Darwin fucks Bloggers?

I'm sorry. It's just that I've wanted to use a ridiculously provocative title for ages now. Competing for attention online is notoriously heated. Which just so happens to be my theme.

A few days ago, Wired announced the 'Death of Blogging', and produced a torrent of sniggering anger from the online community. You can't really write a blog and ignore it - it's the shame of being insulted directly and doing nothing about it but blush and look at your shoes. So I'm preparing to join the wave of meta-activity, commenting on commenting, opinioning about opinioning, blogging about blogging.

Wired's piece bases itself on the contention that Blogging is only fun, worthwhile or even meaningful if it produces a lot of interest and is heard. 'It's impossible to get noticed', they sighed resignedly. Basically because garden variety Joe blogger is now competing with paid up so-called 'sweat shops' of blogging journo's working for online magazines like, well, Wired.

The Times Tech Central and its commentors are taking a laissez faire survival of the fittest approach, 'readers are more likely to find what they're looking for', we're told. 'Perhaps the end of rubbish blogs' triumphs a loyalist. What we are seeing now is the Internet following an apparently organic and inevitable pattern which sees those that provide the best quality service rising to the top. It's voting with your credit card all over again, except this time, the consumer votes with their mouse. Have we voted out the solitary hobbyist blogger? And is this desirable in terms of the democratic and representative ideals of Internet communication?

One Twitterer on the subject remembered a relevant article by an essayist and network theorist responding to similar rumours who pointed out that website traffic follows a Power Law Distribution: In a big social network where a lot of people get to choose from a lot of opinions, a large proportion of the traffic, and therefore a large proportion of influence will rest with a small number of the websites/blogs. This is a situation that libertarian political philosopher/tosser (RIP etc) Robert Nozick might also nod approvingly at, fitting as it does with his idea of Justice springing naturally from whatever occurs in the course of everyone making the best of whatever resources they happen to end up with. The Blogs with the most time and money deserve to hold the most sway over the online world. It looks as though the internet, the very embodiment of freedom of expression has spoken, and not with the plurality of voice that we might expect.

Not only does the worry exist that multiplicity is drowned out by the loud voice of the few, but in the scrabble to compete, pieces are getting shorter, sharper and therefore somewhat dilute of message. Books and Culture blogger Alan Jacobs finished his Blog back in 2007 on the worrying note "Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought". Wired claimed that Bloggers were moving to places such as Twitter to take advantage of its brevity. Writing complex and attention grabbing Blog articles at the volume required to compete was too exhausting, last year even seeing the deaths three prolific Bloggers, all of heart attacks.

Now, the irony of writing about the fast paced precarious burn out world of blogging on a blog that contains seven whole entries and has to my knowledge no traffic at all isn't lost on me. but then I don't want to die or anything. I never thought I might be able to politicize the personal as it were and hold myself up as on-trend. Though, while I doubt I could find anything with so much tree falling in the forest silence going for it, I have managed to find a couple of illustrative elements. The first is that I probably see this Blog as an accessible portfolio, that I can reference when I need to show anyone what my style of writing is like. It's basically something I think I might be able use when I'm fighting for writing jobs, which is typical I guess of the vicious utilitarianism apparently involved. No one writes Blogs for the joy of writing, we're told, but to be heard - communication first, joy of expression second. Secondly, and more encouragingly, I have read one Blogger sum up what I think is a fairly representative motivation, that is that his blog was for high quality communication between a small but dedicated crowd of friends and like minders. Now, my Blog currently is for nobody, but I am screwing up the courage to actually encourage people I know to visit. I think I'm happy enough for my scope to be limited to real world social microcosm, particularly as certain entries may be the end result of ongoing and co-operative discussion and debate.

Blogging, the Internet community has retaliated, is not as dead as all that. A glance at Twitter tells me not only that this is a contentious and little agreed with notion, but as if to prove it, everybody's little 140 word 'Tweet' seems to link to their Blog, where their initial aphorism goes into more detail. And this very act of information gleening (in fact most of this Twitter-researched entry) tells me that whilst Twitter is useful for the rapidity and quantity that Blogs are unable to sustain, Blogging still serves a purpose. And while it may no longer serve as a net of opinion which you can cast over the entire Internet community, your communication will always be valuable as long as it reaches somebody. Meanwhile, there are still many many ways to be heard on a large scale.

And, on an interesting side note, it's worth looking at the consequences for the Social Darwinism that seems to have seeped into the debate. Ex-banker Bernard Lietaer mentioned in his book 'The future of money' a theory of evolution which placed emphasis on cooperation between organisms and the environment rather than competition between individuals. He said this in a bid to strengthen his argument that the monetary system should be organised around principles of co-operation rather than competition. Interesting then that it is the blogs which have large numbers of people working on them, together, operating as a unit that thrive whilst the individual blogger is lost. Under a certain set of circumstances this surely is a good thing for online democracy. You will only be heard through compromise and co-operation, and it is not one voice which rises to the top, but many.




http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2008/10/is-blogging-dea.html
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/october/13.22.html
http://ash10.com/2008/10/two-points-about-the-alleged-death-of-blogging/
http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
http://www.timelineindex.com/content/view/1038