Tim Blair takes a short partisan approach to suggest there is a decline in the number and influence of blogs, while Derek Barry takes a longer look at evidence which suggests that blog influence is growing.
I don’t think there is any question that traditional blogging has peaked, however I do believe that blogging is making a serious play for influence in the overall media landscape; from straight commentary, to local coverage of events like that of Burma.
However, the big mistake everyone makes is to view blogging as a single destination for influential conversation when in fact it’s just another stop along the way for more folks to participate and network on the web. Like the Usenet groups that came before it, the days of blogs holding sway over conversations are over.
More important now is assessing overall web influence through the increase in millions of micro conversations and connections via a whole range of platforms all of which combine to create a critical mass of participation, which can lead to an increase in influence over the issues of the day.
Blogging itself has probably peaked because social networks like Facebook have creamed off a lot of folks for whom blogging was too time consuming or difficult, but that doesn’t mean web based conversations have lost influence. Blogging took off because it made web publishing easy, social networks have taken that ease to another level with their combination of functionality and fun, this can only lead to more participation and influence.
You can see some of this in action on the issue of Clover Moore’s private members Bill for a new class of licence for small bars in Sydney. The creation of the Facebook group We want Funky Little Pubs in Sydney, which now has 4,829 members, has led to a wider public campaign by concerned citizens in support of Moore’s bill.
Called Raise the Bar, this site contains all the new media modcons, like a blog and podcast plus a take off on the hugely popular Booze Mail feature of Facebook converted to good use as a platform for activism; you can make your voice heard by sending your MP a drink with a note attached voicing your concerns.
No question that in future just about every site will have these kinds of functionalities automatically embedded.
As these conversations become stronger and more widespread they will have an even greater impact in future. So instead of seeing blogs a a single focal point for influence and participation, we should look at them as just one aspect of a larger revolution in conversation.
Phil, just so I can be sure I’m understanding you correctly, what would you define as ‘traditional blogging’?
I’ve always held that blogs are about writing, and the political bloggers (yes I know I’m sometimes one) tend to think that their flavour is the only one, when it ain’t, by a long shot. Also, the personal and the political tend to intersect (example: Cancer blogs and the medical system in the US) in ways that ppl who discuss “political blogging” don’t seem to recognise. But my opinion is one that has never gained any traction.
Pavlov, kinda like what we do here, just posts with comments. Sorry I thought that would be understood. Maybe I erred in using the word traditional and should have just left it at blogging.
Phil, you said
Hey, fair go; that’s a narrow Western, Anglocentric point-of-view. What about the rest of the world? Why do you think certain regimes [soon including our own, perhaps] are worried about free-and-easy, uncontrolled blogging? But then you said
Right on. Blogging is evolving; some parts faster and more profoundly than others..
Ta Phil — I thought you might have been referring to specific kinds of content, political or otherwise, rather than the entire medium.
Helen — it depends on who you want traction with.
I resemble that view of my anglocentrism Graham, born and bred.
One of the great shames in blogging is the language barrier, I dream of the day where automatic translation tools connect us to the wider blogosphere.
It’s looking like while the total blogosphere may be in plateau or decline, what’s left may be the creme de la creme and they will end up having even more influence, while the rest of us move on to other forms of communicating our displeasure with the way things are in other ways.
I’m sick of revolutions in conversational modes, I am tired of learning new environments and conventions every three months. In my local paper just now I was reading about how local librarians recently had training in how to communicate with clients through MySpace. MySpace, golly I thought MySpace was out of fashion now? By the time they learn Facebook no doubt it too will be so last year, the crowd will have moved on, leaving behind nothing but a massive chunk of marketable personal information.
But more to the point. I’m very, very suspicious of all kinds of talk about social networking and influence…influence over whom and for what purposes, and how is it acquired and measured? I’m yet to be convinced that influence is A Good Thing (as opposed to conversation and having one’s say, which are in general very good things) Even if you grant that amassing influence is desirable, I also wonder if the proliferation of social networking sites means that people with interesting voices are neutralising themselves by spreading themselves too thinly across too many hubbub-ridden platforms.
Yep. Not to mention closing themselves off from conversations on the wider web.
Yep. That’s why I’m generally not a fan of closed networks like Facebook, there has to be a way of claiming ownership of your content and taking that with you wherever you go or having your online persona all integrated into one place.
The example of influence I gave is the the kind that I think positive, it comes from a genuine need by folks to change things in the bar scene in Sydney and was not activated by Clover. Of course this one small action if successful may have the effect of lessining the power of the pubs, clubs and pokies lobby and give our pollies some courage, and for NSW that would be a food thing.
I see much of this as giving some power back to ourselves, in much the same way Burmese activists are using the web and blogging to effect change.
