Aborted Notes Against Blogging

There are a few more days left in January and Isuppose it is not too late to speak of New Year resolutions. I wanted to writean anti-blogging pamphlet and circulate it among friends at the very beginningof 2008. Since pamphleteering is a dying art, I thought I'd write one pamphlet amonth on a consuming issue and provoke a discussion. That was my NewYear resolution. The one against blogging was to be the first in the series and Imade some notes too. But due to a personal tragedy, the project did not takeoff on the appointed day and hour and now it may be considereddeferred to 2009. In 2009, if blogging is already dead, I will perhaps haveto consider some other subject to begin my career as a pamphleteer.

Till then, let me share with you what irks methe most about blogs. It is the myth that they have generated about theirtransformatory social powers. This, besides the enormous self-love themedium displays and the cruelly splintered identities it encourages. Here'show my incomplete, disjointed and, at places, borrowed notes on theaborted project ran:

ONE:
I am neither a neo-Luddite, who is totallynegative and deeply suspicious of what the Internet or blogging can do, noram I a technophile, who is a full-convert to the ideology of the medium. Iposition myself somewhere in between, trying very hard to steer a reasonedmiddle course between being a Luddite and technophile--that is, not being swayedby technological innovation for no better reason than that it is innovative and,at the same time, remain open to its actual character and possible advantages.

I sometimes feel that the middle path is thedestiny of the 70s generation to which I belong. Primarily because we spent ourchildhood in the frugal, public sector milieu of socialist India, but witnessedthe splurge of a liberalised India in our youth. A modest credit thatI want to claim for my 'in-between' generation is that we seem to havean insight to the advantages of both the worlds. So is the case when itcomes to technology and, in this context, Internet and blogging. Even as weindulge in ipods and laptops, the romance of fine stationery, for example,never seems to escape us, at least me.

What I want to do in this pamphlet is to raise afew questions, without bothering too much about the finer points. Andthese questions are a result of my personal experience as a user of the Internetand a visitor to various blogs. My questions may be coloured by the fact that Iam a professional print journalist, who often reads with some trepidation thepredictions that are being made about the death of the newspaper. [An Economistreview of Philip Meyer's book The Vanishing Newspaper said thatMeyer calculates the first quarter of 2043 to be the moment whennewsprint will die in America, as the last exhausted reader tossesaside the last crumpled edition. But the other day, on the jogging trackaround the Sankey lake near my hous,e I saw a lady, whose t-shirtread 'We Survived 1984,' a reference to the Orwellian scare. So probably we willget past 2043].

TWO:
Before surveying the scene and raisingquestions, I would like to begin with an assertion: Whatever may beour conceptions of the power of blogging, I do not think it is andcould be politically or socially transformatory. The Internet as amedium perhaps is, but blogging, at best, is a novel tool, which will runits course. Until and unless, the idea undergoes a bit of reform. Or,as some analysts of technology culture would say: until italters its architecture and anatomy. Prof. Alan Jacobs in an essay 'Goodbye,Blog' (in Books and Culture) says "the anatomy of a blog makes aserious conversation all but impossible" and discusses at length how,with the present architecture, it is difficult to sustain the thread ofdiscussion or 'comments' that happen on a blog. He concludes that "for the foreseeablefuture, the blogoshpere is the friend of information but the enemy ofthought."

According to one source, there are some 37million blogs in the world, with a new blog created every second. It is said theblogosphere doubles in size every six months. It is now 60 times biggerthan it was three years ago, with 1.2 million new postings each day--about50,000 per hour. The enormous rate at which the blogosphere has beengrowing has made the Western media sit up and take note and analyse the drop intheir circulation and revenue figures. Sample what the editor-in-chief of the Guardian,Emily Bell, had to say, when they launched their 'comment is free' blogproject:

"You have to think 'where is this competitive landscape going?' - and it is already there. Unless you take your writers there you are already dead. There is an old-fashioned debate that still goes on in the mainstream British media about the differentiation between bloggers and journalists, but blogging is just a fantastic piece of software. It doesn't mean that bloggers can't do journalism or journalists can't do blogging. It is just a different way of reaching the audience that now wants links and expects to be able to answer back."

