Procrastadabbler

I’m working on an article about blogging and the break down of public and private space. It was precipitated by a posting I made a while ago in which I mentioned the work of Ben Agger who writes about the breakdown of the public and private in a fast capitalist economy. I haven’t gotten a lot written (don’t tell Ben), but am having a marvelous time reading the research on blogging – both the empirical research and the theoretical stuff.

As a result of my reading, I’ve been thinking about how there really is no public / private space anymore. Binaries are no longer useful. What has developed is a constant tension or negotiation or refiguring of one’s position in respect to the public and private sphere. As Lankshear & Knobel point out, privacy has become a matter of deciding what we let into our lives, not just what we share. So, in the Web 2.0 world, our attention is being vied for, but we have to decide what it is we want to pay attention to. We also need to decide what we want to share if we want a piece of the attention economy. One way of garnering attention is by what Emily Gould called “oversharing” but I wonder if the results of oversharing are short lived. Are those who really garner attention and have longevity in the attention economy the ones who really have something to say (as Knobel points out in her discussion of memes? Are we in a transitional state where it’s an anything goes world, but are we moving to perhaps a world where we become more selective in what we share, just as we are becoming more selective in what we pull in?