The Sunday Tribune last week published this article on the current state of the blogging phenomenon. Technology journalist Matt Magee talks to a number commentators and bloggers. Interestingly he identifies the point at which blogging began to break into public consciousness in Ireland as the rise of Salam Pax, the Baghdad-based blogger.
By Matt Magee
Eyebrows were raised around the world last spring as journalists began to make reference to a set of eye-witness accounts that gave a rare and vital picture of life on the ground in Baghdad during the UK and US invasion of Iraq. Journalists started referencing the blogs of Baghdad residents such as Salam Pax, whose blog was even published in The Guardian newspaper.
This was blogging�s moment, the instant that it broke through into the mainstream and caused most people to wonder what on earth a blog is. The idea of blogging is very simple: it is the keeping of an online diary. The reality is far less than simple, since blogs can be anything from personal diaries to campaigning platforms to sources of either informed expert views or wild unfounded speculation.
The trend has exploded in the last 18-24 months and now accounts for some of the most vital and fertile content on the web. Like many web phenomena it took off first in the US, where politics gave it its first kick-start. 9/11 in the US generated a huge desire for expression and discussion among web users.
�Mainstream media were no good for that,� said John Naughton, a journalist with UK newspaper The Observer who began his own online diary way back in 1996 and is now also Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University. �The old internet newsgroup system was useless because it was too polluted by porn, spam and flaming. So weblogging grew to fill the gap.�
Now politics in the US is putting blogging at the centre of the agenda again.
Howard Dean, a the leading contender for the Democrat nomination for President has been making constant use of blogging to communicate with supporters, raise funds and add credibility with tech savvy voters to his campaign.
He recently guested for a week on the high profile blog of Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford and board member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF). �There is an enormous frustration among many in the United States, and many are discovering blogs as a particularly articulate way to begin to express that frustration,� said Lessig. �As media in the US becomes more and more concentrated, it becomes more and more important for a source that does not care about its message to exist.�
Lessig campaigns, through the EFF and the Creative Commons group, to protect the creative, social, and political uses of emerging media technologies from corporate control as exerted through copyright and intellectual property legislation. Blogging is one of those emerging areas, he said. �There is a norm and expectation that blogs will be used for public discourse,� he said.
Other factors contributed to the rise of blogging. �After the boom, people are settling down to figure out what the internet is really good for,� said Antoin O Lachtnain, founder of failed web consultancy Nua and now a director of consultancy Digital Messenger. He is himself a keen blogger. �And one of the things it’s really good for is person-to-person communications, for people to be able to give their views.�
The case of Salam Pax and other bloggers in Baghdad was unusual but instructive. All representatives of the mainstream media were embedded with forces or living in hotel rooms, reporting on military briefings. The mainstream media message was, then, relatively controllable by the military and political forces behind the war. Pax’s real, un-embedded eye witness reporting was suddenly at a premium.
Mick Fealty of Northern Ireland�s political commentary blog Slugger O’Toole blog believes that through blogging he is ‘able to ‘puncture’ the on the ground reality of news production,� he said. That capability will increasingly become a source of worry for mainstream media.
Blogs can also out-expert traditional media. �Blogs on specialist topics are sometimes written by real experts,� said O Lachtnain. �Even the most thorough journalist only usually has an outsider’s view on a particular topic. A blog on the other hand is sometimes written by a person who has real, first-hand experience of the situation.�
The down side of the non-mainstream nature of the blogs, though, is that they do not operate the same checks and balances to ensure accuracy and accountability. �The checks and balances of blogs are entirely horizontal. Blogs check themselves in most cases,� said Gavin Sheridan who runs Gavin�s Blog. �The more well known your blog is, the more aware you have to be of accuracy.�
The number of blogs that are actually likely to take on traditional media is still very small, though. Many closely resemble those very first personal web pages of around 1996 where the endless personal details of a stranger�s life were all that surfing had to offer. But there is a threat there for an increasingly consolidated traditional media business.
�I�m not yet sure it is so important,� said Lessig. �It is a new influence, which on the margin matters. It will be very important if ten times the number of people begin to blog. Then it will be something very interesting.�
First published in the Sunday Tribune, Sunday 28th September 2003
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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