Phil:
Babelfish? There are a few translation programs around …. but I haven’t stuck any that include the fine cultural nuances that make all the difference when blogging. Blogging is not quite the same thing as exchanging business letters and scientific papers or booking a seat with a budget airline.
Graham, I use Google translate but yes nuance is lost, what I meant is a tool that does it without asking, with nuance, that’s the barrier.
That’s why I’m generally not a fan of closed networks like Facebook, there has to be a way of claiming ownership of your content and taking that with you wherever you go or having your online persona all integrated into one place.
Ew no. I want my online persona to be the same as my hard copy persona: all over the place, dfferent things to different people at different times and never the twains shall meet.
Shapeshifter!
Amanda isn’t that what the GG was arguing?
Tim Blair would not know if his arse was on fire,and I,m buggered if I would go out of my way to tell him.
To me the man (and I use the term loosely)is a waste of space
Steve: Don’t know what you mean.
Poor Tim, always the LP whipping boy.
It’s always difficult to tell whether he’s as thick as he claims, or stupid like a fox.
It’s probably the latter. A few years ago blog triumphalism was politically useful, so he was all for it; at the moment it suits him politically to play down the influence of blogs, so he does.
It’s foolish to expect him to be consistent.
Actually he’d catch on pretty quickly when his shirt collar caught fire.
Blair’s lamenting is purely narcissistic. Not long ago, perhaps just following the ‘Latham incident’, I clearly remember reading him claiming that he and other members of the right-wing junta were a major asset to his side of politics.
With the Howard and Bush junta now clearly on the nose, Blair makes a hasty retreat, by downplaying his influence. What a tool.
I can’t tell what influence the American bloggers have, though we have passed The Great Uncovering, in which the Iraq delusions were revealed for what they are.
Swiftblogging I am sure remains potent for them.
Over here, blogging got a huge push before the last election, and the conversation is different now.
For a while, blogging was a great way for secret writers to go public, but a lot of that effect has washed through the system, for the usual reasons to do with pent up demand.
And now the MSM is littered with blogs and comments, which is surely carved into the general internet conversation.
I wonder if the next step for many Australian bloggers is towards longer pieces which are less hyperlinked and transferable to print.
David Tiley [at 10:22pm]:
]
Excuse me, did you mean “LESS transferable to print” or “MORE transferable to print”?
[It’s been a long day
I’d have thought that the next step could be more the style of Metafilter.com with shorter posts having more hyperlinks.
“And now the MSM is littered with blogs and comments, which is surely carved into the general internet conversation.”
Comparing the influence of MSM blogs (minimal) and traditional blogs (less minimal) best gets to the heart of the ‘great blog revolution’, or more pertinently, lack there-of. MSM blogs are usually as anodyne, dull, fence-sitting and impervious to genuine ‘unscripted’ conversation as MSM print writing. That should tell us that the real ‘influence’ debate to be had is not about ‘bloggers v. msm-ers’; it’s about professional v. amateur writers. Professional writers write ’safe’: to a template of some kind, within self-censored limitations, and stripped by the editorial process of much of the kind of raw energy of human passion that is the only vehicle capable of ’selling’ ideas and information that challenge the status quo. No contrived, professional ‘writing persona’ can influence the world in that way, not lastingly. You’ve got to be the authorial real deal to convince someone to change their worldview. It’s not influence if you merely tell someone what they already know. And that’s what ‘professional’ writing mostly does, perhaps necessarily; write to avoid alienating its paying demographic. The writers professional publishers use needs must write as if they have something to lose - because they do: commercial viability. So it’s very largely condom writing, simulcrum writing, pantomime writing, ‘inverted comma’ writing…with notable - and more’s the point, usually short-lived - exceptions, professional non-fiction is essentially ‘play-acting’ writing.
Yet what gave and still occasionally gives any writer their influence is just the opposite: a willingness to write as if they have no ‘paying demographic’ to please, nothing to lose, no influence. Where they write that way - blog, msm, cave wall - is, as usual, supremely irrelevant, except to the merely pragmatic extent that the blog self-publishing platform makes such ‘bareback’ writing easier to get to a big audience than any time in history. Or so it should. If there is any noticeable ‘trend in blogging’ worth addressing it’s the way the joint is becoming so tame and lame as the ‘pro’ bloggers shift into town and the bigger amateur blogs win an audience and MSM cross-over. I think the more interesting debate to be had here is a general one: about the way ’success’ tends to breed caution in any writer’s writing, and caution in writing is what really leads to diminishing influence.
