Description
Book SynopsisBlog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance.
Trade Review"Dean is asking the right questions about online life … We certainly need vigilance and critique to help us resist dotcom charisma, and no one is fiercer or smarter than Dean on this front."
LA Review of Books "Jodi Dean’s
Blog Theory takes as its proximate subject the eponymous blog—and its living death … what is offered is both simple and, oddly enough, also hopeful."
Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
"If Ballard invited the 20th century viewer to witness their own mass atrocity exhibition, we now have the update for the 21st century: Jodi Dean's demolition job of the Internet as we know it. With
Blog Theory we can finally terminate the hype of blogging and seriously engage the deeply distracted condition of the networked present. The incestuous relationship between journalism and bloggers is exposed to make way for critical reflections on techniques of self-management for our all-too-fragile identities."
Geert Lovink "Blog Theory is refreshingly free of received ideas about the wonderful new world of media. Jodi Dean manages the difficult art of being critical of new media without becoming a cranky curmudgeon. She uses psychoanalytic concepts to produce a synoptic view of the decline of symbolic efficiency under communicative capitalism, and the way the blogosphere participates in this dissipation of the totems and tokens of what we once thought of as the public sphere. She clears the way for imagining the politics of media by other means."
McKenzie Wark, The New School University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements vi
1 Blog Settings 1
2 The Death of Blogging 33
3 Whatever Blogging 61
4 Affective Networks 91
Notes 127
Index 144
