Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A:

TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging?
Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that difficult to shape the story. The first part of the book is really a series of profiles of people — Justin Hall, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger — who were some of the key figures in pioneering blogging. In the middle of the book, my job became picking out the stories that had the most to teach us about what blogging was all about. At that point, the challenge became figuring out what to leave out.

You seem set on changing some of the popular notions of why people blog.
One thing I’ve become very conscious of is how careful you have to be making generalizations about bloggers. You have millions of people blogging. There are a multitude of answers to any question about what blogging is, who bloggers are or why they do it.

The author is Scott Rosenberg, the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on where digital media has come from and where it is going. The volume of meta-commentary about the nature and future of blogging has gone up recently. Just about all of the mavens and A-listers wrote something-or-other on the subject last month.

Laura McKenna at 11D generated loads of response after blogging that

blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

To which Ezra Klein lamented

The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers. My blog certainly isn’t as fun to write as it used to be. But it’s also a lot better than it used to be. And it certainly pays more. And so it goes. The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society.

I’m not even sure that’s an analogy, as Klein (born in 1984) and more than a few of the other big blog-turned-job stars are at the age when they’d be finishing grad school, coming out of internships, and settling into responsible positions anyways.

No doubt there are a lot of exceptions, and, as Daniel Drezner pointed out:

new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF’s chief economist, for example.

So exactly how much of the professionalization of blogging is inherent in the medium, vs how much of it amounts to the professionalization and maturity of individual bloggers?

I say, don’t worry because more generations of unprofessionals will arrive soon enough.

For perspective, consider that just as Ezra Klein complains the blogosphere lost its “joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years,” I imagine a number of older hackers and BBS and Usenet users complained that blogging circa 2003 lacked a particular “joyous, raucus, weirdness” of their earlier scenes.

(E.g. Jaron Lanier comes to mind. He made some remarks about blogging in that provocative essay of his, and apparently he still favours the old static HTML for his own site.)

Sort of as the Policy Blogger Class of 2003 co-promoted themselves into professional, respectable positions (read Rob Horning’s reaction), we might also see still-newer classes embracing still-newer platforms which established bloggers don’t see coming… changing the media landscape yet again, and disrupting Ezra Klein et al the same way they disrupted old-school pundits and columnists.

It won’t happen exactly the same way again. All I’m saying is that blogging will be vital for a long time, but certain kinds of blogging won’t necessarily be — because we’ll still have new classes graduating, hungry and irreverent, into a media landscape filled with opportunities that didn’t exist for previous cohorts.

Shortly before the policy bloggers got wound-up on the subject, there were already some high-volume conversations about the nature and future of blogging coming from more technology-oriented mavens.

Steve Rubel left blogging for lifestreaming:

Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It’s like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles – and at the net all the time.

Robert Scoble went the other way (for a bit anyways):

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. [...]

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

Chris Brogan struck a resolving chord:

I get this. I understand the interest in immediacy. The thing is, I think both are required. While I think there are several occasions where the instantaneous experience of the real-time web is compelling, I still think there are plenty of times when a well-considered blog post has some value.

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

[As long as these basic platform issues are unsettled, there's no telling where things will go...]

Come to think of it, there is a still-rising movement we should identify and try to understand more thoroughly: the general inversion of influence from top-down authority to bottom-up innovation.

Think way beyond media… Journalism is just a beachhead.

I.e. What would the world look like if, by 2015, digital platforms have undermined the foundations of higher education, or government itself, to the same degree the newspapers have been disrupted already?

To be continued…

[Note: I originally had the quotes from Rubel, Scoble, and Brogan before McKenna's. I made the edit moments after publishing.]

Related posts:

1. The Best Disinfectant
2. Contrasting the Perpendicular with the Backwards
3. Reiterating the Focus on Collaboration

This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t have any more to add to the discussion, and I didn’t do anything to show how his blog, The Parallel Parliament, is a pretty good place to start demonstrating the kind of generative articulation we need more of.

I should’ve excerpted what he wrote in his previous post:

When MPs enter the blogosphere with their demonizing rants, they often get what they deserve. And when media types attempt to sell the public on shallow controversy, they too suffer as a result. Unfortunately, such practices have, more frequently than not, put a saddening distance between the serious thinkers of both camps who would like to have meaningful discussions over the national state. So, we have arrived at the place where reflective MPs don’t blog and serious journalists won’t write on serious issues that just won’t sell. The historical healthy tension between politicians and the media has now become a debilitating arena of national distraction. Things have clearly changed and only serious dialogue, thinking and writing within these two camps can bring us back to a serious national mood. It would be interesting to see what the journalists/delegates at Charlottetown would make of all this.

I genuinely believe there will be tremendous improvements to the quality of blogosphere commentary and conversation in the next year or two as more late adopters (i.e. normal people) get on and balance things out.

I’m even imagining (I mean, dreaming of) a day when all politicians are expected to use blogs (or whatever they’re called in the future) and social media to make their attitudes and convictions fully open, articulate, and honest. I want it to be just as standard & required in the future as conventions and fundraisers [and staged debates] are today.

We need to see exactly where people’s ideas come from. As it is now, I’m not sure too many people know where their own ideas come from. Leaders should be compelled to make a more rigorous account of what they’re supposedly promoting — both in campaigns, and while in office.

There’s a saying that “daylight is the best disinfectant.” By making things more transparent and accountable (I’m talking about more than just money) — open to scrutiny by anyone, i.e. on the web where everything is findable, and forever — the people who have the most to hide (incopetence, sketchy motives) will struggle the most.

