On directives and the free will

Is there a better quote and comment to start into this weekend, isn’t it. Bryan Alexander on J.W. Cramptons, The Political Mapping of Cyberspace.

Confession and writing blogs: Blog writing is not revelatory, in Crampton’s view, but productive.  Identity is not revealed, but produced:

“While the outcome of ‘classical’ confession… is to produce authentic discourse or the truth about oneself, self-writing such as blogging has no such target.  Rather, they are part of the process of a ‘life emerging’” (96)

That production occurs without normative control, as newspaper editors love to say.  Clearly this goes against the foundation of the confessional:

“To confess is to be in a position of (1) being authenticated as who you say you are (real/false) and (2) being placed in a discourse of normalization’ (97).”

(Via Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education.)