Why do people blog? When did it all start, is it journalism, is it serious, does it still make sense, where is it going in this age of Twitter, Facebook and virtual worlds? Maybe there are no definite answers to all these questions, but there is at least one book full of interesting facts and deep insights: Say everything, how blogging began, what it’s becoming and why it matters, by Scott Rosenberg.
It is an important book, if only because for us virtual worlds people, blogging in all its varieties is like a second nature. It is crucial to understand where blogging came from, what its importance is and eventually where it will go.
There is a site accompanying the book where you will find all the information about the book and lots of interesting stuff about blogging, and Scott Rosenberg of course has a personal blog, Wordyard. I learned about the book thanks to the excellent Second Life show Copper Robot, actually by watching the video of the show (because those events take place in a timezone which is incompatible with my sleeping hours).
Mitch Wagner (who works for InformationWeek, but Copper Robot is entirely independent of IW) is the host of the show and he started out with the question whether it is still possible to start with an individual blog and succeeding in the sense of becoming an internationally recognized voice.
Rosenberg had good news: yes it is possible, and even more so today because the blogosphere is better organized and it is easier now to reach a wider audience (or should we say “community” or “people formerly known as the audience” – we journalists learn to be politically correct in this!).
Rosenberg gave an example of this, the political blog 538.com. Later during the show, this question came back somehow when Wagner asked what impact Twitter has on blogging. This is something which interests me personally as I noticed how some people gave up on long form blogging and switched to Twitter, FriendFeed or Posterous.
Rosenberg explained how the first blogs – personal texts in reverse chronological order, linking to other stuff – were rather short. Short form blogging does not have to disappear, but it is true that Twitter, FriendFeed and Posterous (and I guess may other similar services) make it very easy to do essentially this, short form blogging.
This also means that blogs (those outside the Twitter-sphere) tend to become more long form, places where people put more substantial texts (or videos) expressing their ideas.
It is interesting to note that blogging was not really a single invention or a simple breakhrough. Hence it is impossible to say who the very first blogger was:
There were websites getting personal, about an individual life, adopting a reversed chronology, then adding permalinks, interlinking, comments etc.
Of course there were pioneers and important early voices, creating blogs some of which exist till this day like Dave Winer’s Scripting News (started in 1996-1997). Interesting to note: Scripting News started in part because Winer had the feeling that the press did a bad job reporting on software news.
This brings us to the issue of how professional journalists look at blogging. While these days newspapers are using blogs as a format, the blogosphere stays something weird for many journalists.
Money
Many bloggers don’t blog to earn money. They don’t even expect to become famous. For many of us blogging is a way to put down our thoughts and experiences in public writing. Writing stuff down helps one remember and it helps one think (at least that is true for me). The fact that it is public makes one become part of a conversation, so that other people can inspire, rectify or refute what one is trying to express.
Becoming part of the public sphere is like giving one’s thoughts “a second life” as Rosenberg said. This is still a motivation for millions of people.
Authenticity
There is yet something else which turns blogging into another experience than writing for a newspaper for instance. Most bloggers write without an editor. Nobody can give them orders. The consequence: people feel a responsibility to be real and to show who they really are.
Of course, as Rosenberg says, all writing is artificial up to a certain degree. Authenticity is negotiated, and that very process motivates a lot of bloggers.
The internet has a rich experience in “being in the open”. There was USENET and the mailing lists, blogs, communities such as The Well, closed environments such as AOL, and now Facebook, Twitter and the many other online social networks.
Virtual identities
Young people hardly realize anymore that they are dealing with issues of authenticity and privacy. Except maybe in worlds such as… Second Life. Most people in Second Life don’t put their “real life” identity known on their public profiles.
Instead they share certain elements of their identity with some of the people they relate with in Second Life – some friends get the whole identity, others only elements of that information.
One of the interesting aspects of Second Life is that people navigate through a spectrum between an “authentic self” and a “play self” (with in my opinion the added complexity that the “play self” can somehow be more revealing of the authentic self than the serious business-like persona).
The trauma of 9/11
Rosenberg refers to a number of important episodes in the history of blogging, but one of the most important and most emotional moments must have been 9/11.
Blogs were a way to cope with the traumatic events, the mainstream media were not very satisfactory for processing the emotion. Blogging those events was not only personal, in some instances it was also a very immediate, as-it-happened process.
Rosenberg tells the story of a blogger specializing in Broadway gossip, becoming a witness of the attacks, and blogging what he sees and feels in a very immediate way.
Journalism
Blogging is not only about personal feeling and immediacy. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks it appeared that some bloggers were very knowledgeable in Islam, and could adequately situate the Al Qaeda ideology (sunni, Saudi-Arabia).
Related to this: also other blogging experiences make it clear that bloggers don’t have to be passive people who don’t pick up the phone and just rewrite what the mainstream media tell. Rosenberg gave the example of Talkingpointsmemo.
Blogging and journalism are both activities, so Rosenberg rightly explains. You can be a blogger who is also a journalist or a journalist who is using the blog format. More importantly, journalism is an activity, not an official badge.
You can do reporting, investigations, or opinion journalism, and publish it yourself. It is an activity, and while the business model questions are important, people can do journalism and get an income from other activities.
However simple this conclusion may seem, I think it is one of the deepest insights: blogging and journalism are activities, they do not refer to rigidly defined identities.
Roland Legrand