In a recent Blueprint article Tim Abrahams attacks what he describes as 'the increasingly nostalgic tone of self-published architectural writing on the web'. Bloggers, he argues, fetishise both the past and the image, preferring to wallow in a rag-tag collection of pretty pictures and half-remembered projects rather than providing 'a serious vision for the future'. Part of what Abrahams is attacking (namely the purported frivolity of blogs) was also recently criticised by Stephen Howe, who, in a discussion of two books by bloggers concluded that '[bloggers] need to be locked up, somewhere without access to email, phone, Web, TV or radio, without human contact except (of course) that they'd be forced to be 24/7 in one another's company, and with nothing to read except the Collected Works of JS Mill.' The fantasy here is that stripped of easy access to communication, to the drive to 'link' (Abrahams too notes the centrality of 'linking with other bloggers'), to downloads of pretty pictures of design classics and cute knick-knacks, we'd be able to get on with some serious work. The kind that would invoke JS Mill and talking about proper, manly things like what to do with the future. I am reminded of the comment about 'senior academics' quoted here concerned that 'bloggers are like adolescent girls scrawling in their diaries' and that academia should have very little to do with them.



Blogs are distracting, we should conclude, they don't reflect enough time spent thinking, they junk up your eyeballs with girlish doodles and the endless streaming of fleeting thoughts. Abrahams talks about a flattening out of information, of blogs creating a world 'with no register of what is more important than something else'. It doesn't take much to see that part of what is behind his worry is a more general fear of displacement: journalists have 'proper' writing jobs, they are appointed by people bigger and older and wiser than them. Bloggers 'self-publish', as Abrahams puts it, they literally level the playing field. When you switch from reading blogs by William Gibson or M John Harrison to someone who started writing two weeks ago but has something really smart to say, you're unwittingly admitting that there is something at least potentially meritocratic going on.

As Owen puts it in a piece in the latest New Humanist, in his response to Stephen Howe: 'Now, a huge quantity of people have some kind of means of cultural production at their fingertips, whether via their cameraphones, cheap digital cameras or, most of all, blogs'. There are at least two ways of mourning this, were we so inclined: we could point out, as Spivak recently did, that digitalisation remains isolated to certain parts of the world, or we could decry, as Abrahams does to some extent, the gulf between the virtual and the real world: 'the internet isn’t the real world'. It would be churlish to remain with Notes on Rhetoric's definition of this perennial brickbat: 'Real World - Invariably, a place where things are different. Inhabited by "ordinary people". Often located in Glasgow's East End or even outside the First World altogether, as in 'this might sound plausible in Christ Church common room, but it rings pretty hollow in the Guatemalan jungle'. Needless to say, your interlocutor is unfamiliar with it'. Nevertheless, there is something far too easy about Abrahams' (and others) characterisation of the internet, as if things you read or see online, and the people you communicate with, didn't bleed into your real life and as if, conversely, there is nothing material about the fact of spending time on your computer.



Certainly the internet is not the mutually-supportive idyll some imagined it would be, with free-floating sexualities and anomalous connections proliferating in all directions. It must be admitted that much of the internet is a repository for all that is worst about 21st century human life: it is reactionary, sexist, and angry without end. It is filled with the kind of people who are just a bit too well-brought up to be rude in the outside world, but think nothing of sending death threats and hate mail behind the cover of an anonymous comment or a scrambled i.p. address. Perhaps there is a certain online rhetorical nostalgia for a (mythical) time when people could simply 'say it like it is' and not worry about the reaction (or the harassment case). The fear that one 'cannot be heard' can in fact be expressed loud and clear on the internet.

In the early days of 'Comment is Free' on the Guardian site, columnists would routinely wonder why they were being got at, remorselessly persecuted, have all this personal invective thrown at them. As print journalists more accustomed to putting it out there but perhaps only occasionally getting the odd old-fashioned letter in the post, they just didn't understand what the internet is about for the main part: an endless battle for attention in which those who are perceived to have undue access or influence are profoundly resented. If everyone can communicate, and has something to say, why on earth should we listen to Eton-boys moaning about the persistence of discussions of class, or middle-aged hackettes complaining about their nannies? This resentment is compounded exponentially if the reader feels both that the writer got their job through contacts/ posh education and is getting money for it. A routine complaint on CiF is 'you got paid for this?'



