2004, the Year of the Blog (?)

2004 is supposed to be "the year of the blog" and who am I to argue? Blogging is not only big news and the latest style, it's also something of a miraculous event. It represents (potentially) the resurrection of reading and writing, which were considered "dead arts" among the general population. With more and more folks walking around with cell phones glued to their ears, I'm thrilled to find people communicating at all in a written medium. The best weblogs represent a return to an earlier age, when thinking people communicated through letters. These letters were both circulated and further commented on by other writers. We would be very fortunate if the blogging world, or at least a significant portion of the blogging world, retains as its model the world of literary correspondence.

Obviously, blogging has its unique features. The low barriers to entry, and the low cost of maintenance has clearly opened up the dialogue to include a vastly larger body of participants, and a corresponding increase in the diversity of voices and variety of life experiences being heard. What comes easily can also go easily, and many, if not most, of the blogs being published today will fade away sometime in the near future. This may well turn out to be a good thing. There are times when even the best writers and most insightful observers need to be quiet and listen and watch. Stale thinking from over-extended writers infects our politics, polical commentary and academia. The blog world allows some writers t fade into the background and new voices to come forward.

Some of the special features of the blog world are critical to its development as an important new media:

¶1. Partiality: For the most part, blog writers make no claim to a superhuman ability to remain impartial observers. They are generally very upfront about their context, initial positions, and agendas. This changes the whole context for the writing, from a "pronouncement" or "newscast" style of communication, to which there can be no response, to a dialogue or, more accurately, group conversation, to which a response is encouraged and expected. There was a time when most cities hosted a multitude of daily newspapers representing a range of political and social positions and views. They wore their biases openly, often right there in the masthead. They're editors wrote scathingly about their political opponents and competing newspapers. This may not have been an era of high journalism, but it was very entertaining reading, people read and discussed newspapers as a matter of course, and people recognized that facts must be interpreted through minds, and that there are at least two (and often a lot more) ways of looking at any situation.

¶2. Humility: with a few exceptions, bloggers do not take themselves nearly as seriously as the modern "journalist". Bloggers explain who they are, state their positions and ideas, and reference, through links, those other writers on whose work they are building. This habit also gives their writing a conversational sense, that encourages readers to form their own opinions, and contribute their own ideas and observations. Some writers in the traditional media have responded to the rise of blogs with their usual claims of authority. They point to their journalism degrees, their years of experience, or their high position with respected publications. The blog world, to its credit, scoffs at these. It's not healthy in private conversation for one participant to be frequently asserting his or her superiority over the others. Dialogues can quickly changed to monologues, in a phenomena I'm sure we're all familiar with. It's equally unhealthy in our public conversation (if indeed we want to maintain a "conversation".) Even some of the most popular and widely read bloggers are remarkably (and refreshingly) open to new participants with new voices.

¶3. Linking: perhaps the most distinctive and important feature of the weblog is the inclusion of persistent hyperlinks. Again this allows this written communication form to more closely model personal conversation. The links and connections between speakers, which are obvious in a face-to-face conversation, are now obvious in the written conversation, and even better, are persistent and traceable.

A more subtle effect of linking is to place the primary focus on the idea being discussed rather than the speaker. In the blog world a new idea/story/meme will circulate and spread very rapidly across a wide number of weblogs, some agreeing, some adding and reshaping, some disagreeing and counter-arguing. This idea will quickly lose its association with the original poster and take on a life of its own. Note how most (perhaps I should say, "the best") year-end reviews of blogging in 2004 focus on the important stories that emerged out of a world of blog writers rather than on a few high impact personalities.

This important part of the "bloggers ethic", insisting on links back to source material, more detailed discussion or even disagreeing viewpoints, must be maintained. At the moment the blog world most closely resembles a conversation, or an exchange of correspondence. If we lose the linking, blogging will devolve into Internet pamphleteering.

¶4. Reading: Blog writers are also enthusiastic readers. They read newspapers and magazines, the latest books and the classics, and importantly, they read other blogs. Once again, it's an aspect of this media that forms its conversational feeling. We write to one another rather than past one another. This is why ideas can develop so quickly in the blog world. The great Dan Rather/Counterfeit Memo incident, certainly one of, if not the highlight of the blog world for 2004, is a perfect example of how blog writers can build on one another's work at high speed. Like people around a conference table, blog writers think and write in serial, and an idea can grow and develop through the participation of many minds. This is why I think that writers in the traditional media should embrace and perhaps even join in the blog conversation. Writers need readers, and there are few better and more enthusiastic readers than the bloggers.

While some portion of the blog world will always remain a crowd of public diaries, and another set will become Internet based versions of the traditional news reports and essays, I hope that we can use the remaining blogs to create an ongoing public conversation. A conversation that crosses time zones political boundaries, and ideologies. A conversation that has the persistence and accessibility of written media, along with the flow and dynamics of a verbal discussion. This is not just an old thing moved to the new electronic media, but a sufficiently new thing and a new way of conversing that we can hope for, and even expect, new results.