...we could say that blogs are a gift to humankind that no one needs. This is the true shock. Did anyone order the development of blogs? There is no possibility to simply ignore blogs and live the comfortable lifestyle of a twentieth-century "public intellectual". Like Michel Houellebecq, bloggers are trapped by their own inner contradictions in the Land of No Choice. The London Times noted that Houellebecq "writes from inside alienation. His bruised male heroes, neglected by their parents, cope by depriving themselves of loving interactions; they project their coldness and loneliness on to the world." Blogs are perfect projection fields for such an undertaking.

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"Networking begins and ends with pure self-referentiality,"[46] Friedrich Kittler writes, and this autopoeisis is nowhere as clear as in the blogosphere. Social protocols of opinion, deception, and belief cannot be separated from the technical reality of the networks, and in the case of the blogs, this turns out to be a treadmill.

This essay by Geert Lovink, look, I am pointing to it.

You might want to print it out, actually, as it will almost certainly be on the final. (Via)