If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. The particular is again lost in the disorder of the general.Hannah Arendt, letter to Hans Magnus Enzenberger, 1964.
Arendt was likely referring to the dangers of group blogging. When a single writer maintains a blog, that person feels a certain responsibility to post new content on a regular basis. When, however, a group of several dozen recent B. Mus. graduates maintains a blog, no single person is individually responsible for generating its content. Ipso facto, if that blog should go some two months without any updates, the culpability for this neglect rests on the B. Mus. graduates as a group. This situation, of course, precisely corresponds to the situation in a totalitarian state: because totalitarian governments treat the people as a mass of interchangeable drones, individual citizens enter a state of paralysis. Discouraged from taking individual responsibility for their actions, they become disconnected from the political arena, follow orders without question, and never update their blogs.
We, on the other hand, do not live in a totalitarian state, and so there is no reason why this blog could not yet become a thriving social forum, abuzz with controversial opinions, interesting news, and automatically-generated advertisements in the comment threads. The only thing required for this to happen, however, is that each of us exercise our democratic right to contribute to society. Don't wait for some nebulous group of "other people" to post to the blog! Rather, post thou something thyself, and thou shalt be richly rewarded.
Having lectured you all on the importance of updating the blog, I must now sheepishly admit that I myself have nothing of particular interest to say; it's bad enough for me to come up with enough clever ideas for posts on my own blog. Other members of this class undoubtedly have had far more interesting summers than I - let's hear from them.
Hear hear.
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