The World of Blogs

J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
The importance of blogging has been both talked up, and talked down... much of the mainstream media thinks they're a decadent scourge, (some) bloggers themselves believe they will save humanity.

What does Dissensus think? How important are blogs? And what of the enormous diversity of blogs? Can we even really talk about blogging as it were one thing?
 
W

waffle

Banned
As with your other provocative recent 'feeler threads' in situ, Comeraderie Daniel, could this one have any possible connection with your own theory-versus-experience abandonment of blogoland?

Komeraderie Dejan of the Cliteral Parody Centre wishes to acknowledge your anti-K-punk et al rantings in this haunt and the complete inversion of this forum's original objects.

Desperate Hipsters hereabouts, Komanchi Miller, in search of a new Master!
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Maybe it will amplify it?

Elijah said:
blogs will free the world of the medias grip on it
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Yes... this is is what I mean. This idea was the thesis of a book called "We, the Media" which came out a few years ago. The book suggested, if I recall correctly, that the internet in general and blogs in particular were democratizing, and would, as you say, work to loosen the grip of centralized media control and allow more voices to be heard.

Interestingly, none other than Rupert Murdoch has endorsed at least some of this theory, declaring in 2005:

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them.

They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.


For myself, I wonder whether or not this is real control, or only the illusion of it. It seems at least possible that media control - control by images, news cycles, trends; by a certain kind of understanding of time, perhaps - doesn't really require a sinister figure directing it all towards particular ends, but might instead be something more like an intrinsic property of media itself; so that there are certain kinds of control that emerged with radio, certain kinds which emerged with television, and so on. This is to say, instead of blogs freeing the world from the grip of the media, perhaps they - and the internet more generally - are in fact effecting to ramify it.

I guess I'm interested in a couple of things here.

1) The structure of blogs is not really democratic. There's actually a kind of feudalism to them; big blogs (or sites more generally) can very effectively throttle traffic, or channel it, effectively, where they like; smaller blogs or sites are dependent on blogger blogs picking them up, and there are of course any number of reasons why they may choose to or not. Then again, this is not the whole of blogging, and some people (the notorious cat blogs, perhaps) either genuinely don't give a shit, or else use blogs in a completely different way. I don't know. There are hundreds of millions of blogs in the world now, and perhaps it isn't really possible to generalize about them.

2) There is an interesting psychology associated with blogging, and the net more generally. This can often be very - in fact, insanely - negative. The NYT recently ran a fascinating story about trolls and "the logic of lulz" which captures some of this, and explains at least an aspect of it - for my part, I wonder whether or not "lulz" is not maybe a more general term, related to the necessity of attracting attention. The NYT piece contains this germane idea:

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
I do kind of enjoy reading music blogs even when the ratio of worthwhile points about the music mentioned takes a back seat to the sociological connection that the writer tries to attach to it. Mind you that's been the same since I read the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker years back watching the latest collection of talentless yet polemical hopelesses starting a trend (if two other similar sounding bands could be considered a movement of sorts) due to the fact that writing about how music sounds is kind of pointless as most people with ears can figure that out anyway.

I must admit I'm far more interested in the music that journos don't know how to deal with due to their being no (real or imagined) cultural shift around it.
 
straight

straight

wings cru
what i think is interesting is how the traditional newspapers have incorporated bloggers within their structure now and how it has affected the standard the quality of the writing and how much empty bilge is now tolerated; case in point the guardians music writing and how most of it seems to centre around things from youtube.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Dissensus was spawned by bloggers. All of this is the offshoot of a specific constellation around Matt Ingram, Simon Reynolds and K-Punk in 2003-4. I should think that the general consensus would be that they're pretty important. But there's nothing quite like blogging to inflate your sense of self-importance.

I think it's mostly an important form of therapy. It's certainly better than alcohol or SSRIs.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
As much as I like a lot of them, I find it really hard to swallow, the idea that blogs are democratizing anything.

Sure, just about anybody can up their unfiltered, unedited rants to the nets thanks to easily accessible blog interfaces/software and even more easily accessible free blogspot webspace, but the kind of blogs that agitate readership and are able to keep it and build it up over time are written by the exact same sorts of people who could if they wanted to--and most likely already do-- get their work published in the mainstream print media.

More than that, the idea that blogs sidestep that all-important Editor-from-on-high who is there to tell us what is important (usually a rich white man) is kinda silly, since even the pretty revered blogs like the Huffington Post fall prey to the "quickly recycle or link to an item that's making the rounds on other similar blogs whose readership demographic matches our own" insta-post slow degradation of content. Many a time these hot items are snatched directly from the NY Times, the AP newswire, or similar Old Media Monoliths, since these are, let's face it, the sources with the resources.
 
L

littlebird

Wild Horses
josef k. said:
What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them.

