electric mist

the future of blogging

There's been discussion (and I've come a little late) about "The Future of Weblogging" where the author, Nico MacDonald says:

"Irrespective of its provenance, it is certainly a wonderful thing that many more people are able and have chosen to be self-publishers. However, we need to encourage more people to be journalists. Journalism involves actually interviewing people, doing thorough background research on a subject, presenting a rounded and dispassionate overview, and reasoning through substantive arguments."

To me, this is a bit like someone walking into a room where a bunch of cats have been lounging and chastising said critters for not having their band uniforms on and being in line for the parade. Not ever going to happen, was never the intention, and the person making the assumption needs to re-examine both their conclusions and their motives.

Several bloggers rebutted the point, from Apt. 11d, to Oxblog to Matthew Ygelsias, to my favorite description so far, Allison Kaplan Summers' funny description of blogging as casual sex.

The author of the article bases some of his suppositions on the fact that there was a BloggerCon at Harvard, where the "best and the brightest" of the Blog Community would "schlepp their WiFi-enabled laptops" and report on the con as it progressed -- something the author touts as being significant because so many people are doing it. He refers to "leaders" of the blogging movement as the "blogerati" and urges them to, essentially, herd those cats.

The problem here and elsewhere in this discussion (other news articles, not the other blog entries noted above) is that there seemed to have been some sort of a priori assumption that bloggers wanted to report on the world, or at least, on their small corner in some objective manner. And while that may be true of many and may have been a motivation for so many issue-based blogs to have sprung up, I think the discussion is running counter-intuitive to what's actually happening in the online world and how that is significantly changing society. Sociologists have got to be having a coronary trying to figure out ways to corral this emerging culture into any sort of study that would help them decipher just what the heck all these bloggers are up to and how it's affecting the world, and as MacDonald says later in the article, journalism has often been referred to as the first draft of history. The problem is, I think the a priori assumption is wrong. I don't believe many, if not most, bloggers want to report on their corner of the world objectively -- and, in fact, don't want to report per se, but want to connect... on their world with others... subjectively.

This is a fragmented world, and for the first time in history, I think we have achieved something unique -- we are both global and completely isolated. We live in a time when we can not only drop bombs on another country, but we can read what the people who are hearing the bombs being dropped think and feel. There no longer needs to be spokespeople for a disenfranchised group because that group can now find like-minded others and form a loose community online and speak for themselves. (I'm thinking in the specific about moms who blog, but I have seen numerous other "categories" of blogs which would fall into the "disenfranchised" description.)

What the blogging world is doing currently is forming communities, global villages. And the future of that movement will profoundly change everything from politics to how laws are made to what's for dinner, because of access. I don't just want to know what someone thinks of Bush or Kerry; I want to know how what Bush has done has affected their lives. I also don't just want to know how politics has affected them, but parenting issues and love and loss and humor... because it's a form of communication that we crave far beyond journalism... and we get it in fiction. Books and movies. Welcome to the new world entertainment, the quasi short film, the blog.

Think about it... why do you go into that dark room to watch a film with dozens / hundreds of strangers? Why experience TV in a group? Why read and discuss the book? Connection to other lives, other ways of being, other choices and consequences. It's a way of sampling what others think and do and feel, safely, vicariously, and with rich detail. It's a way of getting to know the human experience more profoundly and taking away from that act knowledge not only about the other, but about oneself. It's the joy of being able to live one's own choices and lives and simultaneously, hyper-living through others... it's a way of having more than just one experience of the world. It's probably as close to making each of us as omnipotent as we're ever going to be.

MacDonald calls for a few improvements to the blogging software in order to solve what he feels are the drawbacks for blogs -- he wants better categorizing, better keyword searching, better ways to prioritize the credibility of the blogger, or maybe their "importance" in the blogging world (which again, just misses the point because if the disenfranchised are blogging, who the hell gets to say who's more important?)... and I'm sure software techs are already on top of this wish list. And like Laura in Apt. 11d or Allison in Isreal, I think the expectations of what the blogs actually are should be kept less pompous -- they are what they are -- commentary. But I do think it's commentary that's going to change the world, and rapidly. We can debunk myths faster, find out salient details faster, connect with people in other countries, faster, report on relevant political maneuverings, and so on. We can also share cultures more (from recipes to hobbies to stories) and be changed by those interactions. I think the ultimate blogging changes aren't going to be to the software per se, but to the portals, the hubs, that we all join or link to -- the global villages we form. The gestalt of these are the new journalism. I predict that there will be a near future where we will have the video blog -- the easy-to-download / view picture of the world and we'll all be so accustomed to the video intrusion into our world, that having our images online will be the norm -- the mini movie / short blog of life. (Much like the cell phone is today, and its innovations of the video messaging.) And we will want to see the others we've connected with online; we'll want to watch them bake that cake or show us the pollution or point out just how much taller their baby has grown. We will be neighbors from across the world; and neighbors look out for neighbors.

Posted by toni at May 2, 2004 10:50 AM