I just finished a draft of another chapter for the blogging book, chapter 5, “Bloggers @ Work”. Here are two sample paragraphs:
“In next to all cases the bloggers’ real crime is to have subverted the company’s hierarchy of power. The power of the bosses always depended on their ability to depersonify their underlings, to treat them as faceless and voiceless fodder for their corporate plans. This, after all, is the logic of torturers everywhere. By giving faces and voices back to employees, blogs make such depersonalization impossible. The anonymous underlings have turned out to be human beings after all, with thoughts, dreams and lives which are distinctly their own. And in many cases the lives in question are considerably more interesting than the lives of the bosses themselves.
Imagine that your secretary starts a blog. She begins to write and before long she has 5000 visitors a day. “What?” you say. “My secretary has 5000 visitors a day!?” “My fucking secretary has 5000 fucking visitors per day! How dares she?” The blog has brought about a real shift in power between the two of you. Not only is your secretary speaking directly to more people than you ever will, but she commands their attention. She is popular and fun whereas you only are feared. Before long you start suspecting your house-cleaner of blogging, perhaps even your nanny. Curious and half-crazed you start surfing the web looking for them. Yes, there they are. They too have blogs, they too have lives. How can you ever forgive them?”
I’m doing chapter 4 next, and holding off on the LSE chapter until last.