I was excited to read this week’s readings, hoping that I could learn about how blogging will fundamentally change the way human beings think and interact with each other. At the very least, I was hoping to read that blogging as seriously disrupted some of our taken-for-granted cultural institutions. So far, I’m not really convinced that blogs are all that special. I concede that they have numerous uses for teachers, students, and non-academics alike, but I feel like we might need to temper our excitement about the potential of blogging.
I don’t mind Marshall McLuhan, at least not when he says that the medium is the message. I understand the importance of the kind of thing that Meg Hourihan has done in describing what she believes is unique about a blog and how that might influence the way we think and interact with one another. Still, I tend to agree with John Grohol on this one. I’m just not convinced that blogging does a whole lot that other online formats haven’t already done. Their ease-of-use and their conversational quality might make them a bit more accessible than other web-based forms of community, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s really tough to make any generalizations about blogs. Some blogs are giving readers daily access to the opinions of respected experts in particular fields, others obscure the idea of an “expert” to such a degree that false information can be propogated by just about anyone; some blogs foster community, others just serve as soap-boxes for bloated personalities that don’t have the faces for television.
In addition to my reservations about the difference between blogs and other online forms, its also important to take into account the number of people who don’t use blogs or for that matter don’t use computers (despite the moves that Year of the Blog makes in describing the growing appeal of blogs). While I’ll admit that weblogs are useful (they’ve certainly been a helpful, important part of this course), entertaining (here’s my favorite), and informative, I’m going to side with Grohol on this one: “Everything old is new again” and we need to understand that blogging has no “special quality to it that makes it, and the people who engage in it, somehow unique or special.”
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2 comments:
Hey Mark,
Your post (which I loved) is eerily similar to something I just read not too long ago.
For the haters: there's a piece in the February 2nd (this year) edition of the The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Blog Overload" that any one finding themselves resisting their blogonaut status (or who, like me, is considering incorporating them into teaching) might find interesting. It's by Kara M. Dawson and the headnote to the piece reads "An associate professor and devoted reader of blogs finds that requiring students to create one produced the wrong kind of buzz." I can bring copies if any one's interested.
I definitely agree that Brooke's article doesn't establish blogs as an essential form of communication; he seems more into showing us how they may embody deixis, and how the temporality of the blogroll really drives this home.
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