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Blog bites Dog

I'm frustrated that some of the loudest voices in blogland fail to acknowledge the diversity in the medium and focus entirely on the quasi-journalistic aspect. I'm glad you spoke to this in your post. Most bloggers are sharing stuff that they care about on some level, not just kitty pictures (or kitty recipes) but fiction and poetry and criticism and philosophy and art and business conversations and politics on a community organizing level, not simply reportage of factoids surrounding political issues.

Blogs is big. So is journo. But the Venn diagram is turning all paisley on me now man, so I'm glad there's somebody in the room with an attention span and a ballpoint pen.

Frank-- much of this comes from the of the hesitancy of the blogging evangelists to recognize any blogger archetypes. Without it, you've got the spin the bottle definitions. And you've got Jeff Jarvis saying "We're all journalists now."

I really admire the Whitman-esque archetype of bloggers, which I call the singers (almost as much as I admire the stringers doing real journalism). But the question is, to what effect? Most of the focus of the written media is news and politics.

What I learned from the Berkman Voting Bits and Bytes conference last December was that blogging as a social communications tool is much more crucial, and transformative, in Iran and China, where there's a clampdown on information flow. Here in the U.S. I'm pretty amazed that people are discovering freedom and civic selves through blogging as Whitman did through Leaves of Grass; we've had a pretty rich culture of information in the 150 years since. But maybe that's because I'm an old hand on the Internet.

Jon

[Reposting some previous comment material, since it's relevant]

For whatever insight it yields, the sort of "Is it a floor wax or a dessert topping?" (both!) argument is one of the aspects I find so frustrating.

There's a path which runs:

1) Blogging is your own unedited voice, your personal spin, the perspective you, yes, you, bring to the universe ...

Well, who in the world cares about my little spin or perspective, beyond a few friends or fans? Why should I spend so much time writing, except as a hobby? And if it's just a personal hobby, in the same sense of train-spotting or bird-watching, why should anyone care outside of the other offbeat hobbyists?

[Then we go to]

2) Blogging is *citizen journalism*, it is We The Media, it is Emergent Democracy, it is the reworking of society itself ...

But it sure looks like the same-old same-old crowd of A-list'ers having the audience, and why should I care that a few pundits and want-to-be-pundits are fighting over the very few available spots? Either you're part of that network, with all its incestuousness and rivalries, or you're the equivalent of a guy standing on a soapbox ranting to passers-by, for all the effect you have.

[Switch! Go back to #1]

[Eventually, jump out of the loop, to]

3) Blogging is undefinable, ineffable, outside of time and space. No judgment can be made, because there are no rules to it besides the rules we each make.

One large reason for this dance is a deep issue as follows:

a) Many evangelists of blogging want social credentials for the activity as important or significant, and hence appeal to journalism or reporting

b) When it's pointed out that very little journalism or reporting is done, the reply is "It's not journalism or reporting, it's *blogging*, so none of that applies".

c) Given this contradiction, then we go to, if you don't like it, don't read it - which is not an answer to the problem.

No matter how many times this is analyzed, the imperatives above still drive more go-arounds of the issue.

I'd only add a little to your comments, Seth. Part of the dialectic is that the media almost inevitably (being human and all that) looks at bloggers and sees media. So, they tend to emphasize your #2, that blogging is a new type of medium. We bloggers reinforce that by saying two things that are true but are not (and are not intended to be) the whole truth about blogging: 1. Some bloggers have already had an episodically disruptive effect on journalism, e.g., Rathergate. 2. There may be a more systemically disruptive effect if citizen journalism becomes more quotidian and less shark-attack-ish.

What is the whole truth about blogging? There isn't one, any more than there's a whole truth about conversation or book publishing.

Singers, stringers, ringers, wingers, fingers... I've written about this in depth. Already provided the links. If the Berkfolk never get around to publish any sort of explicative reports on this; it's alright, other folks will.

If there's one thing that is consistent about the bloggers across the board (maybe not so much at the stringers) is that they gnaw at "the media." There you again. It just gets tired. I'd like a day where the ringers and wingers and just "ignaw" the media. Maybe that will be the day that blogging grows up.

