In the Agora: Saturday Meta-Blogging

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January 29, 2005

Saturday Meta-Blogging

I have been trying to avoid the subject of blogging, especially after Josh's injunction against blogging about blogging, but posts such as this compel me to respond. Metablogging isn't necessarily boring; it's just normally tedious. And because blogs are [lit crit]at once observer and observed, breaking down the binary distinction that permeates Western thought, meta-blogging is a way of escaping the game, of standing outside the reference point, of subverting the system[/Derrida].

In particular, it is relevant to examine, periodically, the claims that blogging is a threat, or a complement, or whatever to established media institutions. It is not true that only right-wing bloggers are triumphalist--gosh, I seem to recall a certain amount of left-wing blog-trumpeting during the run-up to the Iraq war and the subsequent presidential-election-that-never-ended (exhibit A: Howard Dean; exhibit B: that New York Times article on Democrat bloggers). And if the election had gone the other way, I'm certain that Atrios would still be remarking how great a role he and his ilk played in Kerry's inevitable victory.

The blogging world has been around now for several years, and has been in an obviously, qualitatively different state for at least two years; I think that the real shift came when Instapundit got his own domain name (he used to be on Blogspot, with a Blogspot template). That several of the big names who were around then are still around now is evidence for the emergence of a persistent new blogging superclass--the idea, expressed in the blog post linked above, that Powerline and Instapundit will become the new CNN and Fox News of the Blogosphere, similarly insulated from "the little guys."

I think this is mistaken. That blogging and blogs are important is not equivalent to stating that certain blogs will forever retain their importance. The critical difference is that established media outlets are institutions, with institutional "personalities" that persist despite changes in management and turnover in personnel. This persistence's strength varies between organizations, and within the same organization over time; my impression is that the house style of The Economist and the Wall Street Journal is more fixed than that of the recent New York Times and the New Yorker (this profile of Johnny Carson from 1979 is nigh-unreadable, almost a parody of the New Yorker's style).

Bloggers, by contrast, do not form institutions. I do not expect InTheAgora to have the same lineup at this time next year. If we are a policy dork jam session, we must maintain a certain fluidity in adding members and letting members go their own way. I'm not saying it's certain the lineup will be different, but I would not be surprised. And even longer-established group blogs like CrookedTimber.Org, which seems to have stabilised in its membership, do not really cohere as institutions in the same way that Reason, National Review or other established media players do.

Given that bloggers are more idiosyncratic, and that each blog's style will not be institutionalised in the same way as a magazine or a news network's, this implies that factors that would hardly affect a mainstream media player will have dramatic impact on certain bloggers. If Glenn Reynolds ever decides he wants to, say, produce more albums, spend more time with his family, or even--gasp--teach law (kidding!), then that would be the end of Instapundit. Some site by that name could still continue, but it would not be the same blog. By contrast, the Washington Post didn't cease publication upon Katherine Graham's death.

At any point in time, then, there will be an upper caste of bloggers. But viewed dynamically, there will be entries and exits from that cohort--Wonkette, for instance, is a relative newcomer to the blogging world, and is now one of the top ten or twenty (political) blogs around. So although there are many things to criticize about blogs and blogging, the specific criticism that there will be an ossified elite of big bloggers stifling the free exchange of ideas is almost certainly misguided.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at January 29, 2005 09:31 AM

Comments

We still don't know how the Internet as a news/opinion medium will develop in the next, say, 20 years. We don't yet have a concentration of ownership, though certainly there are indications that consolidation may take place.

Let me give an example from my own experience. I started on the Internet nine years ago (sounds like ancient history!) with my radio journalism tutorial, newscript.com. My host was subsequently purchased twice and became part of an attempt to create a nationwide hosting service. But this was at the time that the Internet bubble burst, customer service was pathetic, and I ended up switching, first to a non-commercial host affiliated with an academic consortium, and now with a guy who has a couple of servers in his house.

So long as it is economically feasible for these "mom-and-pop" operations to be in business, content creators such as myself have a wide choice in hosts. But let's say that the phone and cable companies that control the fiber-optic connections start making it prohibitively expensive for these "mom-and-pop" hosts to stay in business. Then we'll see real consolidation...and limited options...for individuals who want to communicate through the Internet.

Here's another scenario. As an "Internet veteran" (or, more accurately, a "primitive frontiersman"), I write my own HTML on my weblog, RED-STATE.COM. But I have discovered that many of the indexing sites and aggregators (e.g., technorati) rely on unnecessary coding that has been built into the commercially available blogging software. So I discovered I had to add this junk to my pages in order to get indexed. In the future, this situation will probably get worse, as additional "bells and whistles" get added to commercial blogging software, and the indices and aggregators will require these "bells and whistles" in order to list and syndicate the site. Commercial blogging software may also make it easier for indices and aggregators to filter postings and comments, so in the end, it may become far more difficult for individual bloggers to get their messages out.

Finally, the promotion of "in-house" blogs by the traditional media may serve to crowd out individual blogs. MSNBC is the most notorious in this regard (even to the point of setting up Eric Alterman's blog, and then referring to him as a "blogger" as if that were his primary media outlet), but the longstanding opinion journals (such as National Review, as you pointed out) have also jumped on the blogging bandwagon. But if blogs become "branded" and attract audiences solely based upon their affiliation with MSM outlets, bloggers will in the end become no different from today's print columnists and broadcast pundits, who must adhere to the corporate demands of media ownership, and who are chosen in corporate decisions with financial demands never far from the mind.

So the sudden fame bestowed on a Powerline or a Wonkette may well become a thing of the past as Internet punditry moves forward. We just don't know.

Posted by: Michael Meckler at January 29, 2005 09:12 PM | permalink

It was admittedly a bad analogy to compare Instapundit to say, Fox News in regard to Glenn's position in the blogosphere. I think you missed the mostly sarcastic tone to that particular blog post btw.

I am a contrarian when it comes to human nature and sometimes I look at the relationships I see between the bigger blogs and then the little ones and wonder how much room there really is for growth now. Btw, you guys need to upgrade your copy of Movable Type, there is a major security hole in the version that you are using that let's spammers have their way with your MT installation.

Posted by: MikeF at January 29, 2005 09:49 PM | permalink