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Blogfænomenet fylder 10 år - godt eller skidt?
Blogs har vendt op og ned på mediebilledet, konkluderer Scott Rosenberg, journalist, forfatter og medstifter af Salon.com i en kommentar i dagens Guardian:
Like so many online innovations, blogging didn't spring fullgrown from some visionary's fertile forehead. It evolved as a bundle of online publishing practices; and as software developers created tools to make those practices easier, the form and tools advanced together.Og fænomenet har da også ført til en masse relativt uinteressante sider, ligesom det er blevet udsat for megen kritik - meget af den helt berettiget.
Today, the blog - with its links, reader comments and archive page for each post - feels obvious and intuitive. It's the default format for a website. Companies use blogs to open conversations with customers and among employees...
(...) Blogging's useful characteristics were not always so obvious. Those of us who were building websites in the mid-1990s did not see them. We struggled to help visitors find the "new stuff" on our static home pages. We scratched our heads over what to do with that stuff once it wasn't so new. Paper had never posed such questions.
Og dog kunne meget af kritikken vel afvises som eksempler på dårlige blogs, som hermed ikke kan bruges til at afvise mediet som sådan - ligesåvel som elendige aviser som Ekstra Bladet, eller elendige TV-serier som Matador kan bruges til at bevise, at aviser og TV-serier som sådan er noget skidt.
En sådan fejl begår bl.a. forfatteren >Tom Wolfe, som Rosenberg påpeger:
Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe - who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal's blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as "a universe of rumours". To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia's entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can't be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn't "strictly a blog" but claimed it "shares the genre's characteristics", and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy - which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it's online, apparently, it's all the same, and all worthless.Hvis jeg personligt skulle rette en kritik mod blogs som internetmedie er det dets transiente karakter: Givet, at vi har noget interessant at sige, eller givet at vi læser en blog, hvis forfatter har noget interessant at sige - hvem siger så, at det vi skriver i dag nødvendigvis er mere interessant end det, vi skrev i går?
It's hard to take Wolfe's assessment of blogging seriously since he admits that, "weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless 'information'," he doesn't read them himself. In any case, those who obsessively review their own Wikipedia entries for errors might pause before accusing others of narcissism.
As a young New Journalist of the 60s and 70s, Wolfe championed the personal voice in nonfiction magazine writing. Today his denunciations of internet culture simply echo the gripes of newsroom veterans who gaze out at the work of millions of bloggers and quail, "who can keep up with all this stuff?" as if anyone ever insisted we do so.
Men hele strukturen i en blog lægger op til en idelig vægt på det nyeste, det aktuelle - ligesom det kan få en arm blogskribent som f.eks. undertegnede til at føle et vist pres for at gå i "pundit mode" og kommentere de aktuelle "varme emner" eller begivenheder, fremfor at beskæftige os med de ting, der interesserer os i mere dybtgående forstand.
Og hvis en ny, ukendt blog rummer sublime, evigt-aktuelle observationer - hvordan skal vi så finde dem uden at læse det hele igennem fra ende til anden? Det er jo begravet i arkiverne, og fokuset på det nyeste bliver hermed selvforstærkende.
Men herudover har Rosenberg i hvert fald den pointe, at det ikke afhænger så meget af, om "blogfænomenet" er godt eller skidt, værdifuldt eller værdiløst - men af, hvordan mediet bruges, dvs. af, om den enkelte blog er værd at beskæftige sig med eller ej.