Ten Years of Blogs

Writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Ray Cooklis notes the ten-year anniversary of the blog as a medium of communication.

To celebrate the occasion I'm going to perform the sacred ritual observed by bloggers worldwide, and offer some ill-informed, hot-headed criticism of Mr. Cooklis' editorial. He is a well-heeled member of the corporate establishment, and I am some wild-eyed everyman tapping away on a laptop in my Spiderman PJs. The nut of his sorta-argument:

Following your favorite blogs can be addictive. But is it worth it? Novelist Tom Wolfe told the Journal he no longer reads them. "The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors," he writes, noting Marshall McLuhan's prediction that modern communications would "turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective 'news' reports but only to what the drums say ..."

With all due respect to the brilliant Mr. Wolfe, rumors aren't really the stock-and-trade of bloggers. I think that's a perception that got started during the Drudge/Monica era - the first momentous collision between Internet media and public affairs.

Blogs are only newspapers, exploded. Instead of a sports section, five million vital and informed blogs about teams, trades, games and players. Instead of an editorial page, four million tub-thumping everyman editorialists, pushing their "humble opinions". And another million subject matter experts, who follow every morsel of information in their niche - fishing, miniature horses, book-binding, TV shows, obscure programming languages (the list could scroll endlessly). And ten million more blogs with nothing more than pictures and family news.

What confounds people, what makes it very difficult, is the complete lack of obvious signs of authority. It puts quite a burden on the readers, especially those above a certain age - that lack of a "meta" layer that explains who and what matters. (Now who the hell is this guy? Spacetropic? What does that mean?) And the bloggers themselves don't help, with inscrutable babble about tags and indexes, hat tips and inbound links. Blogs turn everything over; agency is celebrated and hierarchy is eschewed.

Blogs have a hardcore feel of liberty to them. But those are Just simply some thoughts from a tribal primitive, spreading rumors on a Tuesday morning.