A BLOG ON

BLOGGING
Point and Purposes

James Watson
The Internet made the blog possible, but it
did not invent it. Once upon a time when
printing and publishing were cheap writers
could express themselves in many different forms. As well as the
long stuff, they produced essays, papers, edited newspapers and
magazines.

Jill Walker Rettberg in her recent book, Blogging (1) claims that
the French novelist Alexandre Dumas was the first blogger: ‘he
was truly into the new technology of the modern press,
introduced in France in the 1830s. Dumas’ first newspaper was
written solely by himself, and was called Le Mois, with a tagline
that sounds so bloggish it must be in use by some blogger,
somewhere: jour par jour, heure par heure (‘day by day, hour by
hour’)’.

Dodging the crush

Contemporary writers have, until the last decade, depended in
one way or another on the mass media to open doors to their
publications, short or long. Such has been the competition for
access that inevitably queues form as fortunes rise and fall and as
new kids come rolling or skateboarding on to the block.

Agents have queues at their door; publishers have slush-piles of

unread scripts. The BBC Scriptwriters grant a ten minute window
for every submitted script; what doesn’t impress in that time goes
back into the stamped-addressed envelope.

Fees apart, fat or thin, that scenario prevails in the markets for
mass media and mass consumption. The Internet, however, has
opened other doors. Would-be writers, or established ones, are no
longer limited, as broadcasters have been, to ‘wavelength
rationing’. They don’t have to line up for judgment, largely by
people they’ve never met and are unlikely ever to meet as big
publishing companies swallow up smaller, more intimate and
often more supportive ones.
Today, one has an idea for a story, a play, an article, an essay, a
poem, even a haiku, and one can post it for the world to read,
free of intermediaries. The writer is liberated from gatekeeping.

True, though there are ways of checking the numbers out there
who key in to the uploaded texts, the writer can rarely be sure
that the readers have sustained their interest, read a sentence, a
paragraph or the whole piece. That, of course, is also true of texts
in print: who’s reading your book, in what way, and to what (if
any) effect?

What blogging on the Internet does allow, makes easy and indeed
purposeful, is feedback. Uploaded texts can prompt discourse
between author and reader which one-way print media or
traditional radio or TV broadcasting rarely can.

Quality control?
Resistance to the notion and practice of blogging is an offshoot of
a long tradition concerned with standards. Unless you’ve gone
through the mill, how dare you seek to bypass those who police
quality? The trouble with standards and quality is that they
fluctuate and often defy accurate or even fair definition.

Culture is as much about restricting entry as nurturing it; like so

much education, it serves to favour the few over the many. It
views talent as essentially a restricted commodity, both highly
selective and exclusive.

There are good reasons for careful scrutiny of, for instance,
citizen journalism; after all, journalism is a respected trade,
requiring many skills and ideally preparatory training and
experience. Yet few bloggers aspire to be ‘professional’ in the
traditional sense of journalism, and very few, if any, have
ambition to replace those trained, practised and professionally
committed to journalism.

Uneasiness about citizens ‘intruding’ on the patch of media

professionals centres less on standards than on economics. As in
most other businesses, employers are constantly on the lookout
for cost cutting in a labour-centred industry – why pay a
professional photographer, for example, if amateurs are happy to
get their snaps in the paper for little or nothing?

Yet it is not bloggers who are shutting down papers but

competition in and between traditional media industries. A solid
case can be made for saying that Internet communication has
benefited mass media.
A scan of the press indicates an already well established synergy
between traditional media and blogging. Newspapers dedicate
columns and sometimes whole pages to the comments of
bloggers on particular topics in the news. They do it for liveliness,
originality and brevity.

A vital role
Further, it is important to recognise and celebrate examples of
the way bloggers contribute to our knowledge of what is going on
in the world. Reports by Salam Pax from Baghdad during the war
in Iraq were individual in transmission and content, but of global
interest – because they were issuing from the epicentre of events.

Salam Pax was in no position to report – as professional

journalists would be expected to do – ‘objectively’, but the
personal in this case was what was so valuable and unique.

Such citizen postings will increase as online readership searches

for information, news and views which escape the mediation
characteristic of traditional media ownership and control.

While expecting objectivity from blogs is to mistake their nature,

other principles that apply to serious mass media reporting should
be equally honoured and observed. Bloggers often function as
anonymously as Salam Pax, for similar or different reasons, but
there are quicksands ahead for those who set out to deceive their
audience.

Principles of performance
Sooner or later scams get found out and the backlash can be
devastating. Narratives that purport to be real such as the video
blog Lonelygirl15 which turned out to be a fiction, scripted and
acted out by professionals, invite rejection, censure and
disillusionment on the part of subscribers.

The freedom to be anybody on the Internet inevitably blurs the

line between truth and fiction and between what’s real and what
is simulation or simply PR. Trevor Cook in ‘Can Blogging Unspin
PR?’ published in Uses of Blogs (2) believes that bloggers,
professionals or otherwise, need to maintain trust by affirming
‘fairness, balance, accuracy and integrity’.

Thus if you’re earning a few pounds, dollars or euros from product

sponsors, then you must come clean about that sponsorship.
Even on the Internet there is no such thing as a free lunch. For
most of us, though, blogging is free because we are not reliant on
income to finance our messaging.
A ‘common possession’; but for how long?
What bloggers are reliant on is a free field of delivery and access.
There have long been fears that cyberspace will prove to be less
of an open prairie than it used to be.

Currently, what the late Roger Silverstone in Media and Morality:

On the Rise of the Mediapolis (3) refers to as the ‘otherwise
invisible and unheard’ and the blog as ‘a phenomenon to contest
the already weakening stranglehold of the national press and
broadcasting systems’ remains ‘a platform for public
participation’.

