I’ve never felt like I was part of the so-called “blogging revolution.” Perhaps it’s because, being young and having a technophilic father, I’ve never really been without the internet and so find the idea of blogging to be a rather obvious one. The essence of blogging is the same as the essence of the internet: people collect information that is interesting to them and make this information available to anyone with an internet connection, with or without commentary. The only real difference between blogging and the rest of the internet, as near as I can tell, is the frequency with which the information is updated. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel like I’m part of the blogging revolution: because I feel that people who refer to a blogging revolution think that the internet revolution has already come and gone having been charted by the dot-com boom and bust. To me, the blogging revolution is a small part of the larger, on-going internet revolution that we haven’t really begun to see the full impact of, yet.<\/p>\n
So when I read that the World Economic Forum had a session this past weekend on blogging (specifically, the session is titled “Will Mainstream Media Co-Opt Blogs and the Internet?”) I couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit. I don’t think that the mainstream media will ever be able to co-opt the internet entirely because the internet is, by its nature, a decentralized medium. New servers and new sites can always be created and connected to the internet, allowing for ways around the mainstream media’s servers and sites. I can conceive of only two impediments to the decentralized nature of the internet. On impediment is corporate regulation in two forms: by means of software that cannot go to sites that haven’t been certified by the company or companies producing the operating system and web browser, or by means of search engines that won’t register sites that haven’t been certified by the search engine’s founders and funders, either of which would create a monopoly and prevent customers from finding viable alternatives. The other impediment is government regulation along the lines of the FCC’s regulation of television and radio. Thankfully the first impediment can be conquered by open source software and its infinite, easy mutability (unless the operating system begin to be hardwired into the computer systems themselves, in which case alternative chip manufacturers, be they companies or pirates, would pop up). The second impediment is not currently an issue as the range of the internet is theoretically infinite, meaning that a server that is illegal in the United States can be moved to a friendlier country without much problem.<\/p>\n
Blogging as a method of communication can’t be co-opted by the mainstream media any more than the internet can be because of the server issue I just mentioned. I do think, though, that the line between blogs and the mainstream media is going to become fuzzier. Right now blogs are defined largely by their small size, their independence, the frequency with which they update, and (in many cases) their degree of interactivity. In other words, if the New York Times were run like a blog Paul Krugman could write a new column every day instead of just on Tuesdays, his Wednesday column on economics could be significantly longer than his Thursday column on his dissatisfaction with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD sets, and you could comment on his articles directly without having to go through him or an editor. (Unless, of course, he runs his column like Andrew Sullivan or Josh Marshall in which case you can’t comment; personally, I think this is rather arrogant but that could just be me.)<\/p>\n
Things like what I described with Paul Krugman are already happening in the mainstream media. The print and digital political magazines are starting to have blogs, either written anonymously or written by specific pundits. Usually these are single-topic blogs, but not all of them are. Slate<\/a> has a more or less free-for-all comment system called the Fray (although it’s obvious from comments made in their articles that the writers for Slate consider themselves quite above the Fray).<\/p>\n Meanwhile some blogs seem to be becoming more like interactive, free-form versions of online magazines with the posters writing what are essentially articles (rather than two or three sentence link posts) and usually, gasp, entering into the comment threads to discuss their works. A precious few blogs, like the Daily Kos<\/a> are becoming hybrids between the aforementioned interactive magazines and a community with blogs within the blog.<\/p>\n (An aside: I’ve noticed that when it comes to write political blogs, bloggers who had established themselves previously through opinion pieces in news papers and magazines are significantly less likely to allow comment threads or to respond to comments in the comment threads than those who were not established pundits when they started blogging. Compare Atrios and Josh Marshall on the left or Andrew Sullivan and Tacitus on the right and you may see what I’m talking about.)<\/p>\n Billmon, who is attending the World Economic Forum for his day job, attended the session on blogs and posted his thoughts on the subject<\/a>. In addition to a number of good comments and observations, he said:<\/p>\n I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. On the one hand, this person clearly didn’t have the faintest idea what the blogs are all about, or why most bloggers do what the [sic] do. She didn’t understand how quickly a major media corporation could take a great blog and run it into the ground. Buy up blogs? It would be like trying to catch snow flakes. [sic]<\/p><\/div>\n This is true. The concept of buying up blogs is ludicrous because blogging is a way of using the written word. It’d be as futile as trying to buy up novel-writing or buy up the medium of the short story or, like Billmon said, like trying to catch snowflakes.<\/p>\n I don’t think that this is what Billmon was getting at, though. He seems to be saying that trying to buy up blogs would be like trying to catch snowflakes because the corporate touch would liquidate the blog’s audience by changing its content, thus corporations would be flailing about, buying up blogs, and being frustrated in their efforts as they chased readers away to new blogs. I think that Billmon has a point and yet could still be wrong. I don’t think that corporate contact would be the touch of death for blogs because any smart corporation would begin its relationship with bloggers not by trying to take over control of the blog but through simple sponsorship. “We like what you’re doing and we’d like to pay you $X a year to just keep doing what you’re doing.” The quality of the blog wouldn’t immediately suffer, I don’t think, but it would begin the slow creep of corporate control into the blogsphere. I wouldn’t be surprised if, given a few more years, all of the major blogs were corporate-sponsored, if not outright corporate-owned, with a relatively constant number of unpaid, unknown bloggers. There may be a few big independent bloggers, and while I think they’ll be as well-written I don’t think they’ll be as big as the corporate-sponsored ones.<\/p>\n So far I’ve talked about “blogs” while actually meaning “political blogs.” I’m not sure what the future is for other types of blogs like personal blogs (online diaries) and non-political commentary blogs (like for movies, games, and the like). I keep thinking that we’ll see a rise in the number of personal blogs as more teenagers (not to stereotype, but you know) grow up with the internet and use the internet to communicate with their friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs slowly took over the job of e-mail forwards to share articles with friends and family. (I can see it now: You MUST post this story on your blog within five minutes of reading it or you will never have a girlfriend again!<\/i> And all the gay men say, “So?”) Then again, forwarding, like spamming, forces your views into a location that people are checking for their own gain whereas a blog requires effort on the part of other people to come to you.<\/p>\n So while I recognize that futurists are almost inevitably full of it, and amateur futurists are even more full of it, I’ll make a prediction on the future of blogging: We’ll see fewer and smaller independent blogs as large, corporate-sponsored blogs eat up the readership, and in some cases the writers, of smaller blogs. And that’s all I’ll commit to. I think that, as Billmon fears later in his aforementioned post, the Golden Age of free-for-all blogging is just about up..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve never felt like I was part of the so-called “blogging revolution.” Perhaps it’s because, being young and having a technophilic father, I’ve never really been without the internet and so find the idea of blogging to be a rather … Continue reading