The Blogosphere’s different, that’s for sure. But dead? Wounded? A ghost town of aging hipsters, unmotivated slackers, and sellouts? Look, if the Blogosphere’s dead then so’s every college campus in America.
It’s hard to tell if Nicholas Carr is really just trying to bait everybody, what with Google reducing everyone’s intelligence to that of trained chimps* and, his latest missive, ironically a blog post entitled “Who killed the blogosphere?”
Read those two pieces in succession and you’ll likely hear the faint wheezing of a Hoveround between the lines, the knocking of walker legs, the rustling of hard candy wrappers.
These kids today wouldn’t know a blogosphere if it fell out of the sky, landed on their face, and shouted nasty rumors at them with really bad grammar, right Nick?
“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.”
His tone suggests the use of air-quotes, which went out of fashion when “Friends” was canceled. Nobody told John McCain, either.
It’s true there’s been a corporate invasion of the blogosphere, but bloggers didn’t exactly discourage that. No, in fact they insisted the mainstream sit up and take notice because bloggers were taking their audience. Bloggers insisted not only on their self-proclaimed credibility, especially as media watchdogs and fact-checkers, but also on their entitlement to ad dollars and traffic. The ambitious ones often got what they wanted, whether they still wanted it once they got it or not.
There has been a shift, for sure. Another irony: the mainstream media playing fact-checker to the blogosphere. Remember Sarah Palin’s supposed cover-up of Trig’s parentage? How 23 percent of Texans still believed going into the election that Obama was Muslim? Let us hope the mainstream media never becomes quite so eager to become more blog-like when it comes to juicy rumors.
Carr notes the stink of the blog dead zones: 94 percent have been abandoned, the remaining six percent have gone mainstream or corporate. This is going to sound unrelated but it isn’t: I was the first among my social circle to discover Jason Mraz. Now that they all buy his albums, too, he’s just not as special anymore.
More power to the bloggers who’ve become successful. They beat the system, got around the dues-paying, the mailroom, the internal politics, the crap beats, the ridiculous pay, the low recognition, the local-reporter-vortex, the being passed over for being too edgy, not edgy enough, too fat, too thin, having a face for radio, and entrenched 20th Century journalism rituals. How dare they make money, get recognized? Yeah, they don’t link like they used to, just like some people never call anymore.
More power to the upstarts that took on the established media, who provided the competition needed to keep corporate media honest and accountable. More power to the watchers of the watchdogs who still live in the so-called dead blogosphere.
There are still coffee houses, for those who don’t like sellouts, blogospheric ones too where the poor unknown stay poor and unknown just like they and Carr would seem to prefer. And there’s still the Wild West out there, filled with outlaws with more agenda than truth—kind of like on talk radio, kind of like early, pre-corporate chaos radio Carr evokes as an inapt comparison.
In the infinite blogosphere, all is still possible.
Out of fashion? Time will tell. The majority of abandoned blogs can be attributed to three groups: kids who went straight to video on YouTube and Stickam, opinionated narcissists who ran out of time, ideas, money, or things to say (lesson learned: writing’s hard), and spam bloggers.
The “vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media” is still out there, Nick, along with all that other mainstream, elite stuff you dislike (interesting opinion given your mainstream, elite history). It’s all still there, they’ve just moved your old haunts to new neighborhoods and made way for shopping centers and parking lots.
*A study has come out since claiming the opposite. Google and search engines are actually causing people to process information more information than ever before.
