blog qualitatively. This happens at all levels: links to a post, links to the blog, and so on.
Ok, all of that was written in a blur of passion and is way too dense for a blog entry. So let me restart and go to what is, for me, the heart of the matter. The suggestions that links are not relations in themselves. On this point, if I’m interpreting it as intended, I am in complete disagreement. (This was the surprising elegance of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.) Blogs are determined by their links. If I write online and don’t link out, and no one links in, I have what? A journal? A diary? A web page? Sure, but not a blog.
The blogosphere, all the tools we have to map this, recognise that it is only about the connections between parts. The connecting parts are of more significance than the parts themselves. This is of course the basis of things like Google bombs -the connection effects change over the meaning of the content, and it can do this quite separately of the content. This is what Deleuze calls an incorporeal transformation, it changes what it means but the object itself remains unchanged. In writing we call it quotation (see for example Derrida’s Limited Inc). By ‘only about connections’ I mean that the nodes are useful, even important, but it is the connecting of parts that is the blogosphere, period. Just like an ecosystem. Yes, that grasshopper is interesting and worthy of study, but as an ecology small part of a loosely joined system. And even if I study just the grasshopper I’m doing a serious act of reductive science if I think I can ‘understand’ the grasshopper by ignoring where it lives, the systems it participates in and which define it.
Links are these relations. They are relations that are external to the things that they relate. This is why links can have attributes that are separate from what they point to: my link that I call ‘agreement’ is your link that you call ‘example’ or ‘disagreement’. Yes these might come from different comments, posts, pages, etc, but it is easy (as a thought experiment) to recognise that when links have such metadata then links clearly express a semantic force that changes that which they link to. Just because (at the moment) most of our links don’t do this doesn’t mean they don’t have this force.
As a final but not final thing to think about. One of the ideas I was getting to, or at, is that while blogs are written by ‘individuals’ this is probably a naive view of a blog (and the blogging individual). My blog as a blog gains its authority from the links made into it. It is a simple (and problematic) heuristic, but surprisingly accurate – witness Google and technorati rank. It is, as my students sore ears can vouch, networked writing and not writing on the network. Where my blog begins, and ends, is a nontrivial question for networked practice and identity.
Tags:
deleuze,
hypertext,
Network Literacy,
practice,
tools