The potential levelling of the internet is also an opening for sometimes legitimate anger against old forms of cultural capital, but it is also a profoundly indivdualistic model if we take the 'posh-paid journalist writes something/commentators resent them' model. If the model is more along the lines of one blog linking to another, the very flattening-out that Abrahams fears, then this resentment is in some ways tempered: sure you can link to articles you loathe but find interesting, but if what you say is boring, then no one will bother. If there is an injustice at the heart of blogging, it might be something like this: you can very quickly 'get noticed' if you write interesting stuff (especially if you start off by linking to 'bigger' blogs), but if your prose doesn't sparkle, your posts are too long or too self-involved, then no one will care. It's tough, but a least more meritocratic set of conditions than thinking that he or she should write because of who their daddy is or where they went to school.

Anyway! Back to the dinner-table. Abrahams claims that the link-structure and 'search for consensus' of blogs encourages nostalgia (why? Because it's easier to agree about the past than it is about the present or the future, presumably). It would make more sense, I think, to claim that there is something 'cynically nostalgic' about culture more broadly conceived. With every remake, with every faked campaign to bring back a snack from childhood, there's a sense not only that we have run out of new ideas, but that cultural forms themselves are undead. Advertising's recent recuperation of something so impoverished in the first place as flash-mobs, themselves a parody of collective political protest, demonstrates perhaps something quicker than nostalgia; schoolgirls 'dressing up' in their own school uniforms to commemorate a past that hasn't yet happened to them at 'School Discos', the pre-emptive commemoration of Jade Goody in the press while she was still alive. Perhaps there is a case to be made for nostalgia, so long as it's nostalgia for nostalgia itself; the pain of wondering whether one will return home does at least imply a kind of distance, a sort of weighty homesickness. But there's no time for this; the past must be forced blinking into the present, campaigns to resurrect dead foods constructed, any moment of social transformation box-setted into oblivion.

Things Magazine wrote a couple of responses to Abrahams's attack. Far from being an exercise in nostalgia, they argue that what they do is 'actually the chronicling of the creation of the systems and knowledge and structures that will underpin the future on an ever increasing basis.' This seems right: without understanding the past, both visually and conceptually, we will be condemned to repeat it (or by only partly understanding it, we will be condemned to repeat it badly). In terms of space, speed and structure the web is just extremely efficient at streaming vast quantities of information, as things put it: 'All collections, be they real or virtual, convey a message about the collectors and viewers. The hunger for ephemera, in all its forms, is surely indicative of a broader cultural shift. That shift is what things was created to discover'.

Print media suffers from a lack of space; certainly it is selective, but it is also exclusive - all the stories that don't get told, the injustices that get covered-up. We may feel we can 'trust' print journalists more than bloggers (although this is less and less the case as political bloggers, especially, come to be seen as speakers for the truth against an ossified and corrupt mainstream media), but the sheer quantity and variety of information online allows for the exposure and discussion of things that might otherwise get ignored. Take philosophy as a discipline, for example. Philosophy is a subject rarely taught at schools before A level and then only patchily. Any mention of philosophy in newspapers is usually snarky, something the French do. Edmund Burke bears a big responsibility for the British fear of abstraction: anything metaphysical or conceptual is to be opposed by a fantasy of ourselves as jaunty empiricists, ready to ward off the threat of thought with a sandbag and a cup of tea. Online, however, philosophy is thriving. Whatever you make of 'Speculative Realism', it augurs an intriguing new world in which discussion of philosophy takes place away from its usual haunts: the seminar room, pubs, boys' bedrooms (sorry). Print media certainly does have to rethink its principles of selection in the wake of all these other discussions: 'A print mag accusing a web mag of being 'nostalgic' in this day&age is very ironic' as one of the comments on Things puts it.

Abrahams criticises Owen and Fantastic Journal for discussing Ford, as if any discussion of industry was inherently historicist and backward looking. But what is more interesting about this discussion above and beyond its content (which is also interesting) is that 'a fan of civic modernism and an arch postmodernist' could be discussing anything at all: without the internet these kinds of discussion just simply wouldn't be happening. There'd be the red corner over there and the blue corner over there and occasionally missiles would be slowly thrown across the glossy pages of oversized architectural magazines. And very little would be learnt by anyone.

When Things magazine say the following: 'Critical thinking is not the preserve of magazines, just as a fascination with the past - and the presentation, cataloguing and collection of the past - is not a sign of gravid nostalgia,' I can't help but agree: if we want a 'serious vision for the future' beyond the hype and hysteria of celebrating any and every new development in Dubai or Shanghai, and praising contrarian ideas about the future of humanity, simply because they exist, it's going to be because people who wouldn't have otherwise had anything to say to one another are talking to each other slowly and patiently online and not merely growling at each other across gallery openings and lecture halls.