A reader response to the article The Great Media Meltdown:
From: Jay
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 18:11:32 -0400
To: Evan Coyne Maloney
Subject: Thanks for your July 3 post
Evan,
A few weeks ago Drudge professed out loud that he refuses to be called a blogger, when in fact his site is a proto-blog. It is what a blog wants to be, and it definitely works like it: at least in the show-and-tell method of blogging. Some in the blogosphere understand why he didn’t like the term applied to him: blogging as a reporting medium is in its infancy. It requires growth, and it needs to lose the middle-school attitudes of the personality-and-reporting fusion blogs.
Nevertheless there is a large collection of editorial opinions from blogs. I myself limit my postings to once a day since I like to edit my entries (just like any responsible writer should). I do not know how you’d take it, being called a blogger, but yours is also a proto-blog: you have reverse-chronologically arranged entries, with links, and your opinions. You just don’t use a content-management system like Movable Type or WordPress (which I use on my site) but it follows the mold. Or better yet, the mold follows your pattern.
There is also a wealth of first-hand reporting among bloggers. Not all of us are just pure essayists and navel-gazers.
Blogging, especially analytical blogging, has led mostly to destruction. Indeed, Andrew Sullivan may claim to causing the avalanche that brought down the Howell Raines, but there’s got to be more to blogging that dissection. I’ve always believed in synthesis...in production. Synthetic Blogging instead of Analytical Blogging. That’s where the true wealth and direction of the blogosphere should be geared at.
Jay
Jay,
I understand what you mean about the “personality-and-reporting” blogs. I don’t know if any of them will morph into something else...but maybe they shouldn’t. Just as e-mails tends to use the informal language of casual conversation, such blogs seem to be almost like transcribed conversations among friends. As such, they provide an important mechanism for information propagation (even if they don’t have the professional veneer of other sites). Also, they do provide a window into the raw thoughts of people, and because of this they may be important barometers of opinion (and very useful to people like me who sometimes work on political campaigns).
After people become savvier about Internet media, they will learn to evaluate such sites on their own merits, rather than trying to fit them into the mental pigeonholes that we’ve constructed to categorize the media we grew up with. Undoubtedly, this is a new medium, and as consumers of media, we’re still not entirely familiar with this new medium, so we tend to look at it in the context of the media we know—which generally speaking is the media we grew up with, just as television was initially seen as “radio with pictures”. But this is changing as we assimilate this new medium into our mental model.
You make a good point about the influence of blogs thusfar...they have led to the “tearing down” of a few institutions...but this is what usually happens when a new medium comes into its own. There is a little destruction of the old that is required when something new is built. When a new building is built, trees are taken down or perhaps an old building, then the work begins on the new foundation. The music industry, for example, has seen the technological changes brought by the new Internet medium wreak havoc on an obsolete business model, but they’re not yet comfortable with the new medium, so not much new has been built (yet). But, you can see the parameters of what will come in offerings like Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
We’re still in the infancy of blogs, and they haven’t really come into their own as a medium yet, but I think it has matured beyond the point at which we can see the outlines of what will come. I’ve got a feeling that the next few years will be very interesting...
Hope all is well,
Evan
Note:
Jay operates a website called One Fine Jay, which can be found at http://www.onefinejay.com/.
