The Case of Self-Coverage

That phrase, the subtitle of an article in a 2004 issue of Journal of Communication, caught my attention for reasons obvious at least to myself. My terministic screen misguided me, though, as the curious term self-coverage is not about individual introspection, but about corporate introspection, i.e. journalists reporting on cultural products and activities produced by the same combined 'news and entertainment firms' that they themselves work for. The term is also used about media self-coverage in general, metacoverage and 'news from our own world'.

But - what is dawdling then?

"I wasn't kidding around"

Barbara Ehrenreich, undercover in low-wage America working as a waitress, a cleaning person, a nursing home aide and a retail clerk, picked a spectacular form of field work which helped her build a compelling narrative ('Will she be found out? Will she even endure it?') and which offers itself to being passed on as a sensational anecdote ('Do you know what she did to be able to discover these things?').

Still Ehrenreich's presentation of the events is rather understated concerning the dramatic action involved, and one line in particular stayed with me after first reading Nickel and Dimed:

There's no way, for example, to pretend to be a waitress: the food either gets to the table or not.

[Read the full introduction here.]

You're a matter of course! So - embrace yourself? Or please try to distance yourself from yourself?

Rumspringa is the name [and what does it mean?] of a new magazine edited by journalism students at my new workplace in classy cooperation with students from the Funen Academy of Fine Arts. And this is roughly how the editors present their work by way of introduction:

In the long stories here at Rumspringa the narrator isn't hiding behind objective observations, but becomes part of the story himherself. ... Journalists are just as entangled in the world as everyone else, so we don't pretend to be writing through an objective filter ... we're honestly dishonest. ... We don't invent, and we don't direct, but neither do we pretend that we're not there.

Well, of course we're there, they seem to be saying in the blogosphere at CVA ['Centre of Wild Analysis'], and of course we're entangled in the world. So the rhetorical strategy for the CVAers becomes the opposite of the rumspringars': They make an attempt to dissociate themselves from their entangled individuality and do not sign their blogposts individually.

So are they hiding behind CVA? Or are they just kidding around? Well, they claim that they're not. Rather they want to 'keep their positions of enunciation open' in an attempt to 'keep the symbolic alive', and they argue for their collective strategy (roughly) as follows:

The trouble with real writers [bloggers or others] is that they feel and eat too much and they think too much about sex. We distinctly want to dissociate ourselves from that! CVA [and blogging collectively] is ... about exercising your ability to change your position of enunciation. ... It's a mistake [made by Descartes and others] to equal your position of enunciation with your being.

You may change your being by changing your position of enunciation.

Both arguments are very appealing - and the latter is rather new to my own way of thinking (and blogging) too. What's at stake here? Is there a difference on the level of awareness and/or ambition? Or is it a matter of attempting social change by means of rhetoric on two different platforms: The journalists challenging themselves and their readers by abandoning the standard prose style of their colleagues in printed reporting - opposing the voice of what Tom Wolfe called the 'pallid little troll' - on the one hand; and philosophers challenging themselves and their readers by challenging the self-aware blogger style on the other?