Blog Theory: a Dystopia Tale of Our Age

Jodi Dean has strongly attacked the “drive”-driven enjoyment of blogging, friending, tweeting, sharing –all online communication activities. The communicative capitalism, according to Dean, is pervading everyone one of us, making people communicate under the “drive” instead of the “desire” of communicating, thus creating a new kind of “spectacularly society” where everyone is participating yet submissively spectating.

I cannot help associate Dean’s “Blog Theory” with two other works criticizing a society saturated by entertainment –the “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” by Neil Postman, and “The Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. Together with “Blog Theory”, the three books resemble on another in that they have all depicts a dystopia society that is dominated by amusement and entertainment. Neil Postman discussed how the show business formed a society of amusement worship, wherein all forms of information is presented meant to amuse the audience. According to his example, the fragmented news reels which compressed a disaster to a 90-second news clip only fed our “illusion” of knowing more. Thinking back to Dean’s reference to the Lacanian concept of “drive” –that we enjoy repeating the process which is enabled by our constant failure, I observe a consistency between the two’s argument in that they all criticize a possible final outcome of an entertainment culture that only circuits information perpetuated by the drive of knowing and let known.

The image of a dystopia has reaches its climax in Huxley's "The Brave New World", where every one is pleasantly satisfied by the appropriate dozen of drug to feed the need of entertainment. While Dean certainly does not foresee a future as such, the communicative capitalism, in my opinion, is in nature a dystopia prophecy about the network technology, as what Neil Postman's book has towards the motion picture technology. While I do appreciate the sharp observation and  alarming effect of this stream of thoughts, I encourage a more balance, dialectic view towards technology.