I’ve got no doubt whatever that Frank Devine or some crusty old duffer columnist at News who’s just bemused about this modern phenomenon of having a “weblog” or “web diary” (isn’t it all about being nekkid on teh intertubes or posting videos of your pet salamander or something?) will soon rush into print (if in the Oz, it will be ironically named “Crusty Duffer blog” on the website and come with an annoying Web -99.0 popup) and decry Time Magazine for naming all of us Web 2.0 folks as person/s of the year.
For what it’s worth I thought the Time writers took a pretty balanced look at the range of social networking/democratising phenomena – including the Macaca and Foley blog scoop/scalps of the midterm elections as well as the more outre stars of YouTube and Myspace.
Guy over at Polemica has a good post which captures what I think is common to most such discussions in the MSM:
When questions are asked of the future of democracy and the media, observers tend to either dismiss the blogging phenomenon as overhyped and unlikely to forge a lasting impact, or overestimate the blogosphere’s strong points. Most of those who are sceptical of the blogging phenomenon are either associated with or affiliated with the mainstream media, and either don’t understand or are in some ways threatened by the blogosphere’s ever burgeoning growth.
He’s taking as his hook an op/ed in the SMH by Alison Orr commenting precisely on Time’s choice. Orr is writing a PhD on the nets and democracy. She makes some reasonable points, but she also repeats some common furphies.
In itself, it’s interesting that being a PhD candidate still gives you some some sort of entree into the op/ed pages and implied authority that being a mere blogger (lots of whom of course are also PhD candidates or PhDs) isn’t accorded by Fairfax, ironically despite or perhaps because of its woeful celeb trash gossip approach to its online operations.
Orr, for instance, repeats the furphy that online politics is not really “activism” because it doesn’t take place on the streets, something I attacked in my article for Griffith Review [link to pdf] last year [there's a shorter version online at Australian eDemocracy]. I’m dumbfounded that opinion formation, conversation and persuasion apparently don’t count as politics, whereas a few people at a derisory picket or a boring as batshit party branch meeting do.
Similarly, it seems to me rather trite to point out that Google, YouTube, Blogger etc. are profit driven. On one hand, you could easily find non-profit social media like Wikipedia. On the other hand, no one is going to build a web commons for nothing, and social networking sites make their money precisely by allowing users to provide and generate content. They’re platforms for community formation and debate. They’re not, and neither are blogs, an idealised public sphere, but such a creature never existed except in Habermas’ nostalgia.
Probably the least interesting point is one that’s also been made by Guy Rundle a couple of times over the last year in Crikey – that much content is of little interest except to its creator. That seems to me to ignore both the value of providing a space for self expression, as well as the potential for audiences and communities to grow. And it also often smacks of a certain elitist disdain for what people like to write about – which is often gendered in that catblogs and knitting blogs, or for that matter the discussion of personal and interpersonal relationships, are dismissed as not properly public.
I don’t know what 2007 holds for Australian blogging, though I suspect the interface of the federal election and the blogosphere will be significant. I do know that whatever it holds, it’s likely to be very interesting while most commentary on it by pundits is likely to be very boring and predictable.
You know I’m gonna comment on this.
Yep, because they are still stuck in a certain view of media, but as blogging and other social networking/user generated sites show, we are now all media and it’s up to each of us to determine exactly what has value and what does not.
And the interesting thing is that there will be a market and demand (not specifically monetised) for the cat bloggers and knitting bloggers by many folks who see value in what those editors/writers/creators produce.
As for the democracy thing and social media/blogging, well this is just a fragmenting of what was once a body politic cohesive because of lack of choice into a whole bunch of segments all of who will become harder and harder for the big media and political svengalis to reach.
I like that prospect, because long term it heralds more independent and curious population interested in exploring for the things that really excite them rather that the old way of some big media editor or program director deciding what’s good for us.
BTW, given this post I think some LP readers may enjoy this article in The Economist.
Although it’s about shopping and philosophy, I think they are talking about the same thing.
Exactly, Phil, and making links with others who share that excitement.
Nothing is trivia. Really.
One interesting point about the Time Magazine online article is that none of the pages had links to the sites they were talking about.
Corporates still don’t get the nature of blogging, by and large.
Most newspaper sites won’t even let you insert links.
Of course, the corporations are not going anywhere soon – brand power is even more important in a world with millions upon millions of blogs. But if LP is going to let me insert links to my work, and the Courier-Mail isn’t, I will be coming here first.
Much blogging will continue to be tiresome, predictable and not worth the effort to read, but the good stuff is going to run rings around the media – which is often just as tiresome and predictable.
I think articles like this one I wrote about a rally last November are streets ahead of the mainstream media’s websites, when you look at how I used photos, sound recordings, maps and so on.
I meant to compliment you on that post a while ago, David, but forgot in all the end of season to and fro. Now I know you’re floating about, I’ll do it know. The first photograph of the kid playing under Queen Victoria’s statue (draped with the Aboriginal flag, mind you) is classic.
The Economist article doesn’t mention people like Felix Guattari that explicitly wrote against the emergent pomo trends. That is the sort of article that really makes me want to be an intellectual thug.
They call it the cultivation of consumer choice through liberation marketing, I call it the production of stupidity through the decrease in thresholds of appreciation. Contemporary niche marketers are artists of stupidity who properly understand the age old axiom ‘ignorance is bliss’. My prediction is that soon consumers will be sold the tools to appreciate their own stupidity. Perhaps this is what an Arts degree has already become.
Oh, this is complete and utter bullshit:
“Pomos made a point of writing impenetrable prose: it was necessary, Foucault argued, if they were to be taken seriously.”
I have not read anything remotely like this in the several Foucault books I have.
No, and Foucault is a very clear writer. Sometimes the English translation is deficient, but he could hardly be accused of writing impenetrably.
Thanks very much SL, I’m especially glad you liked the choice of lead photo.
The Mulrunji rallies have been very different to rallies organised by the ‘usual suspects’, IMO, and had a much more family/community feel to them.
There are plenty of shots of children (not just as subjects, but also as ‘background’) in that article, which was a deliberate decision – I wanted to drive the ‘family’ vibe home as hard as I could – why be subtle?
BTW the photos are all Creative-Commonsed and free for download and use with a credit/link to my site. CC is a bandwagon I hope to get a lot of mileage out of this year.
Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs had this to say about Democracy and digital tools of production.
It’s early days yet, but like him I’m largely positive.
I’m reading The War on Democracy, and a comment by its authors regarding the audience reached by the (Victorian) Herald Sun‘s Andrew Bolt intersects with this discussion.
Bolt reaches 1.5 million readers with his conservative rants, and the question for blogs is how will they ever communicate particular issues, alternative analyses to an audience of that magnitude? Proliferating alternatives are a good thing, but how do they break out of their digital silos?
While we have blog search sites such as technorati, we need a mechanism that is capable of lifting the audience for particular issues to a level beyond those who are savvy enough to search intelligently for alternative viewpoints. Maybe part of the answer lies in sites that aggregate content from disparate sources (as any blog can in fact do to some degree). But we need something that matches the reach of newspapers that lands on the digital lawns of Australia.
I’m not sure how many bloggers actually make or report their own news. There are some high profile cases… but I think by and large the ‘sphere still feeds off msm… even if in a critical fashion. Personally I never read as much print media as I do now since I’ve been reading LP. I certainly never paid much attention to wingnut columnists until they became the subject of ridicule on this blog…
Is that a good thing though, Cliff?