At the end of Henry Jenkins' article titled "Blog This!", he begs of the reader, "So blog this, please" (181). As Jenkins states in the article, blogs are becoming ever more popular as people are posting, well, just about anything. Jenkins argues that bloggers are "...expanding the range of perspectives and, if they are clever, creating order from the informational chaos"(180). Comparing bloggers to the "committees of correspondence" that distributed revolutionary texts, Jenkins attempts to show that bloggers have the power to "shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media" (181). I agree that blogs give a very wide range of opinions on vast amounts of information and have shaped and will continue to shape the media landscape. I don't agree, however, that me blogging, as I am now, will help blogging or the Internet at all. I believe it will make the Internet worse.
There are many blogs I read, have read, and genuinely enjoy. However, for every blog I enjoy there are hundreds of thousands of blogs that I will never get a chance to read, and the vast majority of these blogs will be of no value to me. Thanks to search engines such as Google, we typically do not get lost in a jungle of pointless blogs, most of which have a few introductory posts and since then have been forgotten. Even if a gem is randomly found within the vast maze of the Internet, unless it is already a large and well known blog that is embraced by a large audience, it would be very difficult to find again unless the reader bookmarks it, which most readers probably wont. Between typing the sentence before this and this sentence, I attempted to find my friend's blog that was a dream journal; I could not. A new blog following an article's advise on an evening in boredom will just further dilute the readership of blogs. It will be made, published, and forgotten to be ignored by the few web surfers that happen to drift by. "Stuff White People Like", a blog my friend used to read religiously, has only had 9 blog posts in 2009. In the previous year It had posted over a hundred times and was popular enough to prompt a book release. I haven't heard my friend speak of the blog for many months now. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but a simple Google search about dead blogs leads to a mass of blog posts about dead blogs.
The most successful blogs, in my opinion, are typically those that are run by multiple people that are committed to continuing the blog. Individuals creating blogs and posting their opinions on random topics generally tend to clog up the Internet, even if it is well maintained due to the fact that most people don't want to pend time reading about a random person that they never heard of talking about random topics. Successful blogs such as Cute Overload, Make Zine, Gizmodo, Gawker, Smashing Magazines, Mashable, Google blog, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Blog, Fail Blog, etc. are all about specific topics. Although the topics each blog covers varies greatly, a blog that is good for the Internet must be liked by the users of the the Internet. If someone wants to have opinions on a subject, creating a decentralized personal blog without a community is a waste of time and weakens the image of blogging as a powerful tool. Joining the community of daily readers, engaging in comments, and communicating with committed blog writers is a more effective way of strengthening blogging. Unless there really are not enough blogs that talk about how one politician is superior to another, the formation of a blog for such a topic is unnecessary.
http://xkcd.com/635/
- Joshua Ziesmer
Doesn't your post resonate with Vannevar Bush's concerns in "As We May Think"? Even though Bush wrote that over fifty years ago, at that time he was already confronted with the overwhelming mass of human knowledge (not to mention all the drivel, which you are right to point out). As the Web balloons and more and more users produce more and more "content," certainly search engines and other ways of sorting through it all (social bookmarking, e.g. delicious.com) will become more and more important. Does this create, however, an opportunity for a few major players (e.g. Google) to control the Internet? Later, we'll read more Doctorow, who suggests that technology will soon shift its focus from stockpiling and generating information to managing and ignoring it--returning to us the "privilege of forgetting."
ReplyDelete