The blogosphere is as real as the public in public opinion
The blogosphere is dead and its your fault, screams the post’s headline. But did that actually happen a long time ago? And was it ever real?
I’ve been chewing over Paul O’Flaherty’s nearly radioactive post since I read it earlier this week. In summary, his diatribe is hyper-critical of a blogger who may or may not have been treated poorly by the TSA in Atlanta, but who probably took a very liberal interpretation of the word “truth”.
O’Flaherty seemed even angrier at the seeming hordes of bloggers who:
a) took this person’s words as gospel without questioning
b) then proceeded to NOT berate this person when huge gaps of her story began to look rather false while she was associated with a respected blogging community and had a badge on her site about blogging with integrity.
O’Flaherty seemed to think that the blogosphere, a grouping of content publishers that’s hard to adequately identify or pinpoint, is composed of spineless individuals that resemble sheep more than human beings:
I’m truly sick of todays blogosphere, where the ultra polite and light on brainwave activity have massivezombie hordes follower numbers while those who dare to express an actual opinion are ostracized to the edges of mediocrity.
And furthermore:
Heaven forbid that someone be different. That someone suggest we don’t all have to brown nose each other all the time.
When the hell is the blogosphere going to finally grow up and stop moaning about what it doesn’t have, what bloggers believe (naively) they are entitled to and act like adults.
Adults can have opinions. We don’t have to go along with the crowd. We can do something different and be part of the community.We don’t have to think that every god damn post by every idiot we just happen to know is praiseworthy to the point of gushing…
We can call a spade a spade. We can call people out for what they’ve done wrong and praise them for what they’ve achieved. We can regulate ourselves without a laid out set of rules or crappy badges in our sidebars. I mean seriously who besides those that display them know what they’re for anyway?
All we have to do is accept that we are adults and that we have a community to protect and build if we ever want to get taken seriously.
The underlying assumption behind O’Flaherty’s post is that there is a community of bloggers, commonly been referred to as the blogosphere, with norms, mores, and rules of conduct. Or that there used to be one, anyway. He thinks it’s dead now.
Here’s one definition of the blogosphere (via Wikipedia), which seems to have the meaning that O’Flaherty believes (or believed) in:
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.
Nick Carr pronounced the death of the blogosphere in 2008, echoing a similar sentiment:
While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.
Carr also had the following comments on blogging:
“Blogging” has always had two very different definitions, of course. One is technical: a simple system for managing and publishing content online, as offered through services such as WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. The other involves a distinctive style of writing: a personal diary, or “log,” of observations and links, unspooling in a near-real-time chronology. When we used to talk about blogging, the stress was on the style. Today, what blogs have in common is mainly just the underlying technology – the “publishing platform” – and that makes it difficult to talk meaningfully about a “blogosphere.”
There’s an implication among many people that blogosphere equates to:
- the general public or public opinion
- common knowledge
- the “grapevine”
- or some form of shared opinion held by a very large group of people
This may have been true in the heyday (re: earliest days) of Web 1.0 technology moving into Web 2.0 technology, piggybacking off the original weblogs and the journaling websites (and forums and USENET and listservs and BBSes and….) But it’s like what happens when your favorite “hole in the wall” restaurant is finally discovered by the masses: a whole new crowd enters. Or a crowd of crowds. And they bring their cultures, biases, hopes, dreams, attitudes that get stirred into a stew that becomes quite unrecognizable to the earliest denizens.
In the aggregate, the blogosphere is no more united or homegenous these days than public opinion is. Public opinion is based on percentages, slices of pie charts, and groupings based on seemingly common attributes. Not all Americans hold all of the same values and opinions, nor do Europeans, Christians, wine drinkers, football fans, basket weavers, or teenagers. Sadly, in a way, this fictional blogosphere (which is a term I use frequently, I must admit) was mortally wounded by Web 2.0, when it became a lot easier to join the club with tools like MySpace, Blogger, and now Twitter. It’s hard to maintain a culture when it becomes huge – changes, mutations, etc. will happen in republic or democratic environment.
Here are other things that the blogosphere is not:
- a country (like or unlike the United States of America)
- a religion, cult, or sect
- an ethnic group
- a social club
- a political party
- a company or business
- a focus group
- composed of participants in continuous public opinion polls
- a homogeneous community
It does share some traits of all of these things, but it isn’t any of them.
The blogosphere (and, if we really want to complicate things, the entire continuum of social media applications/spaces) is really an ongoing fair or marketplace. Or, perhaps more specifically, it’s the fair grounds and the city block that the marketplace inhabits. It’s a technology framework and a space of places for people’s minds to inhabit, shout into the pipes, and sometimes get a response back.
My point is this: this elastic, heterogeneous world of minds is too big, too varied, and subject to too many agendas to realistically believe that people would not use it for different reasons. The collection of people using digital media is not a common society, sharing common beliefs. It’s just an ever-growing slice of the thoughts and creations of the human race. And we’re messy.
But, as hard as it might be to enforce, having a few good common principles certainly would make sense, wouldn’t it? Honesty, integrity, consideration, transparency, charity, self-improvement – all good things, right?
Let’s look at one of O’Flaherty’s points again:
Adults can have opinions. We don’t have to go along with the crowd. We can do something different and be part of the community.We don’t have to think that every god damn post by every idiot we just happen to know is praiseworthy to the point of gushing…
This is key, in my opinion. Basically, the blogosphere, originally derived from the playground of scientists, educated people, free thinkers, etc. (who could be messy, nasty, and uncivilized at times, make no mistake about it) has become a more representative cross-section of humanity. The rules or tendencies that govern the groups that emerge from this mass of bodies are duplicating as well. Politics and power struggles don’t get left behind when our minds jump into digital media; neither do motivations, attitudes, etc. Social contagion, echoing, conformity: they come along for the ride as well.
The blogosphere is no utopia and it never really was. For awhile these online worlds were places where humans could temporarily escape many of the patterns and behaviors of humanity, trying to exist in realms created by binary codes and patterned in new ways. Today’s digital realm is imperfect, crowded in spots, and so on.
It’s perfectly fine to have high ideals for human behavior and to want a better world. It may be still be out there. But did it really exist before? I doubt it. Is the blogosphere going to die? I’d argue it’s broadening and mutating. I think there are places for standards of conduct, etc. but the fact is that it’s basically becoming the physical world and if we can’t agree on things how should be run here, it’s a huge challenge to expect perfection elsewhere, even in a digital world.
Image by fdecomite
