— 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 … Continue reading “It’s the people, stupid”
— 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.
