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Saturday, July 30, 2005
Documents
Gerard Van Der Leun, one of the Blogosphere's finest, has a perceptive essay posted on the evolution of our new medium:
This bit of blogger hope, despair and redemption illustrates the axiom, "If you're not the lead sled dog the view is always the same." It also illustrates the tendency of a new medium to become what it beholds -- the old media.For quite some time now it has been glaringly obvious that, with few exceptions, blogs gargantuan and teeny-weeny are in fact a collection of footnotes and corrections tag-teamed onto print, radio, television and other blogs. The main roles that most blogs play are to act as pointers to the stories-du-jour thrown up by mass media, or a hacking or fine honed carping at the prime-time players.
In this posture blogging underscores daily that it is not yet ready for the prime-time itself. In the main, this has to do with 4 factors: 1) The extreme youth of the medium measured against the other three; 2) The extent of blogs penetration of the mass market which is, to say the least, scant at best; 3) The sheer weight of millions of "blog-channels" from which to choose or even find; 4) The lack of resources, staff and talent (funds, foot-soldiers, finesse) that it takes to pursue and report stories on a wide range of issues on a daily basis.
There are, of course, exceptions to this situation [Pace Rathergate, Easongate, and others... Pace those blogs, few, doing original reporting.... Pace all the others you can think of and I can't.... ]. Give me millions of anything and I'll always find you a few exceptions. The tag-team nature of blogs is most evident at those sites that track this sort of thing, memeorandum: A newfangled news tangle being a sterling example. Still, the point of this particular comment is to note that blogging, for all its "independence" is growing increasingly more co-dependent on a few favored blogs as exemplified above. Not a new observation to be sure, but even I was unprepared for the present extent of this phenomenon. Whether or not it presages transmogrification or ossification is presently unknown.
Please read the whole thing. It's seed material for many, many other thoughts, which will follow in their turns.
Your Curmudgeon writes in many modes: fiction, poetry, exposition, op-ed, cultural criticism, and the best damned C and C++ code you'll ever see. He does all this because the alternative, not writing, is unthinkable. But every writer wants to be read, and the enduring phenomenon of "gatekeepers" -- persons or institutions who can see to it that one's words reach a mass audience, or not -- has been his chiefest irritant since he first learned to spell qwerty and poiuyt.
The World Wide Web changed all that...in theory. Certain noxious hacking practices excepted, no one can deny a writer whatever audience he can garner from the Web. Of course, there is that leeeeetle problem of informing people that you're there, but the mighty minds at Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and similar services appear to have nailed that one. Simply write well, on subjects of interest, and the search engines will lead readers to you. Right?
Well, perhaps not.
Eternity Road can serve as an example. Google it. Google "your Curmudgeon," or "Curmudgeon Emeritus," or, God help us all, the name of that Fran person who haunts this dive on Sundays. You'll get tens of thousands of hits. But that doesn't translate into readership. The readership here continues to average about three hundred unique visitors per day.
Your Curmudgeon isn't complaining, mind you. There are a lot of people posting their work on the Web these days. Some of them can write. Others can think. Granted, the intersection of those sets isn't particularly large, but it's not vanishingly small, either. So the astute, cerebral reader, however selective he might be, has a large number of choices before him. The three hundred-odd (no slur intended, Gentle Reader) who've found their way here and return each day for the latest in supercilious anfractuosity are much loved for their devotion and their evident good taste.
The big sites, such as InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs, garner hundreds of thousands of readers per day. They have several things in common:
- They follow hot news and current-interest items, mainly as presented in the Old Media.
- They're "link-rich," such that they can serve as portals to the Web's most enthusiastically discussed items.
- They're relatively light on original commentary, preferring either to let the linked items speak for themselves, or to cite other opinioneers, whether in assent or dissent.
In short, apart from their personal ownership, such sites greatly resemble news portals such as those operated by MSN and Yahoo.
Please don't mistake this for derogation. These sites are quite valuable in their way. They just aren't of the same genre as Eternity Road and similar sites. But they command a larger "market," which many writers envy and strive to tap.
The problem is that to tap that market, a writer such as your Curmudgeon would have to abandon much of his subject matter and his approach to it. He'd have to transform his whole approach to Web publishing. He'd have to destroy his reasons for wanting to write in the first place.
Why do bloggers and other sorts of Weblicants do it? Few of us reap any perceptible reward. There's no money to be made in it unless one can grab that elusive mass audience, and just how likely is that?
Your Curmudgeon can only speak for himself. He's indulging his delight in words and ideas. He's communing with a handful of like-minded persons, a circle of intellectual and spiritual sustenance in a world that seems to be going mad. He's staying out of trouble, a goal the C.S.O., for all her amusement at his ardor, considers eminently worthy. And perhaps most important, he's laying down a record that might be useful to someone in the future.