Silverstone sees this alternative to mass communication as ‘a

common possession’. He envisions a mediapolis characterised by
justice and what he refers to as ‘hospitality’ – openness, the
acceptance and welcoming of Other, equality of exchange; but he
also states his uneasiness about a situation that is ‘constantly at
risk both of its own self-violation (paedophile and terrorist
networks) and its enclosure (by transnational corporations and
political controls)’.

What has scared Netizens in recent years is the threat to network

neutrality. In a Washingtonpost.com article (4), media analysts
Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney wrote that network
neutrality ‘means simply that all Internet content must be treated
alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners
of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate’.

Pressure to legislate for precedence

Lessig and McChesney’s article is entitled ‘No Tolls on the Internet’.
They write that network owners ‘could slow down or even block the
websites and services of their competitors…Without net neutrality,
the Internet would start to look like cable TV. A handful of massive
companies would control access and distribution of content,
deciding what you get to see and how much it cost’.

The authors refer to the ‘smell of windfall profits in the air in

Washington’ as the phone companies ‘are pulling out all the stops
to legislate themselves monopoly power’.

Blog battlers
Alerted to this corporate threat to their futures, bloggers by the
thousand, aided by over 700 Internet groups, successfully
pressurised the American Senate Commerce Committee into
approving the AT & T merger with BellSouth in June 2006 on
condition that network neutrality was preserved.
The New York Times commended this ‘limited but important
victory for net neutrality’ but added that ‘it should not be
necessary to negotiate separate deals like this one’. Net neutrality
remains, but so do the ambitions of the corporate sector. As the
New York Times asserted, ‘On the information superhighway, net
neutrality should be a basic rule of the road’.

Loose wheels on the big-buck tumbrils

Corporate Man has never been hesitant to follow the rule If You
Can’t Beat Them, Join Them. How many global Internet sites are
not in the hands of the big spenders? MySpace passed into the
ownership of Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for an estimated £200m.

In the following October Google snapped up YouTube; while

Facebook, with its millions of ‘friends’, has been described by
journalist Tom Hodgkinson as an ‘extension of the American
imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-
gathering tool’ and which is commoditising human relationships;
success, it would seem, guaranteed (5).

Yet a prevailing feature of the Internet is uncertainty. What goes

up usually comes down, and often with a sudden bump; even the
media masters get their fingers burnt. Hundreds of jobs have
been lost at MySpace. In June 2010 AOL sold Bebo for a sum
dramatically less than it paid for it.

David Teather writing on social networking (6) talks of ‘soured

investments’: ‘Ever developing applications and a lack of
customer loyalty mean social networking can become huge,
almost overnight, and crash just as quickly’.

Keep up the sharing

But to close on an up-note: enthusiastic student of, practitioner
and advocate of blogging, Jill Walker Rettberg declares in
Blogging, ‘People like participating in the media. We like
contributing and sharing our ideas, and we’re unlikely to stop now
that we have the technology to allow it’.

She goes on, ‘Participatory media which makes publishing

available to everyone is like fire: once the cunning Prometheus
had stolen the secret of fire from Zeus and given it to us mortals,
there was no way for the gods to take it back’.

Rettburg receives ample support from Net guru Clay Shirky

interviewed in the Guardian by Decca Aitkenhead (7). He argues
that those who post – free of charge – their thoughts, views,
knowledge, opinions on the Net do so because it satisfies ‘the
primal human urge for creativity and connectedness’.
Compared to traditional media such as the press and TV, Shirky
says the Internet ‘has removed the barrier to universal
participation and revealed that human beings would rather be
creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged
elite think they should watch’.

Islands of civil discourse

This is a hearteningly optimistic point of view, but would need to
be considered alongside Decca Aitkenhead’s more sceptical
position, ‘bewildered’ as she is ‘by the exhibitionism of online
social networking’, its ‘juvenile vacuity’, ‘baffled by the amount of
time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like
Hitler’ and ‘a little bit dismayed by Facebook’s revelation of
almost infinite narcissism’.

Shirky’s answer is that ‘even the stupidest possible creative act is

still a creative act. And I’d still take the most inane collaborative
website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV’. In
other words, don’t blame the medium for the message!

Along with other commentators, Shirky recognises that while

anonymity can make people ‘behave more meanly’, he remains
confident that ‘we are slowly going to set up islands of civil
discourse’. His message is, be yourself: ‘We need to set up the
social norms which say in this space you need to use your real
names, or some well-known handle’. He sees ‘the really big
challenge’ is how to maximise the Net’s ‘civic value’.

NOTES
(1) Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging (Polity Press, 2010).
(2) Trevor Cook, ‘Can Blogging Unspin PR?’ in Uses of Blogs
(Peter Long, 2006), edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs.
(3) Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the
Mediapolis (Polity Press, 2007).
(4) Lawrence Lessig and Robert W.McChesney, ‘No Tolls on the
Internet’, Washingtonpost.com, 13 June 2006.
(5) Tom Hodgkinson, ‘With friends like these…’ Guardian (14
January, 2008).
(6) David Teather, ‘Social networking curse strikes again as Bebo
is sold’, Guardian, 21 June 2010.
(7) G2 ‘If there’s a screen to worry about in your house, it’s not
the one with the mouse attached’, Clay Shirky talks to Decca
Aitkenhead, 5 July, 2010. See Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Allen Lane,
2010).
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The author is currently working on the 8th
edition of The Dictionary of Media and
Communication Studies (with Anne Hill). He is
also the author of What is Communication
Studies? and Media Communication: An
Introduction to Theory and Process, now in its
3rd edition (Palgrave).

This posting appears simultaneously

with WATSONWORKS Blog 13 (July
2010).

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