The culture of blogging may provide for the first time ever, in the history of humanity, the mass desublimation of personalized hate. It is a new culture, discovering it’s norms, building its potential. It is a promising culture, suggestive of a leap into self-reflective public participation, integrative of the personal and political. And it is a dangerous culture, free of social and institutional constraints, in which indentities are created and destroyed in a meaning making process of unrestrained casual conversation.

Of course, mass movements have often been about desublimating hatred: the pogroms, riots, rallies, and wars; the ethnic cleansings, genocides, and politicized anger; these episodic swings of mass emotion have often represented little more than the unleashing of rage - pent up frustrations with no place for expression - spilling into the public psyche and surging in waves of nebulous friction and feeling. Yet, being directed at one source, their pacification is a passing phenomenon.

The blogosphere seems different. Here the hatred is personalized, sectioned off in tiny niches, directed at allies, and expressed in the rolling banter of witty sarcasm and analytic stings. Here the hatred involves the commentary and consternation of an ever growing mass of the disaffected. The blogosphere provides a subaltern realm, reflective of our worlds, yet conscious of itself and the many meanings sedimented in our minds. It is a mass journal of our psychological interrogations. It is a culmination of questions, a meta-dialogue about our personal relations with public events.

And therein lies the rub. The blogosphere draws the most intimate pieces of our personalized lives into the web of public discourse, at one and the same time reinforcing and fragmenting the fragile material out of which it’s woven. We go to the blogoshpere, paradoxically it seems, because we are not yet ready to go public; yet, in our adolescent explorations of expression, we bring our innermost secrets to the wider world. Is this a coarsening or deepening of public discourse? The blogosphere seems far more viralent than the right wing talk shows of decade ago. For like a pogrom, it is participatory. And in the exponentially rising crosscurrents of dissent, there is seemingly no end - as if humanity could divide itself infinitely.

And yet, out of this ocean of expression a collective intelligence may emerge. Out of this discord, we might integrate the ever growing accumulation of informational noise. What is the cumulative meaning of these personal screeds laced throughout the blogosphere? What are the norms emerging in this self reflective public? What is the cultural gift the blogosphere offers? And what are the dangers if this culture fails?