Managing expectations
Protobloggers Matt Welch and Ken Layne taught me my first and most important lesson about blogs. A day or so after I started this blog shortly following 9/11, they linked to and said something about what I’d written and I linked back to them. When I tell this story in my blogboy PowerPoint dance, I snap my fingers over my head and call this a ding! moment: I realized then that this is a conversation and it doesn’t happen in one place; it is a distributed conversation brought together by links. This, I learned, is how news should operate. I became friends with both men, though I’ve met only one of them, and worked on various aborted though worthy projects with them. But more than that, I continued this blog that I thought I’d do for only a few weeks until it changed my view of news and my career and thanks to that, I’m much poorer and happier today. I never expected much of this blogging thing.
Matt, on the other hand, had high expectations for blogging — warblogging, in particular — and now he’s disappointed. In his valedictory piece for Reason, Matt — who just rode the Wayback Machine back a few decades to become assistant editor of the LA Times editorial page — says he’s disappointed if not disillusioned by blogging:
I had launched my blog (or shall I say “warblog,†which is what I named it, apparently coining a term I’ve come to loathe) five days after the September 11 massacre and almost immediately found myself swept up in an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation. As a consumer, it was exponentially more edifying to me than the post-9/11 fumblings of the mainstream media’s binary, Crossfire-style opinion slinging.“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?†I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.â€
Man, was I wrong….
So where did I go wrong?
Mostly by confusing what I’d like to see with what was actually happening. September 11 did indeed lay a linebacker-style hit on many people’s political views (including my own, to a degree), opening them up to formerly incompatible or simply unknown ideas and thinkers. But instead of separating them permanently from any particular political tribe (something that I, as a longtime nonpartisan and critic of ideological warp, would have celebrated), the effect turned out to be short-lived.
What was wrong here? Only Matt’s optimism, I’d say.
At another moment in my blogboy bugga-bugga dance, I say (paraphrasing Stuart Butterfield and Ross Mayfield) that the web, weblogs, web 2.0, whatever are — like Soylent Green — simply made of people. I define blogs now as people in converation. It’s that distributed conversation Matt and Ken taught me about. Some people are thinking with the open-minded discipline Matt yearns for. Others are closed-minded black holes. That’s life. No medium is going to change that human nature. But it is exhilerating that we get to hear new voices of more people now — people like Matt.
: Meanwhile, Richard Bennett characteristically turns up the bass on Matt’s melody:
Matt hoped that a new form of publishing would give voice to the silent center not caught up in the partisan system of political labels and allegiances, and so did many of us. The prototypical warblogger was an “anti-idiotarian†who would fearlessly criticize spin doctors on both sides in a relentless search for truth….But now the blogosphere has been taken over by apologists for partisan causes, spin doctors, and profiteers: Atrios, Hugh Hewitt, Daily Kos, Michele Malkin, America Blog, Captain’s Quarters, Talk Left, Powerline, and the like. Where did it all go wrong?
In some sense it had to, because the 2002 warblog was a utopian enterprise and therefore destined to fail. People don’t have to time to approach politics issue-by-issue so we naturally fall back on party affiliation when other concerns are more pressing.
The discovery that money could be made serving up red meat to partisan loonies was a key turning point as well, and I thank Atrios for cementing that in the minds of the bloggers. Atrios is the father of Michele Malkin as a blogging phenom, ironic as that may be.
I think the problem starts when people get big enough to think that they speak for others… just like newspaper editorial pages. The real blogger speaks only for himself or herself. It’s just people talking.
Tags: Weblogs
April 16th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Re: warblogging. Warbloggers had to have a a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s.
I get the feeling something is not feasible with that. To what degree do the culture wars define nearly everything we are as Americans?
April 17th, 2006 at 8:20 am
This post and Bennett’s post really speak to me.
The blogosphere was really vivid and alive in 2002 and it brought a certain excitement that the old news could not possibly bring. It was more real, and people’s voices came out and sung.
Self-employed and highly interested in the new world, I could not help but dive in and read read read, many hours a day.
Today my “top 10″ list is not covering topics that are important to me, even though I spend much time looking for fresh new thinking. Then, my “top 10″ was heavily weighted towards the state of the world. Sully, USS Clueless, a fiery political Lileks, a less knee-jerk LGF, Eject Eject Eject. I would happily eat up long essays that brought me the world in new ways I hadn’t considered it before. Sometimes they were wrong but they were always smartly so.
For me it was Schaivo that turned the tide foul. My previously favorite thinkers found it the Most Important Thing In The World. I found it to be nonsense. I realize it’s only opinion and that if I thought it was Important the bloggers voices would still seem essential. The commenters still felt it was essential. But something was lost.
Today the top 10 is more like: Boing Boing (web/tech/culture oddity), A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago (pop culture), Kausfiles, Gizmowatch, Insty, Michael Totten. Mostly not state-of-the-world, most of the politics is interesting non-partisan analysis, more about fun.
April 17th, 2006 at 8:50 am
I’m not disillusioned at all about the way things are going, in fact, I just keep finding more things to get excited about. It’s rather long for a comment, so I put my take on this here:
http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/the_blogosphere_vs_human_nature.htm
April 17th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
[...] Great Jeff Jarvis piece on managing expectations. This could only have been written by someone who’s been through it, and seen the other side. Life goes on - but why do so many people NOT learn from past mistakes? One could run an entire consulting company JUST focusing on that! This is why I never participate in the debate around “what is blogging” or even worse “what is identity?” [...]
April 17th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine continues to impress me. Jarvis is a blog-evangelist, without question, and his focus is always on the future. But he's not overly impressed with himself, nor does he pump up the blog phenomenon to be more than it really is. In a post yesterday, he reports that some of the early, innovative bloggers he admires have become disappointed. [...]
April 19th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
I’m with Trudy; I have not become disillusioned with blogs over the last few years. I have a few favorites (mostly conservative), but check out a few new ones every month.
Jeff wrote:
“I think the problem starts when people get big enough to think that they speak for others… just like newspaper editorial pages. The real blogger speaks only for himself or herself. It’s just people talking. ”
I agree somewhat, but for some bloggers who hit a nerve with enough folks, they become a “voice” for those people. I guess it works something like party affiliation.
Now do some of these bloggers subsequently get big heads over their newfound popularity? Yep. But just because you’re a popular blogger doesn’t necessarily mean you BELIEVE you’re the voice of your readers.
But a “real blogger” may wind up speaking for others even as he “speaks for himself”. To me, it’s not mutually exclusive.
April 20th, 2006 at 2:14 am
The blogs were fun for me, long ago. It was nice to see people behaving badly, throwing some real outrage at the 9/11 horror.
But that was a long time ago, and the whole idea of 9/11 being some unknown surprise beast has been demolished about 1,000 times. (Had it really been about Saudi fundamentalist operations against American values or whatever, we sure as hell wouldn’t be paying $3 per gallon for gasoline today.)
So what happened? Followers of the U.S. political parties did what they always do. Libertarian-leaning small-government conservatives became Stalin-worshipping Big Government fanatics. Democrats wallowed in their failures, trying to convince themselves Al Gore was actually Jesus — but a Jesus nobody actually liked. Ralph Nader secretly worked on new plans to make baseball bats out of soft nontoxic foam. China took all our manufacturing. Clinton and Bush Sr. made sweet love on the golf course.
We all got suckered again. Blogs are the ribbon of shame on our idiocy.