Every Blog has its day

By Emily Berry, Designer, Epic

At its outset, the internet promised to give everyone access to an expansive network where information and ideas could be freely and almost instantaneously exchanged. It was heralded as a way of bringing people closer together; making the world ‘smaller’. Yet creating a website was often too costly or complicated to be achieved by anyone outside governments and corporations. It took the advent of email and easy-to-use web authoring tools to truly open it up to the people.

The blogging phenomenon is a case in point. Thanks to Blogger, Pitas and other software, people with little or no knowledge of HTML are able to publish on the web. And with a blog being created every second, they’re certainly doing it. Anybody can get their voice heard - you don’t have to be a journalist, win the approval of an editor or pay to be published.

Initially, bloggers combined ‘blogrolls’ (lists of links to similar or recommended sites) with their own commentary or personal thoughts. By linking to sites that their audience may otherwise have missed, they helped to filter and disseminate the web. Successful bloggers drew a loyal fanbase with their intimate, reflective postings. Along with diary entries, they highlighted the (in)accuracy of articles and provided additional facts or personal opinions.

Today blogs take many different forms. As well as personal blogs, there are political, professional, topical, cultural, social and collaborative blogs - even ‘moblogs’, which contain content posted to the net from a mobile phone. Companies have cashed in on the market too, employing in-house bloggers to promote their goods/ services and raise their status online. However, a blog won’t survive on the web unless it’s honest. Coca-Cola and L’Oréal learnt this the hard way when they enraged the blogging community by authoring blogs ‘by fictional characters who did no more than parrot the company line’ (Yeomans, 2006).

The blogosphere has a social conscience. It’s often responsible for revealing information that other news companies have deliberately not published, since it went against their allegiances (political or otherwise). For example, not one of America’s major media outlets reported that the government suppressed 8000 pages of the Iraq declaration because they detailed the biological and chemical weapons that the US had sold to Iraq (Belichick, in Raynsford 2003). A blog did. It is this sincerity and scepticism that differentiates blogs from traditional journalism and ensures their popularity with the younger generation. Today’s youth ‘don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important’ (Rupert Murdoch, 2005).

It is for this reason that blogs flourished in the aftermath of events like 9/11 and the Tsunami. Wary of the news broadcast by large media conglomerates, the public turned to blogs for personal opinion and amateur video, as bloggers tried to make sense of the tragedies. Even soldiers set up blogs during the Iraq war, portraying a stark and authentic sense of the realities involved. Daily Kos, an American political site maintained by its registered members, is the net’s most trafficked blog, receiving about 20 million unique visits a month.

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The ‘do it yourself’, anti-corporate ethos of the blogosphere is redolent of early punk rock, with its rawness, attitude and sense of immediacy. Just as punk was more about the message than the music, bloggers are less concerned with the way they write than what they want to say. Rules and regulations have sprung up around blogging, as they did with punk. Enforced by the bloggers themselves, they demand conformity with a kind of ‘ethical code’ regarding copyright, slander, broken links and so on. Those who break the rules risk being exposed online and a damaged reputation.

In the main, though, bloggers are extremely conscientious and overwhelmingly generous. Google Earth is an excellent example of this. The free, downloadable application, which maps the earth using images obtained from satellites and aerial photography, is enhanced every day by the involvement of others. Via the Google Earth Community forum, users around the world can contribute resources and add ‘placemarks’ of interesting or educational sites to the globe. It’s a tool that is both geographically and historically instructive, and one that despite its slight bias towards the US, is wholly international. The craze has inspired several unofficial, ‘spin-off’ blogs, including Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania and Google Sightseeing.

The amount of voluntary time bloggers must invest in the net is staggering. Wikipedia, the limitless encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, is another great example of the blogosphere’s commitment to knowledge. Data inputted by a user one day, may be adapted by another the next, in the interests of accuracy. Knowledge is fluid, ever changing.

In this respect, blogs and wikis are characteristic of postmodernism, which refuses to view knowledge as an end in itself. With the computerisation of society and flood of mass media, truth has become changeable, unknowable: what really matters is discourse. The blogosphere encourages us to value our own – and others’ - point of view. It champions the voice of the individual, while simultaneously acknowledging the interdependence of one text on another with its continual cross-referencing.

Yet the very traits for which blogs are loved also invoke criticisim. The ease and speed with which content is published means that less rigorous checking and editing takes place. Unlike traditional media, many blogs are unstructured, unprocessed, or their authors self-obsessed. It’s also argued that there are now so many of them, blogs have become as confusing as the web itself. Yet Steven Johnson views this positively (The Economist, April 2006). He believes kids will benefit from the mass of participatory media, that their cognitive abilities will be enhanced by sifting through it, separating the good from the bad.

Certainly bloggers know that there is no ‘correct’ way to define things: it doesn’t worry them. That’s why they listen to and learn from one another. It’s as though more than 25 years ago, the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard anticipated the role of the blogger today:

‘A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.’

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