kopfmaennchen

Surprise, surprise: Best day ever regarding clicks on my blog. Why? Because I wrote such an interesting article? Dream on! Doing a little second of research in my blog-statistics showed the referrer alphainventions.com as main source of users. What the hell of an adress is that, I asked myself, and discovered Cheru Jackson and his project of “supervising” blogs that are actually updated. When I understood it right, alphainventions is a kind of scanner searching for blogs updated at the respectively actual moment people are visiting it. According to Jackson it is the main aim to bring together boggers in realtime to foster communication and exchange. Really interesting and striking, as it has risen traffic from an average of 8 a day to currently 61 (17:59, GMT +1)  for today, with tendency rising.

To overlook news in the blogsphere thus seems to become more easy and comfortable. Fine. Let’s see where this development will lead to.

As I am a political scientist, I actually see some other facets of this project that are by far not deliberative. As authoritarian political systems are in need for knowing what is going on in their interior in order to preserve themselves from being surprised by the uprising of opposition forces, they always look for new technologies to control and monitor all subversive activity. As we know from some authoritarian regimes, e.g. Iran and China, there is a vital blog-culture in which underground and opposition forces are active and inform us of developments in these rather closed systems. Thus alphainventions could be used in different ways: On the one hand, it can make such blogs (amongst others) more popular and powerful, but on the other hand, this tool can be used for repression as well. From a surveillance studies point of view I would strongly suggest Cheru to keep the codes of alphainventions topsecret. What a powerful tool to monitor such activities. Combined with IP-trackers: perfect tool.

But enough of being the “Bedenkentraeger”, which is an excellent german word for seeing all from its’ negative side: Another positive aspect seems to be that the blogsphere becomes more lively in a sense that with alphainventions more instant “contacts” between bloggers are possible. The world again comes closer together, or in Sloterdijks terms, globality is once more enforced and brought closer to the people. I like this approach, even though I am sceptical about the quality of communication in a world of simulations and simulakra.