I wish bloggers would stop seeing words in cyberspace in different qualitative terms to words published anywhere else. It sets up false dichotomies that lead to online writers believing themselves automatically immune from common writerly pitfalls. The medium is not ‘cyberspace’ or ‘paper’ - they are mere publishing mechanisms. The medium proper - common to all written words - is…well, ‘written words’. That’s what in the writerly case conveys the ideas, emotions and information of ‘communication between sentient beings’. Other media for attempting that splendid, indeed definitive, human task are ‘visual images’, ‘music’, ‘mime’ (ie body language), ‘maths’ and so on. What most seem to think are ‘communications media’ are actually just ‘platforms for communications media’, as Phil’s title suggests (and his thread-text then inexplicably contradicts!?) So IMHO the question here should really be: ‘Is the written word declining in influence?’. The answer is yes, and to answer the obvious follow-up ‘why?’ is by far a more urgent epistemological project of the Information Age than this latest version of the historical demarcation dirt-pissing b/w publishers as mere platform-technology changes: scroll-makers and stonemasons, stone-masons and ink-scribes, scribes and typesetters, typesetters and IT geeks, whatever. Mere technical lacky-chatter, beneath us mighty wordsmiths. (There’s geenyus afoot tonight, Gates - fetch me something to write on, boy geek! ) After ten years of mostly failing to get my deathless words into MSM print and five ranty years online in various fora and capacities I have my views on the ‘Why?’ of the declining influence of writing, and they almost all start and end with the quality of professional writers, not their writing…but that’s my hobby horse whinnying restlessly again, so I’ll shut up.
David, I think that’s probably true with the better writers who always have great stuff to offer the blogosphere, however, for the second raters like me, I think the shorter form and micro grabs of text will be the future.
But I look at what’s happening in the social sites like Facebook and see connectivity and interactions that through their critical mass still add up to something influential as far as social commentary is concerned.
From Jack.
Yep, you can feel it all right, the criticism comes thick and fast and that would cause a lot of writers to level out their writing. Personally I write what the fuck I please Jack, and I don’t really care about writing perfect pieces.
But what do I know, I’m just a soon to be ex-blogger.
“Personally I write what the fuck I please Jack, and I don’t really care about writing perfect pieces.”
Yeah, I see you, Flip. A passing breed, amigo. I really miss balls-to-the-page ‘traditional bloggers’ like Dave Heidelberg, eh. I even find myself missing the ‘traditional Blairelzebub’ of pre-Op Ed gig yore - which shows how nuts I really am. (Oy, oy, Evil One! Got bit by the Famous Byline greebly, did we. You big cuddly softie…it used to be all about the music, man…) I’ll miss your posts, Phil, if what you say is true. To whence, pray tell, are you off to? Or just had enough? Before you nip off, one thing I meant to ask you long ago (actually, it’d be interesting to hear from all the LP regulars on this score): have you done much banging freelance pitches against the MSM wall over your years of blogging?
By the by, I’ve just finished reading Margaret Simons’s cracker of a book: The content makers. Boy, talk about writing ‘as if [she] has no ‘paying demographic’ to please, nothing to lose, no influence…” It’s suck-in-your breath, holler with joy, marvel at her elan stuff. Breathtaking. And - I reckon - highly influential in the long run. Like Latham’s bracing hacks at the Meeja, only with class and wit and narrative elegance and cohesion. And the fact that she got it up in the Oz MSM - my god, the sheer energy required to get any book up here, let alone one about politics/media - proves that ‘platform’ is irrelevant. Great writing always transcends what were thought to be hitherto stylistic imperatives.
Good luck where-ever you go, Phil. Hope you keep writing.
No MSM pitches for me Jack, not really interested though I’m sure they won’t be interested in what I have to offer anyway, it ain’t my style. But I am doing stuff for dead tree media, specifically bicycles and just recently tech.
I promised myself (and the girl) that I’d stop traditional written blogging after the election, but I’m interested in micro blogging and mobile platforms, short text via mobile IM, SMS or mobile web with voice thrown in and some video. Anything that takes you away from the desk and can be created and consumed away from the desk.
When the election is over I’m gonna throw some time into that and see where it takes me. Maybe an LP podcast?
Phil, what you are suggesting in the post was something that came up as a common theme in the blogging conference yesterday (though it should be noted that there are a few blogosphere will take over the world evangelists still around). I think the consensus was that blogging would become less distinctive as only one platform for a style of writing and social interaction that would increasingly migrate and cross-fertilise across different platforms.
Influence is a whole other question, and it’s capable of being defined (and perhaps measured) in a number of different ways, but I’ve kept the notes I made for what I had to say on the question so I will try to do a post on it over the next couple of days.
“Anything that takes you away from the desk and can be created and consumed away from the desk.”
Amen to that. Good luck with whatever you come up with.