My friend Rebecca Blood has a piece on blogs in The Guardian that tries to shift our enthusiasms about weblogs. I’m not entirely convinced by it.

She starts by saying that “no one really understands weblogs.” Fair enough.

She then puts holes in those who have described weblogs in “outrageously overblown terms”:

Enthusiasm abounds. Bloggers enjoy describing themselves as pioneers, though their ideas of innovation are sometimes suspect. “We are writing ourselves into existence,” some ecstatically proclaim, as if Pepys and Boswell and the historic legions of their fellow journal-writers had never existed.

As the guy who said “We are writing ourselves into existence,” I should maybe point out that I didn’t say that this was the first time we’ve ever done so. But I do believe that the Web is a new public space and weblogs enable us — all of us, not just the Pepyses and Boswells among us — to construct public selves in that space. So, what’s not new: Creating public selves. What is new: Doing so in this new public space and doing so primarily via written text, as opposed to via speech, writings, body language, clothing, etc. (On the other hand, I proudly admit to being way too enthusiastic about the Web and blogging.)

Then Rebecca dismisses those who “can conceive of weblogs only in terms of their own experience.” “A weblog is something fundamentally new,” she writes, and “those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point.” (But if weblogs are something so fundamentally new that they bear no resemblance to current institutions, then why is the enthusiasm overblown? Aren’t we indeed pioneers?)

Then Rebecca explains the thing that she says no one has understood: Weblogs are, she says, “participatory media,” as opposed to either “passive news consumption” or broadcasting. Definitely, but I don’t think that’s enough to explain the thing that no one understands, that “no one can quite put their finger on…” We’ve had participatory media before — letter writing, CB radio, radio talk shows — but there’s something distinctive about the blogging form of participatory media. IMO, to see what’s distinctive about them, we should look at stuff like: their conversational nature, the way their dailyness requires anticipatory forgiveness of lapses in typing and thought, their embracing of the distinctiveness of voice, and, yes, the way blogs create public selves. That sort of thing. Of course, that’s really just to say that I would have written a different article than Rebecca, not a very useful comment.

Then she ends on terms that seem as overblown as the ones she criticizes:

…weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing – and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

Online pampleteers? I don’t want to make too much of this phrase since Rebecca had to wrap up somehow and probably didn’t want to say “participatory media” again. But pamphlets??

So, the take away is, I think: The enthusiasm for blogging is misplaced. Blogs are in fact a new form, called participatory media, that will change online publishing forever.

If I got that right, then I respectfully disagree with Rebecca; I think “participatory media,” while useful, takes us only some of the way towards understanding blogs. But I certainly agree that we haven’t understood blogging yet. That’s precisely why we should be encouraging a diversity of enthusiasms.

Categories: Uncategorized dw