Where do "the media" (and everybody else) pick up this understanding about blogs? Pick and choose from the delicious blogbunk buffet. Ok, the sun is rising over Sand Hill, I'll await Frank's reponse to this Hub-centered discussion.

Jon, you seem disappointed/annoyed that I'm blogging the event, not reporting it. I'm not a reporter. I don't "cover" events. I write about them from my perspective, which is necessarily narrow. I happily fail to meet the reportorial standard. So what?

The day bloggers "ignaw" (good pun, btw) the media will not be the day that the media show up with cameras and lights to cover a bloggers' weekly discussion of blogging.

BTW, do you recognize that you gnaw on bloggers the way bloggers gnaw on the media? The difference is that I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Quite the contrary.

As Jon said, the personal self-expression in the format is valuable. But, David I've thought about your point "the media ... looks at bloggers and sees media". Or, (did you coin this phrase?) "little versions of themselves". However, it seems to me there's a flip side of this, that you, as a guru of socializing, look at bloggers and see socializing. In the same way they see little versions of themselves, you see little versions of yourself (people interesting in chat and expression - again, not that there's anything wrong with that).

But, as Jon describes poetically (archetypes), and I describe mathematically (one/few/many), there is a fairly meaningful and consistent categorization which can be applied.

So my overall point, when you write "I hate to see us reinforce that", is that the way not to reinforce that isn't saying "I'm not a journalist". That leaves ordinary people with no context. Rather, I suggest that it's necessary to emphasize that diary-writing and chatting have nothing to do with journalism, AND there are deliberate attempts to conflate all these, which leads to much confusion. That provides the background necessary understand your view about which category you are in.

When I shuffled downstairs this morning I was captured by Jon's essay at http://civilities.net/BloggerArchetypes

I was reminded that I'm a blogger who can't really keep up with the conversation, a slow two finger typist, ruminative, easily distracted by quotidian obligations, I can't run with the pack.

By the time I get around to commenting on that which is of the moment, the rest of you have moved on to the next big thing.

(By the way, do you think Negroponte's "work" in Honduras through '85 had anything to do with positioning the contras on the Nicaraguan border in 1986?) ... you see how far behind I have slipped.

I've long maintained there are no blogs. From Lovelady to Locke, there are insightful writers and a growing population of multimedia mavens using the web to share their work. BoingBoing and Dr. Menlo trump Jay Rosen every day. Michael Wolff and Vanity Fair lay waste to the self absorbtion at Scripting News. Nothing against Jay Rosen or Dave Winer, really... their work is valuable, but is it blogging? Of course it isn't. There is no such thing as blogging. Blogging is an exercise in marketing, branding, and labeling, like podcasting. I suppose these things provide convenient labels... I know that Ann Althouse thinks she is a blogger and she has a wonderfully large readership. And I know that Chan Stroman is a blogger even if there are no blogs. Derek Powazek, Heather Champ, Jonathon Delacour... I access these people's work on my obsolete CRT all the time. I seldom access Glenn Reynolds, although I do return to the Instawife photo from time to time, so soft-core, so inspirational. And who is this guy "Harry?"

I look at the categories on my typepad powered personal publishing site and I despair. Where is "Telecommunications?" Where is "Progressive Politics?" Where is "Environmental Concern?" If I can't classify and categorize my own work properly, what right do I have to criticize others. In the seventies mag card typewriters were hot. In the early 80's Norm Rosenblatt forced me into learning IBM's GML. I balked and took a rapid left turn into word processing. The world of WYSIWYG lay before me and I haven't looked back.

Online personal publishing is about empowerment and freeedom of expression. In America we used to have freedom of the press for anyone who could afford to own one. That may still be true, but as has been observed elsewhere, the barriers to entry have been lowered a lot.

There are no bloggers blogging blogs. There are only people connecting and communicating, behaving well and behaving poorly, creating and copying, encouraging and frustrating each other.

Thank you Jon Garfunkel for your interesting taxonomy of online personal publishers. I'm not sure whether I'm a "flinger" or a "slinger," but enough about me. I'm off to read a few good blogs.