Re “The Rise of the Pyjamahadeen,” by Warren Kinsella (September 2007), quite frankly, what I found disquieting about Kinsella’s review were not the profanities, understandable in light of his adolescent approach to a study of blogosphere as a personal threat, but his striking lack of intellectual integrity, as if the LRC has been designated as the next pillar of the “anarchic, leaderless, disputatious media community,” better known as “citizen media.”
Blogosphere: The New Political Arena analyzes the online diaries of an Iranian girl seeking self-expression, an Israeli woman in search of politi- cal sanity, a Canadian baby boomer, an Indian mother of a schizophrenic child, an African exile writing on war, hunger and misery, and four Americans (a web designer, a feminist blogger, a playwright and a soldier on a war ship in Iraq). The analysis of these diaries is used to draw preliminary hypotheses on the new emancipation provided by the internet, which allows individuals of no former repute to publish their autobiographies. It shows how these individuals assert this freedom and become part of a new political reality in which private concerns play an increasing role in the public domain. It argues that this new emancipation cannot be simply defined as a restoration of an Aristotelian civil society, i.e., a community of autonomous citizens engaged in a rational exchange of ideas within a framework of social obligation and political responsibility, because of the lack of discursive boundaries in cyberspace. Drawing on Richard Sennett, Charles Taylor and others, the book warns of the illusion that solipsistic talk entails political freedom and shows how political parties, marketing agencies and lately populist media commentators are capitalizing on this illusion by promising individuals in genuine need of self-expression “the third great communication revolution.”
What is so disquieting about Kinsella’s polemic, which ignores the above ideas while attributing to the book bizarre claims it never made, is that it appears in a literary review demanding certain intellectual rules and constraints, such as careful reading of a book one comments on, unless, of course, these rules and constraints, a product of the “Ice Age,” are also expected to succumb to the “new citizen media.”
Michael Keren
Calgary
