Adam Greenfield posts on what seems like a decline in blogging:
What he's really asking is not so much whether blogging is withering away, but rather, whether the expressive explosion of what some people still call "web 2.0" has faded. And it has, I suspect, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, there was a bubble there, and it fooled a lot of people who said they weren't going to get fooled again. That bubble was borne out of novelty, and out of the adjustment period that comes when we start doing something new. Do we still need to post every single boring picture we take to Flickr? Are we, as bloggers, getting anything out of the treatises Greenfield's searching for? At some point it becomes noise and it stops being any fun. At that point, we're going to start seeing more traditional content in non-traditional venues, and less diarying and self-expression dumps.
Given that, it would be nice if new media scholars would start taking genre into account a little more seriously. When Greenfield asks in his post's title if "blogging per se [is] a dying art," the blogging he's talking about isn't blogging "per se," it's a particular kind of blogging. For those of us interested in studying another kind -- like, say, political blogging -- the tendency to describe blogging as if it were one thing is a real pain. It's not something that would happen with other media -- nobody looks at "television" without at least some acknowledgment of genre differences. Yet, a colleague and I came up dry over the course of hour yesterday spent looking for literature that examines readers of political blogs specifically, rather than just of blogs generally -- as far as we can tell, the only such piece is another I and three co-authors wrote which will be published soon in Cyberpsychology & Behavior. I got into an interesting but frustrating conversation about this at a conference last weekend, in which basically every speaker brought different assumptions into the discussion based on their genre interests, and I really think it's a significant problem in the study of blogs.
Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2007:11:21:23:39
Your first graph is specifically why I never got into personal blogging. I can't imagine anyone being all that interested in either what I have to say about things or the minutia that is my life. I will be starting a professional blog in January, however; all editors at my company will be required to do a blog entry monthly that focuses on nursing matters.
Your second graph points out what could be seen as a problem inherent in being at the beginning of a categorization. You will be among those voices calling for the division of blog study into genres, then establishing a vehicle for that study.
Those who want to maintain the status quo will not be happy, but change is nearly never achieved without some struggle.
Do please have the decency to not tell me what I'm "really asking." It's not a particularly winning way to introduce yourself, and strikes me as being especially ironic coming from a site calling itself "Civility in Public Discourse."
Among other things:
- I've never used the term "Web 2.0," except mockingly. I can't quite tell if you're here conflating me with the Web 2.0 amen chorus...but if you are, oh boy are you barking up the wrong tree.
- Because there are a few hundred of them at best, a plurality of whom know me personally, I trust my readers to understand perfectly well that when I speak of the Golden Age of High Blogging, I'm referring to a time before "genre" as you think of it had quite sedimented out.
If you were around in 1997 or 1998, you'll remember that *all* blogs were personal blogs, and that it basically required the trauma of the 2000 US elections before any avowedly "political blogs" came into being. (Certainly, September 11th and the rise of the "warbloggers" helped accelerate the tendency.)
- Given both the above, I hope it's clearer that I'm not *at all* asking whether "the expressive explosion of...'Web 2.0' has faded." A closer or more attentive reading should satisfy you that in fact I'm asking just the opposite: whether the adoption of formats and constraints inherent to so-called "Web 2.0" tools has tended to suppress the genuinely expressive explosion of Web *1.0*.
- Finally, I'd want to question your sideways characterization of me as a "new media scholar." It's true that I write about technology and design, but I'm quite happy to leave any scholarly investigation into the effects of computing-as-medium to others more qualified (and interested).
What I am - in this context, anyway - is a blogger. And as a blogger, I no more appreciate the mischaracterization of my comments than you would.