This Blog Article Does Not Exist

By Aditya Sivaraman | Tuesday, April 24, 2007

There are no more monopolies on information. The Internet revolution made sure of that—of all of the benefits brought to the modern world by this innovation, the ability to have access to an almost limitless amounts of information has been the most influential one. It’s not just a question of volume of information either. It’s about access: a normal human being (one who perhaps shies away from sifting through volumes of reports and statistics for information) is no longer limited to ‘mainstream media’ outlets for facts and analysis. Welcome to the latest layer of the viscous media haze of modernity: the blog-o-sphere.

Web logs, or ‘blogs’ as they are more commonly called, are the new ‘revolution’ in the information age. Reporters and journalists are no longer necessarily individuals who write for newspapers or who appear on television; a college degree is no longer necessary to influence the masses. All one needs today is a computer and an opinion, the story goes.

If knowledge is power, then power structures are dissolving from their traditional vantage points. In an age in which anyone can be a ‘citizen journalist’ (and can occasionally beat the old news outlets at their own game), the former rules seem no longer to apply. Anything can be news, even mind-numbing trivia that no orthodox news outlet would cover. On the other hand, this is a triumph of mass society—the marketplace of ideas has widened, and in this process, media outlets have become more transparent and accountable. (Due to his recent death, Jean Baudrillard was unable for comment.)

So what are the implications of this latest foray into hyperreality? A panel of bloggers, prominent both on the national stage and at Dartmouth, gathered at Rockefeller Center on Thursday to offer some answers that question. On the panel sat homegrown bloggers Joe Malchow ’08 and Andrew Seal ‘07, as well as famous national bloggers John Hinderaker ’71 from Powerline, Ann Althouse, Brendan Nyhan, Laurie Clawson of The Daily Kos, and Roger Simon ‘64.

People base their love of blogs on two basic assumptions. First, there’s a lot of information out there, more than a small conglomerate of media outlets can ever cover. There are people who want access to this information, and there are others who want to provide it. Second, the only real constraint on the number of media outlets is the high fixed cost that acts as a stringent barrier to entry in the industry. Blogs fix both of these problems. Hinderaker told the audience about how the circulation problem that incurred the high fixed cost is easily circumvented by the Internet. Fifty to seventy-five thousand people read Powerline, his blog, daily. This number far exceeds that of many popular daily mainstream newspapers. It easily beats out similar conservative publications, such as National Review, which has fewer readers per month than Powerline has in a day. Mass communication is essentially free, says Hinderaker. Unlike orthodox media outlets, which both require valuable content and profitability (with the former often, but not always, contributing to the latter), blogs only need to be interesting enough for people to read them. The idea of journalistic triage to maximize profits seems far antiquated in the face of this.

So why is blogging only catching on now? Blogs have their own subtler barrier to entry: technological know-how. This is also quickly disappearing, however. New user-friendly blogging templates have made it possible for even illiterate morons to promulgate their opinions online (and they often do).

This, of course, is the other edge of the sword. As Ann Althouse pointed out, blogging doesn’t require the blogger to write about anything that anyone else can care about. Irrelevance and banality are the luxuries of those who don’t have to worry about high fixed costs. Other than the number of hits a blog gets per day, the only other measure of success, according to Althouse, is “momentum.” Andrew Seal echoes this point: blogging is less about news and more about personality building. This can refer to either the personality of the blogger, the blog, or a target individual removed from the former two. The cost we may have to pay for this brave new world of limitless information is that we may be lost in the Oceania of knowledge, a hardly navigable WikiWorld. With the relative drop in prestige of established media outlets, Truth may end up losing its capital T. Take me, for instance. I’m uneducated, misanthropic, and bitter. I’ve also just launched a blog—if the opinions of individuals such as myself gradually take on an equal amount of credibility as that of traditional media outlets, the quality of public discourse could go subterranean.

For the moment, it appears as though Damocles’ sword has yet to fall. According to Brendan Nyhan, the blog-o-sphere is still very narrow, with most of the serious bloggers being educated professionals and ex-journalists. This has resulted in both a relatively high quality of citizen journalism but also in a polarization of America’s political e-discourse. He argued that partisan blogs that take extreme positions get far more views than non-partisan ones. Nyhan, who used to run a non-partisan fact checking blog, said that he just couldn’t reach the same kind of volume that partisan outlets could. So what does this mean in terms of the ability of the blog-o-sphere to influence American politics? Nyhan joked about how, for one pristine moment of naïvely optimistic idealism a few years back, political observers forwarded the thesis that online blogging could actually bring politics to the center, provide more transparency, and bring moderation to the election process. People were actually betting that blogging could make politics, well, “nice.” As it turned out, the smart money was selling short.

