At Ambit Gambit, Graham Young riffs off a comment made by Jay Rosen on Twitter:
You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”
Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.
The post concludes:
…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.
Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.
Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.
To the degree that they aren’t just dependent on a reinscription of the whole “public purpose” argument about journalism in a new frame and a range of concepts about public deliberation which are too abstract, I think they’re probably a post facto effect rather than a motivator. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there’s as strong a correlation between the quality of the media and the impulse to blog as everyone seems to think. So I’d be very interested in others’ observations!
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.
I assumed before I decided to investigate the blogging phenomonon that it was largely vanity publishing, (as if there is a another sort), I’m not
entirelysure I’ve falsified the hypothesis to my satisfaction yet. But what would I know about vanity?Seriously tho’, for your compendium, (except that it’s probably an quite rare phenomonon, I’d be interested to see other examples of it), there is the aspect that follows from the undoubted practice of auto-googling, or, in it’s more refined form, auto-google alerting. (That’s where google will email you, or even auto-post to a blog, when it detects a mention of your name, f’rinstance, in the news, web or blog domains.) Thus a blog poster, or their less privelaged cousin, a commenter, can expect that the planting in the googleplex of a target name, such as that of a politician, may in fact get picked up by them or their press agent, or media monitor service, if they are so switched on. And it is possible, and easy, for said “target” to respond.
As such the blog/thread can become a sort of document of record. That’s the possibly obscure motivation I’m talking about: to use blogs to get “players” on the record about issues. It’s happened here on LP, on a post of yours. Interestingly, to me anyway, the MP’s response was counter to the party line, opening up a potential wedge. But as far as I know teh media didn’t pick up the ball, but that’s teh media for ya. When the greens and the nats do a joint press release, that’s when they’ll pick up, and not before.
For me vanity has a fair bit to do with it, although I’ll slip into elitist mode – I had used another word but decided against publishing it – and call it self actualisation.
But I also think main stream media commentators are fairly homogenous and don’t consistently reflect the views of their readership or even where their readers want to be led (if they want to be challenged).
Why blog? It’s one-stop shopping; who has time to write angry corrective letters to all the newspapers and the TV and the magazines and the news-weeklies and all of their ersatz “blogs” all day long, pointing out every single thing of theirs that is hopelessly biased, patently mistaken, breathtakingly stupid, or just plain lying? At this point, pretty much every second sentence in the MSM qualifies for one or more. As the saying goes, if one took the MSM to task, they wouldn’t get back for a year. Epic fail? More like epic betrayal.
Better for the blood pressure to write it in one place and have done.
I think that Danny and Dalek might be near the mark for a large number of bloggers.
A letter to the editor type blog post potentially has a much wider audience on the Internet and doesn’t get wrapped around kitchen waste a couple of days later.
The Parliamentary Library regularly trawls online MSM and the blogosphere looking for background before answering some questions put to it by MPs.
Media Monitors trawls the blogs on commercial briefs and politicians or their staff also go online when an issue goes ‘hot’ in their electorates.
Additionally, the mainstream media harvests the blogosphere for adaptable stories.
When you combine all these elements what emerges is the possibility of using blogs as a vehicle for lobbying, protest and political pressure.
I was amazed at how quickly all the aforementioned groups started to regularly monitor the blog I administer once it came online.
I suspect that more than a few bloggers have noticed a similar readership.
I started reading and commenting on blogs mainly because I:
1) Was looking for people with a similar political outlook to myself.
2) Was jaded with the current media establishment.
I think that #1 was a more motivating factor at first, but these days I rarely read stuff from the MSM because #2 has become much stronger.
WARNING – contains premature blog-triumphalism
Our obvious blinding success raises the question – whats next?
My modest proposal involves uploading by injecting nanomachines into the bloodstream that would replace each brain and sensory neuron with a functionally equivalent, artificial structure. The nanomachine would contain a program that would emulate the neuron, while at the same time interacting with neighboring cells as though the replaced neuron were still in place. The cells surrounding the neuron would be unaware of any change. Gradually, each synapse in the brain would become information in a computer program, retaining functionality but dispensing with its former physical structure.
When the process is complete, what is thought to be the individual would awaken to a new life in netspace. Women and children first.
Jay Rosen – Weblogging is an inconclusive act– which is different from having no conclusions or firm conclusions.
Yes, I think it has a lot to do with the greater effectiveness than the old ‘letters to the editor’ concept.
There is also the concern that the corporate control of the media, and the political orthodoxy, which in many respects is merely a response to that media, has led to a blanket taboo on many topics.
