— In the last few days, I’ve seen quite a bit of crossover blogging: Dan Gillmor writing about civil liberties in connection with Abdullah al-Muhajir and about the estate tax, elf Dave Winer trying, unsuccessfully, to write about journalistic ethics, Doc Searls linking Susanna Cornett as Blog of the Day, warblogger Jeff Jarvis commenting on elf content on his World War III blog, and even Glenn Harlan making a Winerian attempt at getting technical in connection with the WiFi LAN he’s trying to set up in and around his house in Tennessee.
This is a reaction to the New York Times article on the supposed rift between warbloggers and techbloggers, of course, and a testament to the independence of bloggers which makes us unwilling to be pigeon-holed.
So just when it’s looking like peace and harmony is about to break in the Blogosphere, along comes Megnut with What We’re Doing When We Blog and slaps warbloggers in the face with a large and nasty dose of elf condescension, sparked by what was actually quite an excellent article on blogging by Cathy Seipp:
Rather than rant that Catherine just “doesn’t get it,” it seems to me that her article, and others that are similar, are perfect opportunities for the blogging community to talk about our own evolution
Seipp doesn’t “get it,” according to Megnut, because she doesn’t wax technical about hyperlinks, timestamps, reverse-chronological sequences, and that all-important elfin sacred construct, “community.” With apologies to Werner Erhard, I have to say that it’s Megnut who doesn’t “get it.”
The Blog form, as we all know by now, is as old the web, complete with reverse-chronologically-time-stamped-hyperlinked-articles, but nobody paid any attention to them (except for few programmers) until Sept. 11. So the form isn’t responsible for the recent explosion of interest. We could make a half-hearted argument that the new easy-to-use tools are important, but that doesn’t really explain all of what’s going on now either, although they helped.
Warblogs broke down a barrier that existed between the media and the legion of informed and concerned citizens who had a desperate need to understand a new set of issues related to war, politics, culture, and religion that hadn’t been handled without spin for two generations. So blogs became interesting and relevant because interesting and relevant people started blogging. The form of the blog is less important than the content, and the “community,” if there is one, is everybody.
So it’s not the technology, it’s the people, and “what we’re doing when we blog” is the same thing we do at cocktail parties, except that with blogs we provide evidence; which was Cathy’s point, after all.
Bloggers have made the media more honest, and we’ve made it more relevant to people’s lives. We applied technology to a real human need, and we’d best be paying more attention, as technologists, to how the technology is being used, and as citizens to what we’re able to learn through this medium about the world we live in. The medium itself is not the message, never was, and never will be.
must you be Revisionist Weblog Boy all the time? where are the links about the sex-mad french?
http://jsnotes.blogspot.com/2002_06_01_jsnotes_archive.html#77866337
“The Warblogger phenomenon is an extension of the faux-patriotism movement that leapt to new heights immediately following these terrorist attacks. It is a knee jerk reaction to our country being assaulted and us feeling like our very values are at risk, never mind that we’re willing to overlook or give up some of those for the sake of security. It is the action of a populace given to inactivity. The American people needed something to do after September 11th, something to make them feel like they were fighting the good fight and standing up for America in her darkest hour. Something to show how damn American they were and how we weren’t going to lie down and take it.
“So the American people blogged.”
All 280 million of them! Gosh, that’s a lot of blogs.
well, that explains why blogspot is so persnickery.
Richard, it seems you don’t get it either.
Meg is a bit off in her assessment by stressing the tools and format, but I believe she was trying to filter things down to a commonality. From her perspective, that seems to be the tools and format. But that is the arguable point isn’t it?
But yourself and others seem to be diametrically oppossed, stressing that it’s solely the people. You also make false and incorrect statements when you say such things as “…but nobody paid any attention to them (except for few programmers) until Sept. 11.” Absolutely untrue. There were hundreds of thousands of bloggers before 9/11. Blogger itself had well over a hundred-thousand users before that date. Not all of them were programmers, but all of them read blogs as well as created them.
Yes the form existed, but having the tools to allow the average person to say what they wanted, when they wanted, and have it be published on a public web space is as integral as having the people who have something to say. You cannot seperate one from the other. Warblogs may have come into being sans tools, but it wouldn’t have been on the scale it is now. It certainly would have been so small and disparate as to go unnoticed by the media. The proliferation is propagated by the existence of people with something to say, and an extremely low barrier of entry to this public forum in which to say it. The tools help create and foster commonality and community through ease of finding other blogs. How you can simply nearly dismiss the impact of the tools by saying, “…although they helped.” is naive.
If the tool-using blogging culture hadn’t grown, you’d be hard pressed to find blogs. Mechanisms for finding other blogs and common blogs were in place, and well used, long before 9/11. But these hubs and portals would not have sprouted without the community or the tools around which they created themselves.
The ‘community’ relies on the form as well as the tools. The form allows us to easily communicate, interact, and interlink to form cross-site discussions. The tools didn’t create the form, but their ease of use, allows you put forth what you have to say in the ‘accepted’ style, without having to be a computer geek to do it. You don’t need to be a designer or information architect to set up your pages. You can just blog. I’d like to see how many warbloggers there would have been without Blogspot and Blogger. Again, to dismiss the tool’s contribution is naive.
Your last paragraph started with “Bloggers have made the media more honest, and we’ve made it more relevant to people’s lives.” I’d like to see this supported with examples. Where have bloggers made the media more honest?
And relevant? I doubt we’ve made media more relevant. Perhaps more personal, but I don’t see where bloggers have made media more relevant to anyone who didn’t consider media relevant in the first place.
Oh, and you seemed to indicate through this statement “…that hadn’t been handled without spin for two generations.”, that blogs handle information without spin. That’s a joke right?