Some will argue that the critics and commenters might have sketchy motives too — well I’m sure a lot of them do, but everything they do is open to scrutiny as well. The ones who are just trolling to undermine the discussion won’t get any traction on the mature web.

Now that the web has become an essential part of our political system and our daily lives, most people online don’t have any time to waste on snickering, sneering, and snark. People ultimately want quality — if it’s available. Attention, popularity, and authority will gravitate to those who provide the most relevant and generative value for people.

With a little work, the good guys & gals will win in the end — regardless of which party they represent.

Related posts:

1. Re-Generative Digital Media

David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complementary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

Related posts:

1. Re-Generative Digital Media

Halfway through his review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it became totally clear to me. I mean, I always knew it but I didn’t appreciate the full implications until now: Malcolm Gladwell is an entertainer.

He writes to be read and enjoyed rather than to challenge and educate. He turns ideas into fashions, baubles to be jingled and toys to be tossed around, as in a game.

Is there anything wrong with that? Not necessarily. I’m not anti-entertainment, nor am I personally attacking Gladwell for entertaining — as long as everyone understands what it is.

We need entertainment as much as we need education, but the distinction needs to be made. We need to ensure we don’t mistake entertainment for serious dialog and education — which seems to be the case in mainstream journalism.

I was reminded of this from Michael Kelly:

The thing that is sometimes dangerous about writers is that they can express their ideas more cleverly than most people. This wouldn’t ever be a bad thing if good writers always had good—that is, sound, true—ideas. But there is in fact no necessary correlation between an ability to finesse language and a true understanding of the world.

Some of Gladwell’s remarks seem astonishingly uninformed (not that he is uninformed, it’s just that some essential information seemed to be forgotten). This part really stands out to me:

It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?

Indeed it would be nice to know — which is precisely why so many business intellectuals and behavioural economists are busy working on it, looking at how things like experience, attention, identity, and engagement affect people’s motivations and decisions.

It was Peter Drucker himself, the godfather of modern management theory, who explicitly proposed we should think of employees as volunteers motivated by non-monetary rewards:

Peter Drucker captured it best when he said that knowledge workers do not respond to financial incentives, orders or negative sanctions the way blue-collar workers are expected to. I particularly like Drucker’s observation that the key to motivating creative people is to treat them as “de facto volunteers,” tied to the firm by commitment to aims and purposes… “What motivates knowledge workers,” writes Drucker, “is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees precisely because they do not get a paycheck.” The commitment of creative people is highly contingent, and their motivation comes largely from within.

That’s from Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, another pillar of modern pop-intellectualdom (Florida has come under attack as well, but after giving RotCC a second chance I was impressed by how much substance and longevity it actually has; despite/because of its popularity, I don’t think it gets enough intellectual credit).

In 2009, of all years, and Malcolm Gladwell of all people, using scare-quotes around a notion that has moved to the very centre of the dialog about doing business in the recession and moving into the post-recession economy.

Now that Chris Anderson responded and Seth Godin joined in (all we need now is Thomas Friedman to make this an official pop intellectual battle-royale) I get the feeling that in the end this whole debate is a pointless exercise.

BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum originally sided with Gladwell, saying he “destroyed” Anderson’s argument, then later agreed with Godin’s criticism of Gladwell. Fundamentally, it looks like everyone is in agreement.

When Godin writes

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We’ll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

Nussbaum responds

That’s another way of saying that people will pay for value-added and not commodity-type stuff. OK. I agree. That’s always been at the core of capitalism–unique things or services we crave and pay for become over time commodities and cheap (almost free) and are replaced by new stuff, which we are willing to pay lots for.

It’s like one of those arguments in which people mistake a difference of perspective for a difference of opinion. Both sides keep trotting out examples and counter examples that can be interpreted in different ways, depending on how one looks at them.

The fact that YouTube loses a lot of money can be used as evidence for both sides — and neither side — of the debate. Do we look at it as unsustainable in itself, or do we look at it as part of Google’s massive success? The same goes for broadcast TV: does its current decline falsify Anderson’s case, or does the fact it thrived for decades support it? All we can say is it depends, and we’ll see…

The one thing Gladwell unquestionably got right was

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

Yeah, “too obvious to write a book about,” but it’s also too complex to treat as a New Yorker piece.

If anybody “destroyed” anyone else’s argument, it was Matthew Yglesias, who destroyed everything:

I think the whole subject could stand to benefit from a little less good writing and a bit more plodding distinction-drawing. …

And more:

To clarify my own position, I think I would say that I basically agree with Anderson that “free is the future.” Where I guess I part ways with him is the sort of exciting up with people business guru tone of the whole thing.

So we’re no further ahead than we were with Anderson’s original article in Wired, along with Kevin Kelly’s thoughts on “Better Than Free.”

What we needed to follow up with was more unfinished dialog, probing, experimenting, essaying, and prototyping — not more slick, Condé Nast-style packaging and presentation.

One of the reasons I support more free and open media is that it conduces more towards unfinished dialog — what Jeff Jarvis calls process journalism — which does more to address and prepare us for real, emerging challenges.

More people are spending more time reading blogs by professional economists, legal scholars, etc. These are usually far from entertaining, but the general public is acquiring a taste and appreciation for them.

There’s hope that journalism will not be tyrannized by good writing forever. Even Malcolm Gladwell remarked:

“It would be so great to write a really small, incredibly nerdy book. I would really like to write a single narrative book… I have a side of me that just wants to have lots of charts and graphs and statistics. And endless footnotes.”

Interesting phrase: “endless footnotes.” That pretty well describes the blogosphere. It reminds me of the fact that ideas are always incomplete, always in-the-making — “there are no iron laws.” 

Given his influence and the respect, I think he owes us that nerdy book.

No related posts.