Long live the blogosphere
This post is an afterthought to the discussion I had with Oliver about blogging (see, in turn, 1, 2, 3 and 4), though I shall be concentrating here on a different aspect of the matter than those already covered. I mean a development that has taken place during the time since Oliver and I began blogging (in my case, in July 2003): the increasing involvement of the mainstream media - of newspapers and broadcasting organizations - in running blogs. Initially a phenomenon outside the province of these media, an activity of individuals acting independently (even if a few of these individuals were themselves journalists), blogging had an impact that evidently persuaded those with the power of decision inside the established media that it was something the latter ought to be involved in.
The modalities of the involvement that has followed have been various: the creation of newspaper-based group blogs whose bloggers were drawn from amongst the paper's existing staff; the setting up by newspapers of individual blogs for certain high-profile journalists; the 'absorption' by one or another paper of bloggers who, albeit sometimes already journalists, had started out blogging on their own account; and - a special case - the creation of the Guardian's Comment is Free, a sui generis combination of blog-provider (like Blogger or Typepad) and mammoth group blog.
The whole terrain of blogging now looks different on account of this development, and here is where I refer back to the earlier discussion. For what the development shows, I suggest, is that even if there is - as Oliver so insists - a deal of rubbish in the blogosphere, there was also something there that the press and other media wanted a part of, wanted to be part of. They surely did. Why? Of course, it might just be that here was a new fashion, and being composed of human beings, the media were disposed to follow it without any very good reason, as people sometimes will. But we must allow for the possibility, as well, that there was something of positive value in this new phenomenon, and that this was what attracted the existing media to it.
What could it be? One or two initially plausible answers don't withstand inspection. Interactivity with readers? That doesn't need a blog. You can just attach a comments facility to op-ed and other pieces in the online version of the paper - as indeed is now often done - and/or an email address. Speed of response to events as they happen? But again this could have been met by journos supplying, instead of blog posts in the blog-journal format, short columns, and at short notice, of the more traditional kind. None of these features of blogging is able to account for why the media couldn't just have modified their already existing forms and carried on as before. No, it was blogs they wanted to incorporate and blogging they wanted to be involved in. How come?
Here's a hypothesis. It was because blogging and the blogosphere created a space of free communication, a democracy of more or less open access to everyone with an interest in entering it. Good blogs, bad blogs, indifferent ones; well-informed argument or mere sounding off... but, in any case, a space of free advocacy, a democracy of the public realm, an anarchy of many different voices, a variety of every kind of thing, including some you wouldn't like to see turning up in your kitchen, but also others that in small or not so small ways could improve your day.
No surprise that the organized media wanted in on this. There was and is, however, a drawback to their getting in on it: which is that the space they come to occupy on the terrain of blogging they also transform just by that very act. In integrating this space into their own operation they make it part of whatever media organization they are, which is something else than the free space of the blogosphere.
Not to be misunderstood here: I'm not saying that those blogs operating under the umbrella of newspapers and other media aren't really blogs. They have too many blog-like features to be called anything else. But they are part of the press, as opposed to being part of the (free) blogosphere. Since the press is now online as well as on paper, the boundary between mainstream media and the blogosphere isn't so sharp a one, anyway. But blogs and bloggers in the press domain are constrained in ways that independent bloggers aren't, and it's a domain, theirs, that isn't freely open to entry. Some will say that these constraints are to the good. They doubtless have their advantages. Yet they mean that the media-controlled blog-space is a less open, less various, less teeming and less colourful space than the blogosphere as such. Long may this great and noisy multitude flourish.
