Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Blogging: a Self-Important, Minority Pursuit

The most reliable subject on which to blog is blogging. Bloggers, a navel-gazing breed, love it. Currently, we have Tim O'Reilly suggesting a six point charter of blog conduct and Oliver Kamm trashing political bloggery in an article that had Iain Dale and half the blogosphere spitting blood. Kamm is easily dismissed. He's not really talking about blogs, but about the modern media environment and his position, in this article at least, is meaningless. He writes, 'Such is the ideological chaos of modern Conservatism...the notion of the wisdom of crowds: knowledge emerges in a collaborative process rather than being dictated by experts.' There is no form of Conservatism in which knowledge is dictated by experts - indeed, how could an expert dictate knowledge? I think I know what Kamm is avoiding saying - that we need wise rulers - but wise rulers are not experts, quite the opposite in fact. The expert in power is a malign, utopian, technophile fantasy. O'Reilly's code of conduct is all very well and may, indeed, persuade a few bloggers to wear a 'Civility Enforced' badge with pride. But so what? The point that they are all missing is that very few people read blogs. I almost never meet anybody who has read even a single blog. Of course, some bloggers get a lot of 'traffic' and this convinces them that they are powers in the land, but their readers are drawn from a very limited pool. The truth is that, at the moment, blogging is a highly specialised business. Of course, many politicians do read blogs because they are so self-regarding, but, if they all stopped reading tomorrow, their electorates would be utterly unaffected. If blogs ever do become widely read, then a weeding out process should occur in which some will be endowed with authority and some won't. (This, of course, assumes a reasonably educated electorate - but that is another matter.) At that point all current discussions will look quite ridiculous.

10 comments:

  1. My brother Noel reads all your blogs, Bryan, and he passes on the best bits to me. How else do you think I stay ahead of the game?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well of course, Bertie, I should have said my blog is globally significant and excluded from all the above strictures.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What you're on about is the blog equivalent of a newspaper. We have those now. And as with the 'papers birth, slapping a few bloggers into clink should sharpen the appetite for the blog. But one would be hard pressed nowadays to find anything on which to be seditious. While finding a Swift..... In the meantime, the links, are very useful. Found this via Clive James.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Everything you say is true, and also, there are far too many blogs. If political blogs are ever going to seriously affect anything, then there will have to be a whittling down process to the ones with authority. And my money is on the Times, Telegraph and Guardian ones, since they've very wisely staked out the territory early on. Other blogs, like Guido or Samizdata, will be an amusing place for punditry, but not any kind of serious authority. So not much will change.

    For the most part, blogs work best as pubs. You find and then hang out at the ones where the regulars interest you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Since nearly all of my traffic over Easter came way of Google searches for 'Faye Turney's underwear', 'grey scouring pads' and 'The MacDonald Brothers', I am also somewhat cynical about there being 'a reasonably educated electorate' out there that reads blogs.

    However, I thought Kamm's piece an accurate representation of UK political blogging. Perhaps I misread him, but surely Kamm isn't saying that there is a form of 'Conservatism in which knowledge is dictated by experts'. Isn't he in fact saying the opposite? That Conservatism is born out of the collective inertia of the crowd, the opposition that the majority have to any kind of radical change.

    He then goes on, rightly I think, to argue that the crowds found around political blogs are not representative of the masses. They are a breeding ground for political anoraks, who are both parochial and tedious. I don't personally find tax loopholes, government overspending, or leadership contests of any kind all that interesting. In a way, I suppose it makes me feel quite glad for my one regular visitor who always comes looking for 'midget strippers in Detroit area'.

    ReplyDelete
  7. So, Bryan, which expert will dictate whose blog stays and whose blog goes?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Interesting confluence here - new political channels and pubs. Listening to Today this morning (as every morning). Two articles - first on political use of YouTube - total number of viewers to New Labour - 9 of which 3 the researcher, and second on pubs - new way of advertising - script a discussion/argument about your product and let some actors play it out! Stay away from both ...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Good post, Bryan. To some of your commenters, blogs are "tertiary" media -- they are not (in the main) original content-providers, they are producing content via reading content elsewhere, usually in the so-called "mainstream media" -- "secondary" media. The "primary" medium is the event or person creating the excuse for the rest of us to talk about it.

    I sum up my global view of blogging: it keeps us off the streets and is harmless.

    ReplyDelete