They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.
Click to expand...

the thought that this brings to mind, to me, is two-fold (at least initially):

a) quite often it seems certain blogs, esp. in regards to media/news/current affairs are often links to other news sources/bloggers. does this not, in some ways, just repurpose the media? obviously with the slant and leanings of said blogger, but still, it is almost a trail of links/mentions.

though, tbf, i suppose that often these mentions/shout outs are of media/news sources that may be missed otherwise, so one could argue the merit of "news on demand"/"control over their media" in that regard.

b) sifting through the mass blogs can be overwhelming, and after awhile it does become a case of who you know/where you hang about. it seems that most people i know who blog all know the same 10-15 bloggers ("know" in the online-sphere kind of way), or at least there is that 10-15 music blogs everyone knows, 10-15 news/politics blogs that everyone (who is of a categorized leaning) knows, etc. but this takes a certain about of notoriety, time online, and reputation to be a part of.

(thus the merit of forums, in some ways)

but how much impact do these people have on the media? or on the viewer/reader's media choices, overall?
 
L

littlebird

Wild Horses
nomadthesecond said:
More than that, the idea that blogs sidestep that all-important Editor-from-on-high who is there to tell us what is important (usually a rich white man) is kinda silly, since even the pretty revered blogs like the Huffington Post fall prey to the "quickly recycle or link to an item that's making the rounds on other similar blogs whose readership demographic matches our own" insta-post slow degradation of content. Many a time these hot items are snatched directly from the NY Times, the AP newswire, or similar Old Media Monoliths, since these are, let's face it, the sources with the resources.
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yes, exactly.

so many blogs re: issues/news/media are links to stories that if you keep tracking backwards are "usually" source back to the bigger media sources. or if not the big "Monoliths", then from he same string of 10-15 bloggers/sites that are being bandied about.

and as you also pointed out, the bloggers who make the most impact are usually publishing elsewhere, either in print publications, educational forums/formats, or someplace else outside of the online-sphere.

at the end of the day, how much affect is it all truly having?
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
craner said:
Dissensus was spawned by bloggers. All of this is the offshoot of a specific constellation around Matt Ingram, Simon Reynolds and K-Punk in 2003-4. I should think that the general consensus would be that they're pretty important. But there's nothing quite like blogging to inflate your sense of self-importance.

I think it's mostly an important form of therapy. It's certainly better than alcohol or SSRIs.
Click to expand...

Ollie OTM.

i like the Nomad quotes that littlebird has been citing.

political blogs are a useful way of extending a conversation, people you wouldn't get to meet in the pub, etc. in many cases not much more, though certainly no less.
if someone can make even one little ripple, that's good enough for me.

blogs maintained by academics or activists can be a particularly good read in this area.
i like when politicians themselves have a good understanding of blogging, as it's a way of (for example) the people they represent being able to reach them alongside all the other ways constituents have traditionally reached their representatives (via surgery or letter or what have you), such as the British MP Tom Watson.

a blog like Benn loxo du taccu has, anecdotally, got a lot of people really turned onto world musics.

i do want to quote a couple of posts from Normblog (and as is the case with points Nomad and littlebird raise, Normblog is a retired academic and someone who has seen his name in print, he's the sort of alpha blogger that littlebird was referencing), one of the most widely read UK political blogs. he's responding to his friend Oliver Kamm, who used to blog - on politics, economics and culture - away from his day job in finance, until his blogging got him noticed to the extent that he is now a leader writer for The Times (Kamm had written a book on foreign policy whilst blogging as well, so had already had fingers in different pies before he started the gig with the Thunderer).

It's another spin of the same wheel. Oliver Kamm sets out his view on the all-round negative effects of political blogging in today's Guardian. As I said in my previous discussion of his arguments, I agree with him that much of what passes for political exchange in the blogosphere - a term I for my part have no trouble with - doesn't encourage the careful weighing of opposing viewpoints (see also here). Still, I remain puzzled by three features of Oliver's argument...
Second, Oliver writes that blogs are 'purely parasitic'. Yes, true, they depend on the press and other media, but this in itself is presumably not an offence against democratic debate. So do other ordinary, non-blogger citizens depend on these same sources. There seems no reason special to bloggers why they should be disqualified from discussing what has come to them via the media...
From all of which I conclude that Oliver wrongly generalizes from one of the regrettable features of blogospheric debate to a damning of the medium as a whole.
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it's only a short post, available here (if anyone's arsed to read it: i deliberately cut out some of Norm's argument to whet the appetite).

same again, really, with
I'm not sure exactly how valuable a resource blogs and blogging are to democratic deliberation and debate. It's probably too early to form a confident judgement. But I do think they are such a resource and so I disagree with what Oliver Kamm says in this post...
But if, from a democratic point of view, there is this shortcoming of debate on the blogs, it needs to be dealt with practically by trying to improve the culture of Internet discussion. There is nothing about the medium as such, about the sheer availability of this new space for debate, one open to much larger numbers of people and to every point of view, that impoverishes democracy.
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that post is available here.

on a vaguely related topic, i'm a bit interested in what free web content at newspaper homepages is doing for the print paid physical daily editions (i'm a guy who often has the ritual of his paper), in the long run certainly. i think i remember a thread on same here where we discussed advertising.
the media crit at The Reader, Michael Miner, is often quite interesting on these sorts of things.
 
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