In 2004 I jumped into the world of blogging in a big way, both in the sheer amount that I read on a daily basis and my personal output in a widely-unread blog with a name only a pretentious 19-year-old could come up with. At that time, Very Serious Person that I was, I hated the term “blogosphere”. At a time when I was angrily arguing that the Mainstream Media was overrated and bloggers were the future, “blogosphere” seemed awkward and embarrassing. I tried to avoid using it, instead resorting to things like “blog ecosystem”. In the end, I relented, because it was clear that blogosphere was here to stay, and it began to feel even more awkward to be the only one not saying it.
Nine years is a long time in the cycle of media storytelling, to say nothing of technology and technological adoption. Nowadays you’ll still get the occasional scare piece to the tune of “Jesus Christ the Internet is nothing but one, big, angry mob of wide-eyed vigilantes!” but these are at least as likely to cover people’s activities on Twitter and similar social media as on blogs. For the most part, the role of the blog has been cemented and matured, within a larger (dare I say it?) ecosystem of social interactions and media platforms.
There is greater appreciation for the fact that a blog is nothing but one part of the greatly lowered barriers to entry into producing public content, and that non-professionals can and do contribute a great deal to the public conversation every day. Some of them have aspirations of becoming professional contributors to this conversation, but many do not.
As perceptions and usage of the blog have matured, there has been an increasing allergic reaction to some of the rhetoric of the early adopters. More than once I have seen friends I follow on Twitter complain about the term blogosphere and wish that its usage would cease.
I want to defend the much maligned blogosphere, and not just on the (very valuable) rule of thumb that if 19-year-old Adam Gurri believed it, there was probably something crucially wrong about it. Blogosphere was a term coined and adopted by people who were sick of the modes of conversation inherited by modern media from our mass media past. Bloggers who wrote about new media in the first half of the last decade were sick of bad fact-checking and baked in moral assumptions being hidden under the veil of a style of fake objectivity. Most of all, they were sick of people taking themselves too damned seriously.
That is why blogs writing about rather serious topics nevertheless took on silly or offensive names such as Instapundit or Sandmonkey. It’s why many posts that had ever increasing weight in the public discussion used an inordinate amount of profanity to make their points.
The equilibrium has shifted since then; now there are a greater number of professional outlets that have adapted their rhetoric to be less stilted and less objective, if still intended to be respectable. And the blogs that carry weight have, in my subjective perception, seemed to tone down the juvenile naming conventions and swearing in posts, to a certain extent.
Nevertheless, I like blogosphere because it has that overtly geeky, tongue in cheek side to it that I think is unlikely to become irrelevant in my lifetime. We could all stand to take ourselves a little less seriously.
