I have been amused for a while that people actually believed that blogging is going to somehow introduce (to borrow from Glenn Reynolds) "an Army of Davids." Donald Sensing makes the reason why that won't happen, very clear. Despite protestations, and many columns by Glenn Reynolds denying its true nature, the blogosphere is in fact dominated by a number of large blogs, and the little guy has little chance of making an impact on a major scale.
The blogosphere is not democratic, it is republican in the mold of our old republic. Not just any man or woman can start a blog and get people to listen to them, but they are free to try to modestly make their way like a yeoman farmer living peacefully beside the plantation owner in Jefferson's Virginia. The old media was dominated by rules and social norms, the blogosphere is not. There is overriding editor whose ideology you must appease, and the A-listers benevolently guide the "conversation," rather than try to control it with an iron fist the way that the news boards determine what is newsworthy.
The real revolution in blogging has been technological, not social. Everyone wants to believe that the blogosphere is about people suddenly having this ability to express themselves that used to ellude them, or was actively denied them. I'd like to take this time to call shenanigans on that. I had a "blog" when I was thirteen. That was back in the dark ages of 1996. I had lots of them, as did most of my middle and high school peers with a working knowledge of HTML 3.2/4.0 and enough hatred of the asinine crap that gets passed off as the modern American education to use that knowledge.
All blogging is, when you get right down to it, an automated way to maintain and publish content. This blog is really nothing different in principle from the sites that I cobbled together ten years ago. The important differences are what I can do with it. I can effortlessly add, update and remove content. None of that requires multiple (X)HTML files to be modified and reuploaded. WordPress generates its pages dynamically based on what it can find in the database. How cool is that? Dead links are much harder now.
Let's also stop pretending that we're journalists. We're not. We're personal website publishers. We're no more "citizen journalists" than the poorly-hinged, trigger-happy nuts in Montana who call themselves militia are a traditional citizen army modeled on the old state militia system. The fact that journalism has devolved to the level of banality commonplace in the blogosphere in such dens of villainy, ill-repute and molestation of the English language as MySpace does not mean that we are in fact real journalists. If anything, it is a sign of the decline of the professional classes to the level of the proletariate, not the ascension of the proletariate to the level of the bourgeoisie.
I actually have a little prediction of my own for the blogosphere. In the next five years as broadband develops and more infrastructure is developed in the United States and abroad, the blogosphere will die and be reborn. People like Michelle Malkin will stop pretending to be "plain folks" and admit that they are professional reporters who are renegades in the eyes of the establishment. They will go on to "post-blogging" technologies and will become a new wave of new media. Then the blogosphere will be back to ground zero because most of us are not photogenic to be video bloggers and don't sound sexy in lossy mp3 audio (if we do at all). Blessed are the B, C and D listers for they shall inherit the blogosphere.
I think you might be right. If there's one thing I've learnt over the years it's that things come and go or remake themselves in some other form that is then described by those 'in the know' as something new.
As for me, the blog is simply a place I can get things off my chest - just an online journal with no real value except to me and those that read it. It actually amazes me that I have the regular readers I do.
A lot of us cannot afford the exposure anyway. I have no desire right now to get my name really well read out there right now for what I say online because I am just getting started now out of college. I don't like drawing unnecessary attention to myself in a permanent way because it gets the authorities in the corporate and government circles looking at you. I prefer to remain semi-anonymous most of the time because it's the closest thing we can get to privacy online today.
To me the blog is like a modern day soap box from which we can share our ideas. Or maybe for some of us it's the equivalent to a punk rock version of media based on the idea that anybody with access to a modem and computer can write opinion pieces or to draw attention to stories that we don't want overlooked.
MikeT might be the Henry Rollins of the blogosphere.
An "Army of Davids" or a platoon?...
I explained yesterday at DonaldSensing.com why I am discontinuing posting there, although the site will remain online for several more months at least. For the foreseeable future, all my postings will be here at WOC,......
I agree DBS (except I'm not sure about the Henry Rollins part). What I was getting at is that the blogosphere has been built up to be the great democratic equalizer when it isn't. What you do with your blogger account is nothing you couldn't have done in 1995 with many of the same technologies. Granted, PHP didn't even exist back then so WordPress couldn't have existed as is, but Perl and Python did.
I'll give you an example of where I disagree with you on the issue of the blogosphere being great for pushing stories that others don't want pushed. I've been "following" (to use the pseudo-journalist jargon of Pajamas Media) the mandatory data retention law being proposed. Where are the bigger bloggers on this? No mention that I've seen in the past few days. If most blog readers read them and only them most of the time, how are stories like this going to really get pushed?
Again, the reason I said that the revolution is in the technology is that it makes it possible for people like you, who presumably have no coding skills, to quickly maintain entire websites. It's a commodotization of technology, and I think that's the real breakthrough because that is what enables your blog.
I agree on that last part. If it weren't so easy to blog I probably wouldn't be doing it.I'm unfamiliar with the "mandatory data retention law", but I'd like to say that I wouldn't know about McCarthy's background if it weren't for reading blogs. Our local media is more concerned about missing girl cases in Aruba than CIA officers getting busted for leaking documents. I don't remember reading a single article on McCarthy in the OKC papers.
I don't think blogs are going to replace the mainstream media, but I do believe they make it a little harder to spin stories with every misstep being examined by bloggers. "Fake but accurate" is the one that springs to mind as an example.