Profiling Blackspot

When cruising the blogosphere in search of people talking about the possibilities and problems with civic uses of new media technology, especially for disseminating information, it’s really not hard to find posts. There’s no dearth in blogs about contemporary media, which is really no surprise since blogs are themselves a contemporary media development, so it would almost seem disingenuous for media theorists to resist sharing their perspectives through such a media outlet when they make their livelihoods pontificating about it.

And yet, there are very few blogs that focus on the civic side of media. They tend to focus on entertainment and legal developments – which is no surprise, since the history of media development has tended to stem largely from entertainment, and recently legal issues have been central in understanding what (re)uses are and are not allowed in recombinatory culture. As a result, discussions about how emerging media impacts information gathering or is used for new collaborative projects tends to be rare and occur around isolated posts.

So when I was referred to Adbusters, and more specifically the related blog Blackspot, I was pretty thrilled. I had heard about them before, but more frequently from the perspective of criticism, and I had never directly engaged with their work. Micah White, a fairly well known actvist who is pursuing a PhD from the European Graduate School writes the posts which appear roughly biweekly (though sometimes there are longer droughts between posts).

While Blackspot tends to make arguments, they are invariably polemic ones filled with virulent language; its argumentative depth tends to be sacrificed for powerful rhetoric, and sometimes he just criticizes through ethos instead of mixing in logos or pathos. (see his Augmented Reality post for a good example).

That’s not to say there isn’t anything academic or scholarly about it. There is definitely an investigative bent that informs all of the writing, especially the ones that are critiques of more specific parts of society, rather than general calls to action. His post on rejecting clictivism is a good example, where facts and statistics are used to buttress an overall explanation of the problems posed to activism in a digital age.

Even though his work comes from a much more antagonistic perspective than I allow myself to hold (I’m an adherent to the idea of agonistic discourse – antagonism polarizes people, pushing them further into your camp or into what you have constructed as your opponents, rather than working together to move in a direction that actually closer meets everyone’s needs), Blackspot is a really useful site, as it raises lots of issues with where media is going in relation to activism. Perhaps most usefully, the blog is not read exclusively by people who already agree with what Micah has to say. The comment arguments are somewhat frequently responses, and even when they are agreements they almost always include additional links or arguments. So while the readership isn’t terribly high, it seems like those who do read it have something to say (though the troll engagement is a little too frequent for my tastes).

Regardless of the quality of all his arguments, media-centric blogs frequently focus on calls for experimentation and possibility, highlighting only the major successes like World Without Oil, and saying things like “nothing will work but everything might.” But Blackspot looks at the things being done and attacks what won’t work, rejecting techno-topic possibility in favor of pragmatic, if extremely impassioned and sometimes flawed, approach.