Last Friday I gave a lecture on ‘The Perceived Freshness Fetish’ at the Stifo@Sandberg Moving Movie Industry Conference organized by Mieke Gerritzen and moderated by Koert van Mensvoort. In my lecture I focused on the changing notion of authorship in blogging as blogs are more and more becoming autonomous units within the network. This network lives on the premise of constant updates and the blogger is caught in this race to keep content fresh.

I do not have a transcript of the actual presentation (which included a few improvised extras) but here are my prepared notes:

Hi, my name is Anne and I’m a blogger and I’m here today to theorize my blogging addiction.

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I look at my blog daily, maybe even several times a day. I don’t visit it to check if it’s still there. I do it because it is part of my daily routine.

My daily ritual starts with checking my e-mail and catching up on reading blog posts of the blogs I’m subscribed to.

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After reading my e-mail and blog subscriptions I used to look at my blog’s statistics, how many people are subscribed to my blog and what my ranking in the blogosphere is.

However, a few months ago I stopped looking at these numbers because just like the stock market they plummeted dramatically (and I will explain why later). It made me depressed.

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I am still addicted to the blog stats that shows where my visitors come from and what they were searching for because they reveal the network my blog is embedded in.

After viewing these stats, I hit Visit Site and go back to my blog.
This is my daily routine which ends with a confrontation with my latest post.

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Blogs posts are traditionally organized in a reversed-chronological order so I am always confronted with my latest post. The postdate immediately catches my eye and it always seems to tell me that it is time to write a new post, that it has been x days since I wrote my last post. It implicitly tells me I have not written for an x number of days. Why do I feel that I need to blog daily?

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There seems to be some kind of norm or consensus in the blogosphere that blogs should be updated daily. Several blogs about blogging recommend posting daily and blog search engines such as Technorati’s & Google rank blogs according to their freshness.

There is both an internal and an external focus on freshness or “perceived freshness fetish” in the blogosphere.

The internal freshness fetish could be described as a wish, a personal demand or a wanting to blog daily.

The external freshness fetish could be described as a requirement by external parties like the blog search engines Google and Technorati to blog daily to achieve a certain ranking.

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This Wired graphic shows what happens with your blog post once you publish it. It visualizes the external technological factors that influence your blog and blogging behavior.

This technological external freshness fetish is imposed by actors in the network that your blog is linked to through the software. Default settings, standard settings, in the popular blogging software such as WordPress make sure that the blogs you link to are automatically notified of this link and is often also received automatically.

On top of that the software notifies the blog search engines that you have updated your blog.

As you can see in the graphic, your blog post starts living a life of it’s own once you have published it. It becomes part of the network.

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These automatic features in the blog software contribute to the dispersion and distribution of blog posts across the blogosphere. They help quickly spread messages in the blogosphere.

The internal and external forces that contribute to the perceived freshness fetish consist of both human (the wish) and technological (the software) factors that have a very subtle and entangled relationship.

The internal drive for freshness (of publishing new blog posts) is a fetish, a fixation. It is something we strive for and when we cannot reach it we feel disappointed and apologize.

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Apologizing to one’s blog audience for a lack of fresh content, for not posting anything new, is quite common in the blogosphere. In 2006 the JLS blog compiled a list of blog excuses under the post title of “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.” The extensive list is humorous but a closer look reveals that the apologies are uttered towards the readers, the blog audience.

This made me wonder if there are any bloggers who apologize to the blog itself instead of to its readers. This resulted in a post titled “I’m sorry blog excuses” where I noticed a few interesting points after analyzing a number of “I’m sorry blog” blog posts.

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In this clip of the famous blog data mining visualization WeFeelFine you can search the blogosphere for the feelings of bloggers. When selecting abandonment there is a surprising amount of bloggers who do not talk about feeling abandoned themselves but talk about abandoning their blog.

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Here you can see a sample of bloggers apologizing for abandoning their blog. The bloggers who apologized to their blog for not keeping them fresh used a very specific intimate language. The blog posts imply an established intimacy with the blog with references to jealousy, cheating and neglectment.

Most bloggers did not permanently abandon their blog after their “I’m sorry blog” excuse post but some of them did. Their sorry post is the last post they have written and the first post visible when visiting the blog. The blog has become one of the many abandoned blogs out there in the blogosphere and ready to be buried in the graveyard of dead blogs.

But when is a blog dead? Is there a certain threshold for the degree of freshness a blog should maintain? Should we consider a blog inactive or dead six months or a year after its latest post?

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The subtle and entangled relationship between the internal and external factors that constitute and contribute to the freshness fetish have led to the vitalizing of blogs as autonomous entities.

The blogger of course has control over the amount of autonomy a blog has by enabling or disabling the automatic linking features of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks for example. It also controls the “kill switch” (see address not found) of the blog.

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So what’s in store for blogs as autonomous entities within the network? Let’s turn to Japan.

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Blogs aren’t dead, people are.

Arjo Klamer addresses the question of “how can we bridge the gap between economics and culture?”

