....LMB: "Meta"....

January 27, 2004

The whole concept of blogs and blogging is getting a lot of coverage these days. Last night, NPR broadcast a two-hour special on blogs and politics ("The Blogging of the President 2004"), and our pal Billmon reports that the global elite networking soiree known as the World Economic Forum actually had a panel discussion on the topic "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?". So now is as good a time as any to write about the topic.

First of all, I feel kinda stupid writing about this at all. I'm a blogger, I have a blog, and I'm writing about the significance of blogging. Navel-gazing at its finest, with a tendency to self-congratulate, self-promote, and let one's self-importance soar. I'm not a proud man, and I've always preferred to let my work speak for itself, rather than try to point out to others how good or important or profound it is. I do what I do, people can like it or don't, it's not going to affect me that much. Several people have told me that my work has had great impact on them, which makes me feel good, and helps validate my own opinion that I do indeed write some good stuff.

Second of all, only a fraction of all blogs are politically-themed, a fact which is completely lost on most political bloggers. When political bloggers refer to blogs, bloggers, or the vague network of political bloggers often called "the blogosphere", they ignore everyone else. Truth to tell, most blogs are 14-year old girls gossiping about what happened at school, their latest celebrity crush, and the results of their "what kind of popstar/gumdrop/winged lizard are you?" personality quiz.

Which I suppose begs the question "what is a blog?" It's simply an online, web-based journal. Most are written by a single person, some are done in groups. They're really not much different than personal homepages (which were also championed as the end-all of personal freedom and democracy some years back), except that homepages were fairly static, while blogs add content frequently.

But in the world of political bloggers, and journalists who pay attention to political blogs, this is potentially the next step in media and journalism. Which in my opinion, is nonsense.

1) Bloggers are usually not journalists. We can be, but we usually simply absorb mainstream media, filter it, analyze it, critique it, mock it, pee on it, knit it into a nice scarf, etc. We also have the power to amplify certain stories. When we work together (usually in a non-organized, non-planned fashion), we can take a story that would be quickly forgotten and ignored, and give it new life.

2) Bloggers can influence bigger actors. Sometimes, a big name blogger will write or focus on a certain topic/issue/event, and a mainstream opinion columnist can take that nugget and run with it (sometimes the big name blogger got the idea from a less popular blogger, sometimes not). And once the columnist has written about it, it might actually get a decent amount of mainstream news coverage. Likewise, it's not inconceivable that a number of bloggers could have an influence on people like politicians.

3) Blog networks help put all news into a singular context. (Jeez, my years in academia are showing) When a person reads a number of related political blogs, written by authors who have similar opinions and/or worldviews, each news story gets jigsawed into a larger puzzle. Maybe bloggers aren't opinion makers or opinion shapers, but perception shapers. After reading half a dozen far left blogs on a regular basis, current events seem to fall into place more neatly.

But overall, I don't see bloggers and blogs as anything that hugely different or important. I was writing news and opinion articles and ranting about politics on the radio for years before I started blogging. Blog software made it easier to publish articles online than coding each article into a separate html page. And given the common features of the "genre", I could take some journalistic shortcuts (instead of explaining each term, person, organization, etc., I could just make the name a hyperlink to another page which gave details). And when I started my blog, I decided to use it primarily as a way to blow off steam while spending most of my time on "serious" journalistic articles, so the blog had a whole lot of attitude (which again, dovetailed nicely with the genre). And at a certain point, I saw that the blog was getting many more hits than my site of "legitimate" journalism. And the blog was a hell of a lot more fun. And that's how Lying Media Bastards Man came to be.

In conclusion,

Blogs. Eh, whatever.