When thought is perpetuated down the slope of time, as the Web has proved it can do, it can snowball to a degree that's as unforeseeable as anything else about the future. What starts as a muted rumble from a solitary voice can eventuate in an avalanche that will sweep assumptions, traditions, and nations before it. Ask Voltaire. Ask Adam Smith and John Locke. Ask Jesus of Nazareth.
It's just as long a shot as that grope for a mass audience, but it's an easier hope to sustain. The horizons are further away.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
A thesis may be self-evident once it's been articulated and considered, but articulation is the necessary first step. Someone must say it where others can hear.
The seeming ephemerality of our time strikes your Curmudgeon as largely illusory, at least in the intellectual sphere. Ideas are being generated, refined, discussed and discarded as never before in human history. Much chaff is blown away at each stage, but the grain that remains has nutritional value of the kind that endures -- and endure it will.
To participate in this cycle is an opportunity a thinking man should not eschew. Indeed, it approaches being a duty.
As his years have lengthened and his vision has dimmed, your Curmudgeon has taken an ever greater interest in the things of his youth: the pop culture, the fads and fashions, the ambiance, and the general tenor of that time. He wrote of it once, more than a little sadly, for much about it that was good has passed away, and might not return in his lifetime.
But it has left us documents: books, music, movies, magazines, a few old television shows. We who experienced it can still conjure its ghost for our reveries. Now and then, we can enchant our younger compatriots with its pleasures. Though we grow fewer with time, as long as the documents last, the memory of it will not vanish.
It's thus with every age. Time filters for that which endures, which can make a time long past seem better and higher than it really was. But such documents as persist over time possess significance even if the picture they paint is misleading or incomplete. They function as high water marks for their eras: reminders of where their contemporaries strove to go, and how close they came to getting there.
It will be the same with the documents we generate today.
Others will select from the documents we create today. Others will determine which will be discarded and which will be retained. We cannot control how our legacies will be seined by those who come after us, but we can ensure that what we transmit to them is of the highest possible quality: of perception, of comprehension, and of expression.
One's audience of the moment, with its ability to flatter and reward, can cause him to lose sight of his audience yet shrouded by the veil of Time. But the latter could be more appreciative than the former...and much, much more numerous.
We build the future with every present-moment choice and every decision we make.
Not all that long ago, your Curmudgeon wrote:
Why "Eternity Road"?It has nothing to do with the Jack McDevitt novel, which I haven't read, and only a little to do with the old Moody Blues song from To Our Children's Children's Children. It's more a recognition of the path we all share.
Every step brings us closer to eternity. None can be retraced. At the end, when your last step has been taken, your story will be complete. Those you leave behind will remember such portions of it as they, not you, choose to recall.
Therefore, make each step a good one: purposeful, well considered, and of wholesome intent. Do nothing out of pique over trivia or disdain for the moment and its setting. Even if, upon the instant of your passing, you're entirely forgotten by the world of men, there's still your pride to consider.
God is watching, too. Don't make Him chide you for wasting His gifts. You wouldn't like it.
These are words for a writer to live by. Besides, "Eternity Road" certainly beats what that Fran person wanted to call it. ("Throne Room Of Long Island's Sex God," wasn't it, Fran?)
Now go forth.
Comments
The “bloggers are emulating mass media, and they’re doing it badly” meme is pretty tired. Sure...if “bloggers” means the ultra-famous guys who attract audiences that get mass media-style attention, then sure. But then you’ve defined yourself into a near-tautology.
The rest of us should (and mostly do) simply write the best stuff we can for whatever audience we can garner. I mean, it’s not like we’re getting paid by the reader.
I’d rather have one reader deeply interested in what I have to say than a million readers casually surfing through. (At the moment, of course, I don’t have either...but I’m planning to change that.
)
Posted by Matt on 07/30/2005 at 10:47 AMAs I noted at Gerard’s place, isn’t this perceived stratification nothing more than the inevitable consequence of the power law? It has almost nothing to do with media per se, but perhaps a lot to do with the medium, which tends to self-organize in matters like these in predictable ways. So, if you know that, no matter what, you will have a BIG DOG, a tiny handful of Big Dogs, a larger group of big dogs, even more dogs, and so on…
You’d get that structure whether there were portals, gatekeepers, or not, or even if every single blogger in the world was writing some variation of Eternity Road.
I think what I’m hearing is the faint disapproval of the reasons things settle out this way - that the blog consumer, in general, seems to prefer one sort of blog - portal style, if you will - or just Glenn Reynolds style - over longer and more thoughtful writing.
But this is an old debate as well, and was being kicked around by Den Beste and others - thinkers and linkers, remember? - years ago.
Posted by Bill Quick on 07/30/2005 at 10:22 PMPersonally, I like personal blogs where the majority of posts are original, with some interesting links/stories occasionally, but that’s just me. I often do not follow links to news stories.
Posted by Heather on 07/31/2005 at 01:19 AM
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