The following piece was posted on the nettime listserv a few days ago. Brook (whose dissertation has to do with 'power in blogging') and others might find it interesting (the piece addresses issues of 'private' and 'public'). Click on the link to access the full article. Regards, Lisa The banality of blogging or how does the web affect the private/public dichotomy by Helen Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=165 When it comes to debating how gender intersects with digital realities, it is as if the by now mythical term ' digital divide<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide>' subsumes everything under its wings: in the case of gender one simply needs to point out the disproportionate access to digital goods and services that 'women' experience and the issue is settled. Or, is it? Not that these gendered forms of inequality should be brushed aside, but the downside is that they obstinately stick to a limited horizon. And this horizon obfuscates the more radical, interesting, and difficult questions that the focus on gender might raise for the analysis of the net society. The rise of digital technologies does not invite us, in other words, to rehash existing political concepts, but rather to, at least, engage in their reformulation. We will try to engage in such a reformulation by unpacking the following question: how is the private/public distinction re–structured on the web? The problem, here, is not that this question is somehow ignored, but that when it comes to analyses of the net society it is seldom addressed from a gender perspective. All the 'radical' calls for 'participatory journalism', for 'user generated information', for 'being the media', encompass -whether this is voiced or not- a challenge to the private/public dichotomy which is profoundly gendered. How, then, is gender an intrinsic part of that picture? In order to address this problem, we will try to go back to Hannah Arendt's stubborn insistence<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13662.ctl>on keeping the limit between private and public strong, not in the name of maintaining the marginalized, undervalued character of the private, but in the name of preserving the rich multiplicity of the public. To use Arendt's metaphor, the web often acts like a vanishing act: the table that existed between people that brought them together, united them and differentiated them seems to have suddenly disappeared. Instead we are all brought together closer without any table in between us to connect and separate us. [more...] # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org