Currently, there is extensive coverage of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, nearly always accompanied by an Israeli Ministry spokeperson stating that is is merely a modest response to Hamas rocket attacks. There are no public cries of outrage against this inhumanity. At best there are some modest pleas for restraint.
There is hardly much option but to go to the blogosphere in trying to find others who might care. And it was similar at the height of the Bush-Howard ascendancy in Australia and the US.
It was probably only the blogs originally that expressed much concern about corporate greed, albeit it has become a bit more fashionable since things have crashed.
The blogs have not replaced MSM but they have helped a great deal in the search for truth.
I’ve been playing the blogging game for about four years now and and to me it is a much more social experience rather than a vanity thing.
Although I will admit that there is a certain vanity factor in the way that my blog appears and I do take a bit of time trying to improve its visual appearance,what I really enjoy is the feedback and debate on the topical issues that are of interest to me.
If the question is why are there blogs in online media correlative sites like nytimes.com, theaustralian.news.com.au, etc., the answer’s probably fairly simple: it gives more opportunity for more journalists to have a column and it gives more of the general public a chance to vent, both without requiring extensive editorial or proofreading assistance. As an added bonus, if the blogs can generate a sufficiently high level of participation, it’s likely that at least some part of that audience will arrive from or navigate to the main pages, the ones with more advertising, which they might be interested in enough to follow onwards, thereby increasing revenue.
Blogs have evolved from the days of robotwisdom, perhaps especially with the advent of Blogger, and so, too, has the motivation to start and maintain one, whether individually or collectively. I do it because it’s cheaper even than a phone card for keeping in communication with my family overseas, others do it because they are effectively limited from any other outlet for their literary or other creative aspirations. Andrew Sullivan explores the question in last month’s Atlantic.
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.
I’d like to see some research into why people read blogs. To me the verb ‘to blog’ means, indiscriminately, writing, reading and commenting, and the great value of blogs is that in their fluidity and open-endedness they represent a paradigm shift away from the one-way, dichotomous transaction between writer/reader: producer/consumer. This is true not only for political blogging but for all kinds.
I’m bemused by the recurrent trope in these discussions of bloggers homogenously sticking together. I find this is much truer IRL; one hangs out with the like-minded and consumes the media content that reflects one’s views. But since I took up blogging my knowledge and understanding of people who are different from me (men, conservatives, and people a generation or more younger than me, mainly) have increased dramatically.
Iain and PC — both very good points, not much more to add, really.
#12
I agree PC, It works from both sides of the political spectrum But the really brave bloggers make the effort to get out of their comfort zone and engage with those who don’t agree with their opinions.
Blogging is a new form of information transfer. Where previously the knowledge was archived in places which required specialist knowledge to access it now lots of “informations” are out there.
Searching skills and information credibilty are valuable now.
I heard a person explaining why he felt the internet was going to change things ( this must have been 10 years ago on the BBC ) and he thought it would free us all intellectually as we could outsource memory.
I’m not sure that has happened or to what extent but the internet itself must have been an incredible accelerant for globalisation.
I started blogging as part of my get-work activities (hence the title, WillTypeForFood), but I soon found out that was never really my principle motivation for blogging. I’d been commenting around the traps for a while, reading other people’s blogs, and I tended to write a hell of a lot in my spare time anyway. So my blog fast became a good place for random thoughts, musings, and pieces and soon generated its own style and, I guess, personality.
One thing I have noticed about blogging is both the centrality and ephemerality of comments. If you want to reproduce a post – either in print form, or on another website – then often the original post will have generated a fascinating/ amusing conversation in comments that you would want to reproduce. But space/formal considerations usually bar you from doing this.
The comments facility on blogs allows, and usually generates, many more wise, witty, and wonderful comments than the letters page in a newspaper, magazine, or print publication. But at the same time, the comments are hard to find again, and well-nigh impossible to reproduce in a satisfactory form.
Also, of course, a good comment can show up the prolixity and pretenses of a longer piece (blog post, newspaper article, whatever). You can labour away for hours at a long-winded post, only to find your arguments summarised, denied, or brilliantly parodied in one sentence by a commenter.
Janet Albrechtsen meditates on her motivations.
She forgot to mention getting paid lots of money to do it.
I think Janet sums up pretty well why she actually is not a blogger. ‘Over to you’. Wow.
Yep – in at least two ways – the weak excuse for not participating in threads (the contest of ideas or whatever you like to call it implies accountability) and the contempt she shows for “readers”.
Agree, TimT.
That’s one of the reasons why I’m a bit sceptical about the value of the Troppo/OLO Best Blogs thing – the other being that blog posts are a different form from op/eds.
Yes, it’s an invitation to get lost.