Klamer gave up on PowerPoint a long time ago because the flip-over has several advantages over Powerpoint: You can keep referring to it and you can draw and add notes while you are speaking to clarify things. This makes it a superior technique that is very effective. Presenters often read off the PowerPoint which not only makes it a very boring presentation but it also makes people feel stupid because they can read themselves. Klamer gives us a live demonstration of the advantages of another “old forgotten” presentation technique: the overhead projector. This old presentation technique immediately causes some problems because the right sheets and pens are initially lost.

Arjo Klamer is professor of the Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and holds the world’s only chair in the field of cultural economics (from klamer.nl). This chair has changed dramatically over the years as there used to be an enormous gap between economics and culture. Economics was a suspicious subject especially when you were critical of government subsidies. Nowadays more and more people in the world of the arts have adopted the language of economists but Klamer thinks this adoptation has gone too far. We are now thinking too much in economic terms. If you deal with cultural goods, goods with a symbolic value, then the market is not the most appropriate space to realize them.

The connection between economics and culture is now understood by politicians, both left-wing and right-wing who have discovered the power of culture. This insight is completely new but has a lot of consequences. Richard Florida explored this shift in “The Rise of the Creative Class” where he describes the role of the creative class in the urban regeneration. Florida places creativity in the center of the new economy. We no longer live in an information economy but in a creative economy. (The guy who is setting next to me writes down “NO MORE FLORIDA!” but unfortunately I never find out why.)

We are currently very worried that outsourcing our labor processes to China will influence our economy but we must keep in mind that the actual production is only a fraction of the cost. What we really pay for is the idea, the image and the symbolic value. We pay for the experience and the the symbolic value that is attached to it.

Klamer explores the great divide between economics and culture. How do we transfer the creativity to the business world? Not only are the values different, the rhetoric and the way people talk are also different. How to we translate the rhetoric and bridge the gap? The problem is that we place the logic of the government against the logic of the market with its demand and result-oriented approach.

We need a third sphere where art gets realized which Klamer refers to as “the oikos” (Greek for: fireplace, the law of the household). This sphere has its own logic which we take into other spheres. This third sphere is a social space that might be a critical sphere. The third sphere, the creative commons, requires and depends on contributions. The logic of the third sphere is the logic of reciprocity. Another name for this sphere is the creative commons in which we can also place the web, open-source software and its community. Klamer states the Internet arose in the logic of the creative commons.
This is where I disagree with Arjo Klamer.

In my view the Internet arose in the logic of the government because the ARPANET was developed by the United States Department of Defense. The ARPANET, as predecessor of the Internet, was developed in close connection with researchers at universities but all the terminals were sponsored by ARPA. In the late eighties the Internet shifted from the logic of the government to the logic of the market when the first Internet Service providers were formed. (History of the Internet).

The Internet is not as open and democratic as is presented by Klamer. Alexander Galloway described in ‘Protocol’ how the Internet is both radically distributed and highly controlled. According to Klamer we can take the logic of the third sphere into the other spheres. Has the web shifted from the logic of the government to the logic of the market to the logic of the oikos? If we choose to place the web within the logic of the oikos than we must keep in mind that it is still tightly bound to the logic of the market. The Internet still resides in all the spheres with their own logic. We must not place things in a linear way but rather use Foucault’s concept of genealogy.

Arjo Klamer is currently involved in setting up a university in the third sphere. The Academia Vitae is an institution that reflects on the divide between economics and culture. It also acts on the divide with firms that pay for the student’s Master degree. It uses the logic of the third sphere where the reciprocity is that students have a (paid) graduation project and firms receive projects. There is a focus on how the students can use their creativity without losing their own integrity. In order to stay in the third sphere you need to retain your own authenticity and integrity without going into the spectacle.

Mieke Gerritzen, head of the Design department at the Sandberg Institute, opened the New Cultural Networks conference organized by Stifo@Sandberg.

She addressed the general idea of networking online where we constantly have to fill in our profiles. The irony is that when I applied for this conference I received a confirmation e-mail which included the request for my postal address. I kindly asked why they wanted to have my postal address and they answered “so that we can send you a printed invitation next year if you would like.” It is interesting that an institution that organizes a conference that addresses the topic of new cultural networks wants to include me in their old postal network. I declined the offer of printed invitations in the future and replied that I will keep myself up-to-date using one of the many new cultural networks such as upcoming.org or the nettime mailinglist.

Gerritzen stated that creating a profile feels like creating a homepage. This idea is based on the somewhat dated idea of the homepage as the place to build your online identity. I think this idea is no longer maintainable because the homepage was a central place that you had control over. You built your own homepage and thus controlled your own identity. Identity online is no longer a central control issue but identity is now distributed. Your identity is built by your distributed presence on social networks, mailinglists, Google, Flickr, Last.fm etcetera. In the age of the API and the mashup you no longer have complete control over your identity.

Creating profiles equals creating a marketing strategy to promote yourself according to Gerritzen. This can be seen in the case of LinkedIn that revolves around this idea of marketing yourself. Gerritzen even states that nowadays we are all part of the creative industries and that we should all be able to make money. That sounds like a overly optimistic statement to kick off this conference.

My New Cultural Networks Conference pictures are located at Flickr.