Bloggy Activities

The early days of blogging were extremely optimistic about the potential of blogs to give everyone who wanted one a voice and a venue to publish. Now that blogging is over a decade old, to what extent have these early predictions come true?

The predictions of that statement have certainly come true, at least to the extent of people with access to the internet. Only the most basic of computer skills are required to set up a blog, and these could be acquired by talking to the staff at your local library if you're nervous.

The Baghdad Blog of Salam Pax is evidence of this proposition, and the fact that he managed to convey a credible inside story to the world in a way that international media could not is a delightful irony. Also ironic is that he never intended it for this purpose at all, but was just trying to communicate with a lost friend!

The writings of Blood (2000) and Rettberg (2008) have been highly interesting but also somewhat disconcerting. Interesting, because they took me to places I would not otherwise have gone, and they explained many of the blog phenomena of Web 2.0, categorising them most effectively. Their historical perspective is most illuminating, and helps explain why things are the way they are today. For example, Blood notes that in 1999, Blogger, with its ready facility to respond with comments and to link into other bloggers, turned blogs from ... into a very frequently updated short-form journal on matters of personal importance. Moreover, the style transformed from possible editorial to conversational.

Also fascinating is Blood's discovery that, through her blogging, she discovered what she was really interested in, and that it wasn't what she had previously thought. I think that this arises from the therapy of writing for pleasure, and is something shared through the ages by journal-keepers and diarisers of their lives. The difference with a blog is that all the world can see it, and this no doubt has appeal due to people's hard-wired desire for recognition and a degree of celebrity. The very existance of plazes.com, which can track users geographically, is evidence that many people want their privacy invaded.

Rettberg's discussion of Granovetter's theory of weak ties highlights one area where Web 2.0, through some of its exponents, may be actually failing the dreams of Berners-Lee and other web forefathers. Sites which encourage closed clubs (Rettberg's examples are Facebook and MySpace) actually tend to stifle creativity and innovation by excluding new blood which are necessary to provide it.

Rettberg talks about blogs facilitating ‘distributed conversations’ and even ‘distributed communities’; what do you understand these terms to mean?

When Rettberg mentions distributed conversations, she is arguing that, in blogging, no one person, organisation or authority is leading the conversation, as for example happens with traditional media. Instead, the internet, with no central hub, is a distributed network, and bloggers on that network can communicate without needing reference (or permission) from the central body.

The term distributed communities arises from the argument that blogging is not really conversing because the listener is not (necessarily) present when the speaker is speaking, so to speak. But Rettberg quotes blogger Danah Boyd (who has an affectation causing her to decapitalise her initials) that blogs have the advantage of persistance over conversation. Thus advantaged, blogs can maintain their perceived importance in social networking, even if the word 'conversations' has to be struck out.

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Blood, R (2000). weblogs: a history and perspective. Retrieved September 21, 2009 from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge.