the blog ‘moment’

I ran the now defunct junk  for code and public opinion blogs in the first decade of the 21st century, and these blogs were part of the post-20th century  blog ‘moment’, with its hyperlinks, blog rolls and networks. Though this blog moment has long passed, it is worth looking back to  see what has been lost. This is not for nostalgic reasons of looking back to golden times, but to recover some things from that moment that could both help us to address problems that we experience in the present, and to guide us to construct the future in an Australia that continues to devalue culture.

The blogging nexus of online self-publishing was at its most intense and generative for roughly a decade, from 2002 onward.   Blogging  was  easy, it was free,  it  got more readers than you could from a zine and it  sidestepped all the old means of distribution and cultural production.  The energy of the blogosphere  fostered an unofficial, de-commodified  intellectual and visual  culture. DIY book publishing –eg., like many books my Edgelands photobook —emerged out of the writing and photography in the  blogosphere. 

I currently persevere with the blog form in an attempt to keep the concept of the public  alive outside of academia, social media such as Facebook, the commercial televisual mass media, and the decline of the surviving print papers. I also continue to use the photo blog form as a counter to the isolation and the feeling of weakness in the face of neo-liberal,  capitalism’s consumer distractions,  temptations and depressive hedonism.  This isolation and weakness can lead to a particular interior, emotional state — a sort of debilitating emptiness,  despair and resignation.  A nullity if you like, which makes it difficult to continue being a creative artist/photographer.

This picture is of an early morning seascape made whilst standing on Rosetta Head in mid-winter. We are  looking across Encounter Bay towards the Coorong National Park. This was the  morning   I was playing around experimenting with fuzzy seascapes learning to see what’s in front of me—what’s actually there, in all its existing complexity– and figuring out how to represent it.

We now live with a digital duality, which suggests that in fact no easy divide can be made between our online and offline lives. These two aspects of our lives  are now so closely enmeshed with each other as to be inseparable.

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