Blog Theory (ePub)

Blog 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. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis
extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media
histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and
applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by
neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary
media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean
Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through
these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that
reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the
psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that
reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their
real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed
us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial
and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to
more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday
communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text
messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only
undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits
of domination.