A prominent Dartmouth blogger once apologized to me for snapping at a comment I left on his blog. The anonymity of the Internet, he explained, often brings out the worst in people and causes them to be far more aggressive than they would be otherwise. The evidence, though (to my knowledge) anecdotal, has proven surprisingly accurate. Take BoredAtBaker, Dartmouth’s own bloggish verbal sewer. Joe Malchow commented on how this website represents both the worst of Dartmouth and of its people. The way this scenario manifests itself in political blogs is similar to political primaries. Just as it’s easier to be mean when you don’t have to face the people you’re subjecting to abuse, blogs find it easier to move to political extremes because, as it turns out, their audience pretty much agrees with them. Leftists read mostly left-wing blogs, and conservatives read mostly right-wing blogs – as Nyhan put it, “blogs just preach to the choir.” To cast further doubt on the political impact of blogs, the panel came to the consensus that blogs seemed to be engaged in discourse more with each other than with the general public or any other politically significant set of actors. Blogging has also been less than optimal at motivating people to leave their online discussions about politics and actually act in the real world. Clawson and Althouse together provided a good explanation for this. Clawson argued that there are a limited number of people who are politically active. Althouse argued that it’s harder to act politically in the real world than it is to do so online, where the average person is surrounded by like-minded individuals and is able to act impersonally. The combination of these two factors suggests a compelling impediment to the blog-o-sphere’s political significance.

Which, at least in a small handful of cases, is too bad. Roger Simon spoke from his personal experience and assured the audience that the fact-checking ability of the blog-o-sphere far exceeds that of orthodox journalism. In mainstream journalism, fact checking is rare, spotty, and after-the-fact at best. On a blog with millions of online viewers who have a research tool (e.g., Google) available at their immediate disposal, fact-checking is both thorough and immediate. Laura Clawson agreed, arguing that the ability of blogs to link their original sources for verification by the reader makes them a far more accurate news source.

So why hasn’t blogging replaced mainstream media entirely? First, of course, is the credibility problem. A mainstream outlet, like CNN (or, more recently, Newsweek), has a substantial stake in getting the story right. In a business built on credibility and reputation, mistakes are not an option. The average consumer of information finds himself caught between a problem of capability and incentive: mainstream media has a much better incentive to be accurate, whereas blogs have a greater capability. The tie-breaker, as it turns out, is experience and probability. Mainstream media specializes in getting their stories right. Also, for someone who doesn’t know the difference between one blog and the next, the probability of randomly choosing one and having that one be at all credible is astronomically low. Mainstream media is probably not going to be unseated by blogging, in much the same was as newspapers and radio weren’t replaced by television. The main threat blogging poses is to political magazines and opinion publications (such as the Nation, National Review, and others).

Another space that blogging might occupy is that of local news. Individuals who care about the events that transpire in their small communities (Malchow, Seal) now have the ability to broadcast those events both as news and opinion. Personal politics come to the fore, Malchow argues. This is driven by the enormous demand that exists for information about institutions that are cagey about their information simply because of their cageyness. There’s a lot of information to be gleaned, too. Malchow argued that people are willing to give up all kinds of confidential information to dissent against their bosses, especially if they are assured that their identities will be protected.

Seal disagreed. The inherently short attention span of consumers of information makes a blog that focuses on small communities unsustainable. Blogs, Seal argued, are sustained by the diversity of the subject matter they cover, and this diversity is simply not present in a smaller setting. The real diversity of a blog, if there is any, lies in the comments section in which readers can reply to the posts of the blogger.

In any event, it’s fair to say that blogging and reading blogs appeals to a very niche audience. But, as Hinderaker pointed out, it’s a “very influential niche.” The danger, of course, lies in the potential for dilution of knowledge to the point where populism is confused with Truth. If media does in fact have an effect on political and intellectual discourse, and if blogging does in fact water down this discourse, then the effects of blogs could be truly harmful. This harm, however, should not overshadow the much greater tragedy that provided a backdrop for this panel on the expansion of the realm of electronic media: the death of Jean Baudrillard. So here’s to you, Jean! It seems only appropriate, however, in the context of Jean, a panel on blogging, and the hyperreality in which we live to clarify that Baudrillard never died, the blogging panel never took place, and you, reader, never read this article.

This Blog Article Does Not Exist

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