About the mainstream media entering the bloggingspace, there is another purpose that is served--of bringing in credibility.Blogs suffer from a crisis of credibility. The blog is a valuable source ofinformation or knowledge only in so far as we are able to subject what we findon it to all the normal checks we customarily use in the course of othersources. In short, material on the blog is as reliable and as unreliable as thesources from which it comes. Interestingly, the sites on the Internet,which have credibility are most of the time institutions that havebuilt up credibility over the years outside the medium and much before themedium. So, if you are actually having to apply the rules that you havenormally applied over the years to make your judgment, what then is thetransformatory power of a blog?

The recent debate that has been happening aboutthe fraud that happens on Wikipedia--the interactive Internet-basedencyclopaedia is very interesting. The New Yorker had a damning piecesometime back on how a guy had profiled himself as a tenured professor oftheology while he was 24-yr-old college dropout. In fact, Steven Levy, recentlyin the Newsweek, cites the incident while previewing polemicist AndrewKeen's book The Cult of the Amateur. Levy writes: "In Keen's view,sites like Wikipedia, along with blogs, YouTube and iTunes, are rapidly erodingour legacy of expert guidance in favour of "a dictatorship ofidiots".

THREE:
Much is made about the role played by bloggerswhen it comes to conflict in Bosnia (about the Muslim minority in Serbiabeing rescued by the Internet) or Iraq. But the simple question that needs to beasked is: what did people who received the information do? Could theycounter the brazenness of the state? So what purpose does loads of information serve? Theblogs put out real horrors in Iraq and other parts of the world but theirknowledge/information brings no power. Or what has the world been able to doabout Gautanamo Bay? As the state realises the power of a blog or awebsite, the first thing it attempts is to subvert it or appropriateit and then slowly regulate it. It is a set pattern in not just authoritarianregimes, but also in democracies. As the state intervenes the positive anarchyof the blog gets even.

There is enough and more evidence on display toprove this. Google crows about the power of its 'search,' the freedom that comeswith it, but then how many sites does its search tool block out in China? Itclearly proves that the seductions of big business are very different. Similarexamples in the Indian context is the anxiety about Google Earth beingable to access sensitive locations and what about the recent rageagainst the anti-India community on Orkut, the networking site. Thereare several other examples when blogs were simply shut down. This is yet anotherreason as to why a blog cannot perhaps be transformatory because there isalready control and monitoring of the medium. So to say that a blog is independent,autonomous, free, immediate, revolutionary and interactive may need afew qualifiers to go with it. This is not to discount the power of the blog,but all that I am trying to say is that its limitations cannot be overlooked.

As an extension of this argument another pointthat needs to be made is that blogs are appearing more and more like websiteswith podcasts, vodcasts, elaborate commentary and a list of contributorsand columnists. Shifting from individual identities to group,organisational and even corporate identities (Infosys has a blog). This isactually the undoing of the blog. In fact, the Guardian's blog applies aformula that is not uncommon to the editorial formula of a newspaper. It iscomplete with even a cartoon strip. The only act of difference on itsblogspot is to hide the other half of the C P Scott quote: 'comment isfree' runs bold at the top, but the other half, 'but facts are sacred,' runsright at the bottom, which is visible only after much scrolling.

FOUR:
And now to the point of responses on the blog.They are mostly reactionary. They are far from being liberal. It appears thatthe built-in-tendency of the medium is to favour those whose disposition is notto wander to realms which challenge or conflict with their interests andopinions, but who like their existing interests to be satisfied and theircurrent opinions to be confirmed. And therefore the abuse. Abuse on the blog isactually entertainment. It seems that there is extraordinary anger present onblogs than in everyday life. Debate even on religious sites either escalatesfrom rational discourse into sneering and name-calling or just bypasses reasonaltogether. This is partly because of the anonymity of blog comments, peoplerarely identify themselves by their real names. Blogs are becoming catharticchambers, which I think cancels out the necessary build up for socialaction.

The professionalisation of the blogosphere canalso curb its transformatory powers, if there are any. Blogadsare coming in on popular spots. Trying to create a regular revenue stream mayfinally irrevocably alter the nature of blogs. Money has a way of handlingindependence, individuality and dissent. All ideas in the beginning appeartransformatory and revolutionary, but how they resist the pressures ofa structured, established world is the key to social transformation.