Aphorism #1: To a man with a blog, everything looks like fodder.

Geert Lovink ends his 2006 essay Blogging, the nihilist impulse with this remarkable paragraph:

Can we talk of a “fear of media freedom”? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by “their” channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders [on] the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as “a psychological problem” because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon “the uniqueness and individuality of man”. “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.” The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to [do] with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the “community”, “swarms”, and “mobs” that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn’t the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn’t the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

From this perspective, the blogosphere, and indeed the entire link-denominated Web, is not a machine for exposing the truth but rather one for hiding it. For Google, and for its users, the unlinkable does not just lack value; it doesn’t exist. The overriding goal, for bloggers and other purveyors of online content, is the creation of the linkable, the link-worthy: that which will immediately attract approval or disapproval, that which is easily assimilated. Bloggers break the mass media bauble, then spend all day in the nursery playing with the shards. Lovink guotes Baudrillard: “If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption.”

A rephrasing: Does truth begin where the long tail ends?

Twitter is often referred to as a “micro-blogging platform,” but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape – retreat? – from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it’s compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it’s up-front about its creepiness, using the term “follower” in place of the popular euphemism “friend.”)

Aphorism #2: To a man with a Twitter account, every action is a pretext.

What are you doing? is the question Twitter asks you to answer. But in the world of Twitter, there can be only one honest answer: I am twittering. Any other answer is a fib, a fabrication – a production.

As with other media of the self, Twitter makes the act subservient to its expression. It turns us into observers of our own lives, and not in the traditional sense of self-consciousness (watching with the inner eye) but in the mass media sense (watching with the eye of the producer). As the Observer Effect tells us, the act of observing the act changes the act. So how does Twitter warp the lives of twitterers? If truth lies in the unlinkable, does life lie in the untweetable?

Yet if Nietzsche’s typewriter pushed him further into the aphoristic mode and set the stage for some of his greatest works, might not Twitter be an empty cage awaiting its resident genius? It’s worth remembering, in any case, one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.” That’s a tweet worth twittering.