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And I said
to myself, I am not going to sign this evildoer's guestbook. I am
not going to link to his posts. I present here some thoughts about the phenomenon known as "Web logging," or "blogging," that I originally delivered in 1973 to the faculty of King's College, Oxford University, under the title "End The War in Vietnam Now." • • • MY ROOMMATE NATHAN and I pride ourselves on having the lowest annual earnings of any subscriber to Fast Company. According to the magazine's press kit, the median household income of a subscriber is $168,100, which exceeds what Nathan and I will make in the next five years of our lives. Our net worth, adjusting for inflation and based on a market basket of goods, is approximately eight dollars and bus fare to Skokie. As a result, Nathan and I feel badly for the magazine's advertisers, as we can no more afford the products for sale in Fast Company than we can afford to stage a production of the musical "Titanic" in our living room. Truth be told, most months we can't even afford to buy the magazine, but I received a complimentary subscription last fall for completing a survey and have been afflicted with advertiser guilt ever since. I also feel badly for the magazine's editorial staffers, who each month bring us articles dedicated to helping business leaders succeed even though Nathan and I are presently unemployed. But despite our being a few career choices and several tax brackets away from the average subscriber, we nonetheless on occasion find Fast Company a good read. By its own count, as of its April issue the magazine had brought us 125,451 business ideas, 2,526 thought-provoking articles, and six years of global change; it is inevitable that, occasionally, one of these will spark our interest. Enter John Ellis, a writer and consultant based in Irvington, New York. Ellis writes the magazine's "Digital Matters" column, which purports to examine how digital technologies are changing business practices, and he fancies himself the very quintessence of humility. "In my humble opinion," he told us in issue 29, "genomics is the most important economic, political, and ethical issue facing mankind." Issue 30: "In my humble opinion, that sound — the sound of advertising being allowed in — is the sound of the future being born." Issue 31: "In my humble opinion, people need a haven from the Web that's on the Web." For so modest a man, though, Ellis wrote a strikingly self-serving column for the April issue. "All The News That's Fit to Blog" begins ordinarily enough, with the usual prattle about bloggery's superiority over every journalistic medium yet devised. "A new breed of cats has emerged," he tells us. "They even have a name. They call themselves 'Webloggers' — or 'bloggers', for short — and they're providing the most energetic, lively and passionate analysis, commentary and opinion around." But skip to the end of the column and read the boldface note: "John Ellis has joined the bloggers. Read his weekday musings (www.blogspot.johnellis.com)..." This is the essential journalistic equivalent of writing a piece declaring plastics to be the Next Big Thing and then announcing that, by happy coincidence, you have joined the plastics industry, and that the reader may purchase your fine wares at you.sellout.com. Ellis' sly efforts at self-promotion failed to pay off, however, as his blog's URL was inadvertently misprinted in the magazine. But people are finding Ellis' site nonetheless — GoStats says it receives more than 300 hits each day — and what they're finding is your standard Blogger-powered punditry, running down the issues of the day in a manner that is competent but rarely compelling. "If the measure of a man is his capacity for friendship," Ellis wrote recently of a friend who passed away, "then Tom Winship was seven feet tall." Judging bloggers by their capacity to enthrall, I would say John Ellis is about 5-foot-8. [ Audience roars with laughter for several minutes. I sip water. ] Ellis is right about one thing, though: The weblog is a genuine phenomenon, and in recent months its rise has spurred a glut of articles in the mainstream press. Estimates of the number of active bloggers range from 500,000 to 1,000,000, and a few bloggers have emerged, so far as such a thing is possible in an insular world of interest only to itself, as celebrities: Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall. What these nice people do — and what they do better than the scores of imitators who have emerged in their wake — is to post links to the articles they read and offer a few sentences of commentary, sprinkling in occasional personal anecdotes along the way. If you believe writers like Ellis, this "new breed of cats" threatens the livelihood of traditional media outlets, who lure subscribers with the promise of authoritative analysis but offer too narrow a range of commentary. The New York Times has two pages of opinion a day, in other words, but thousands of blogs are updated every hour — and have the additional advantage, of course, of being free. Some even hint at impending revolution; Ellis says "the bloggers are at the gates," as if they ever leave the house. Such self-importance has not gone unnoticed by Old Media. "Welcome to Blogistan," Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam wrote recently in a marvelously snarky column that incurred him the collective wrath of the Web, "the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outre, goes unpraised." In what was nominally a rebuttal to the column, blogger Henry Copeland actually provided a more comprehensive list of bloggery's failures: "Individual blogs don't appeal to a broad audience. They aren't serious or objective or edited. They contain meaningless personal details. They can be trite, verbose, incoherent and/or self-aggrandizing." Exactly. And nowhere do these observations apply more than in the dormitories and off-campus apartments of academia, where each year a glut of bloggers-to-be discovers the joys of their university-provided space on the Web. If you ever doubt that college students have more time on their hands than inhabitants of what is known on campus as "the real world," observe any personal site at a .edu domain and marvel at the staggering self-indulgence contained therein. Somewhere amid the in-jokes and quotations from indie-rock bands may lurk a human being with a distinct personality, but in general college blogs exude a deadening sameness. It seems that college bloggers share more than the compulsion to discuss their private problems in public; turns out they share the same problems as well — they are unlucky in love, have no money, don't know what they want to do with their lives, don't like their classes, or their major, or their school. The average college blog is insipid only when it isn't inane. Which isn't to say that all college blogs are the same. Although at bottom every blog has the same underlying premise — "Hey, look at me!" — plaintive pleas for cyber-sympathy manifest themselves in different ways. I would like to offer now a partial typology of the college blog, and encourage further investigation of the ways in which privileged young adults are using the Web to seek validation from their peers. |