When I made this blog a few months back, I did it without really thinking about it. And then I kept it relatively private for about 3 months and now I've decided to make it public.
My first post was more or less a joke, but since July, I've thought a lot about the role of the blog in today's world and I've more or less made up my mind about how I'll construct my entries.
Like all works of personal expression, I think the blog could either be (theoretically) severely detrimental or (theoretically) extremely beneficial for society, but it seems as though this medium has been abused and consequently leaned towards its problematic and harmful inclinations. Many people have, without a doubt, observed the hidden realities of the blog's longterm effects on public opinion and imagination. What's occurring is the hyper-democratization and the hyper-inflation of feelings, and not ideas. I probably should have italicized or bolded this previous sentence, but for the purposes of this blog I don't think I'll do any of that. I have this romanticized belief that a written work should have a sense of unity, rather than have one sentence be more important than the others.
Anyways, I'd like to first discuss the former half of my thesis: the blog's role of over-democratizing the Internet. I think it's nearly impossible to have a meaningful discourse on democratization of an institution without mentioning the platonic origins of democracy as a theory. But first, we'll have to introduce the unit of the democracy: the individual. Through the tripartite soul, Plato divided the human essence into three parts, the most base of these parts being the faculty of desire, equivalent to Freud's Id. The bridge between the individual and democracy rested in the reign of this faculty. Hence, Plato criticized the democracy in The Republic as a form of governance too inclined for chaos. Each individual would chase his or her desires and ultimately, no sense of order would be accomplished. This is what I meant by the latter half of my thesis: the hyper-inflation of feelings, not ideas. The voices of music critics, film critics, and literary critics used to be equivalent to those of the platonic philosopher kings, but now, in this over-democratized state, the voice of reason is silenced by the cacophony that is hyper-democracy and its consequential need to obtain even the most whimsical desiderata.
Here exists what I believe to be the central problem with the blog. The blog was created to not only appeal to the masses, but also to be accessible to the masses. But then, what gives a blog merit? Very simply, I think a devotion to rationality gives a blog merit, meaning that the writer does not try to create the illusion that his or her feelings are thoughts, and that his or her opinions are truths. But what separates feelings from thoughts and opinions from truths? Both sets of binaries and their divisions can be extremely problematic, but for my purposes, I believe that thoughts and truths are those discourses that exist in dialogue with a theoretical dimension. Criticism without theory is empty, fruitless, and worst of all, boring. For example, discussing KungFu films without discussing Chinese national identity, discussing Descartes' Meditations without discussing the performative, or even discussing Harry Potter without discussing the bildungsroman.
So with this blog, I'll try my best to adhere to theoretical dimensions. Meaning that I'll discuss the conceptual rather than the imaginative aspects of culture. I think this approach will help me appreciate culture in a way that balances aesthetic vision and rational thought.
