What can we say about Oxford United? Part III: Blogs, the group, and the self

In one sense a blog is simply a piece of webspace where one can store and display various bits of text, images, and sound. Yet a blog invites the use of the first-person narrator, it calls for the expression of feeling, opinion, emotion, in a way that a news site is not. The self is always there; the self is at once the subject and the object. One could then ask of what value is this kind of expression? Is Manuel Castells right when he says that ‘…a significant share of this form of mass self-communication is closer to “electronic autism” than to actual communication.’?

One answer is that to the extent that others identify with this subjective view, there’s value. And in this search for identification and difference, we see a parallel in a football crowd. At any moment one finds people of different backgrounds, different views, different values, and yet what attracts so many people to follow a football club is a sense of unity. Vociferous disagreements are held about the talents of a particular player, the merits of a particular manager, the wisdom of a particular tactic, and yet, for the most part, we can be as one on the terrace. We are the Left Side/We are the Right side: but, We are The London Road.

We Are Oxford United: This title was intended at once to be a claim of possession, but also a nod to this sense of universality. We wanted anyone who follows Oxford United to look at the things we present here, and recognise in them something they know, something they are a part of. Where can this universality come from?

As we talked about in our last post, one important factor is the context in which these games of football we watch take place in. Without supporters, without a league, without desire, you just have 22 men moving a ball round a pitch.

But perhaps the most important piece of context is the past. This is something we saw in what Oxblogger was doing in his favourite posts of ours, the ones we found ourselves identifying with most strongly (such as this, this, this, but especially, this). For the experience of the Oxford United supporter watching the team, as I would guess for all supporters, the past is always present. The players, team, manager, ground, club: they all change, but these are only so many pieces of tracing paper layered over whatever it is that lies at the bottom of this all. It’s this that we glimpse on occasion through these pieces of paper: it portrays a new scene, but visible through it is something we recognise, something we find all-too familiar.

And in the end, that’s what we tried to do last season: to find whatever it is that lies at the bottom of all this. Or not to find it, but to try and allow us, and anyone following this, to glimpse it. Because we’ve become started to realise that what we want to convey can’t be looked at directly, and it can’t be written down. It’s there at the back of your mind: it’s there in the corner of your eye. That’s how we’d like you to look at this blog: subconsciously, with the corner of your eye. If you find that you can see what we’re getting at, then we’ll have managed to say something about Oxford United.