Has the Blogosphere been co-opted
Tim Finin, 12:12pm 8 November 2008Nick Carr asks Who killed the blogosphere? on his blog.
“Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there’s good reason for the teeth-gnashing. 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 is something of a technology contrarian and has written a book Does IT Matter? and a recent article in the Atlantic Is Google Making Us Stupid?.
In his post, he compares blogging to the amateur ratio during of 100 years ago and predicts that its demise foreshadows the Blogosphere’s.
” When “the wireless” was introduced to America around 1900, it set off a surge in amateur broadcasting, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the airwaves. … The amateur broadcasters, the historian Susan J. Douglas has written, “claimed to be surrogates for ‘the people.’” The democratic “radiosphere,” as we might have called it today, “held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science.”
But it didn’t last. Radio so on came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production. By the 1920s, radio had become “firmly embedded in a corporate grid,” writes Douglas. … Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both.”
That’s not to say that the amateur radio operators didn’t change the mainstream media. They did. And so, too, have bloggers. Allowing readers to post comments on stories has now, thanks to blogging, become commonplace throughout online publishing. But the once popular idea that blogs would prove to be an alternative to, or even a devastating attack on, corporate media has proven naive.
I like the analogy, but it does have limitation. The popular blogs that arose out of nowhere he romanticizes about were always just a small part of the Blogosphere. Just focusing on the nature of the Blogosphere’s head — the top 100 blogs or even the top 5000 blogs — and ignoring the long tail misses a lot.
Ebiquity Blog
November 8th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Come on!
You do realize that you are guilty of exactly what you are accusing Carr of – picking some aspect of the subject matter and dealing with just that.
I read the piece three times: Carr deals with the nature of blogging – platforms vs. process, abandoned blogs and the loss of the concept of “blog personality” that has fallen under the ax of commercialization of the medium.
And this is before he makes the analogy comparing blogging to amateur radio.
You said
I read the piece and I did not find evidence of Carr “romanticiz[ing]” popular blogs – if anything, he bemoans the fast that they are seem to be commercial engines designed to pull in readers (and presumably the ad revenue that comes in with eyeballs).
At least give us a some supporting arguments to go with the throw away comment about missing the long tail else this post is at best a collection of random thoughts and at worst sloppy writing.