Walter Benjamin/Arcades/and Blogging

"Like the railroad stations,
exhibition halls, and shopping arcades, the
'despised , everyday'
weblogs easily adapt
themselves to the
contours
of everyday activity
and more or less comfortably
serve as literary and political
meeting places, akin to what
was once cafe culture.

Benjamin is anything but the slow
and methodical kind of scholar-creator.
On the contrary, Benjamin would have
loved the quick turn-around of reading
and writing made available and
instantly universally accessible as blogging.
Benjamin's collecting of materials for the
Arcades project, like blogging,
pleasurably embraces reading
over the shoulders of other writer.
In turn, this action embraces the past,
as well as the future.

Walter Benjamin would have
loved blogging because of its
capability of embracing as
part of its mortar what society
considers trivial and unmentionable.
These innumerable details,
which constitute the names,
or at least the initials,
of every person who exists or
who has ever existed, embrace
what traditional journalism consigns
to 'quaintness' and the
'human interest story.'

Walter Benjamin would have
understood that like the growing
masses of moviegoers of his time,
the thronging masses of bloggers
stand with insousciant
defiance towards the overall capitalist
conception of the function of
information and history."

Link: fait accompli: 11/30/2003 - 12/07/2003.

via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

and to us via the delicious! Theresa Duncan