While blogs may provide a platform for multiple, mutable truths to co-exist, any analysis of blogging should have regard for questions of power and access. It will be argued that blogging is neither revolutionary nor radically postmodern but is profoundly influenced by the configurations of the western neo-liberal capitalist democracies that the Internet in its current form is both a product of, and remains dominated by (see Flew, 2005:71) Any analysis of blogging practice should take into account who is included in and excluded from cybercultures, how dominant discourses places limitations on who has the authority to speak about what and when, as well as the influence exerted by existing economic, cultural and political structures and power dynamics – in short an analysis informed by the very critical theories which Lovink posits that blogging is in opposition to. (Lovink, 2007a:6)
Media theorists propose a wide variety of understandings of the relationship between traditional journalism and new media. These range from the utopian to dystopian, Briefly then, early new media theorist posited that new technologies were destined to radically transform society, creating a flat, democratic participatory culture in which knowledge was built collectively, identity and community were fluid and politically engaged dissent was widespread. (Flew 2005:62) Later more critical theories emphasised the need for a political economy of the Internet, with greater attention paid to the influence social, economic and historical factors. (Flew, 2005: 79-80) The world wide web as we know it was born of the military and academic research, is significantly (and increasingly) occupied by multinational corporations and still populated largely by users from developed nations (Flew 2005:71, Roscoe, 1999:675) Finally some theorists emphasise the need to consider how users employ the new media technologies as part of their daily lives, continuous with and embedded in other social structures in which they participate. (Miller & Slater 2000: 5-6 in Flew, 2005:81)
Blood states that weblogs developed in the late 1990s (Blood, 2000). The earliest sites were link driven, combining commentary, thoughts and essays and required that the owner understand site building technology. In the most general terms blog is defined as “‘a frequently update site with new material posted at the top of the page.” Boyd (2006) underlines the need for a more tailored definition suggesting that blogs are best understood as a medium upon which a ‘diverse set of practices produce a variety of content” rather than as a genre of computer mediated communication.
Blood argues that early bloggers complied and annotated news items, often providing extra information, context or analysis sourced from alternatives to mass media outlets in an attempt to “redefine media as a participatory... project” (Blood, 2000) With the development of new software which simplified the process of maintaining a blog, the number of bloggers increased exponentially. Blood (2000) also sees this technological development as influential in the shift towards shorter journal-style postings with greater emphasis on reactions and impressions a view with which Lovink concurs. (Lovink, 2007a:2)
He portrays the increased number of bloggers as the ‘massification’ of the medium, rendering blogs banal via the establishment of normative practices which he sees as largely informed by public relations techniques. (Lovink 2007a:1-2) The fact that opening a new word document in Microsoft Office 2007 prompts the user to choose between a new document and new blog post suggests that the practice is endemic and marketable. That being said, the proliferation of blogs, user-friendly as they may be doesn’t mean that they are universally accessible.(e.g. Flew, 2005:71-75, Papacharissi, 2002:14). Moreover, Boyd (2006) highlights that a significant proportion Internet users don’t read blogs, with many not knowing what the term means.
Although Lovink acknowledges the difficulties of discussing ‘blogs’ in a generalised abstract, he concludes that this is necessary in order to develop a holistic theory of blogging that takes into account ‘technology, interface design, software architecture and social networking.” (Lovink 2007a:1) Indeed much of difficulty with Lovink’s argument arises because of its attribution of a particular philosophical standpoint to the medium as a whole - situating the practice of blogging in a culture of nihilism is problematic. This rather bleak outlook on society provides a difficult backdrop against which to analyse the influences blogging practices have exerted on traditional journalism and vice versa, particularly in the absence of an alternative project for new media. (Poster:1995)
Lovink challenges the assumption that blogs are new form of news media: “[bloggers] rarely add new facts… they find bugs in products and news reports, but [don’t] ‘unmask’ spin, let alone come up with well researched reports.” (Lovink 2007a:3) Rather than relying on the investigative journalism analogy, or the citizen journalism model, he prefers to describe bloggers as ‘gate-watchers’ who create ‘clouds of impressions’ around topics rather than adding anything substantial to media reports (Lovink 2007a:3)
Even where bloggers are engaged in deliberately journalistic pursuits, alternative news-making is a marginal practice in the blogosphere (Lovink, 2007b) Rather than blogs offering conceptual depth then, a generalised method for interpreting and attributing meaning to news arises. (Lovink 2007a:5) Lovink doesn’t address whether the development of a blogging-publics' hermeneutics influences or transforms journalist or traditional newsroom practices. It is debatable as to whether the marginality of the journalist-bloggers should mean that their practices aren’t influential, particularly in light of how widespread the view that blogs and news media have a symbiotic relationship.
It is important to acknowledge that in some limited circumstances bloggers are able to publish stories that otherwise wouldn’t be covered, whether due to structural or cultural limitations on journalists, or wilful blindness of the mass media, with the most oft cited example of this being Salam Pax’s blogging of the second Iraq War. ((Redden, 2003:163) This isn’t to suggest that these few marginal examples constitute an alternative to mainstream media as Kahn & Kellner (2004:94) contend, but neither should their existence be ignored.
Other writers suggest that some bloggers have the ability to draw mass media attention to otherwise neglected issues and stories, and potentially challenge the narrow scope of professionally accepted topics and sources. (Haas 2005:389) Moreover a form which juxtaposes news reporting and commentary from multiple sources facilitates the reader comparing and contrasting competing truth claims (Gallo, 2004, Haas 2005:390) This fits well with Lovinks argument about bloggers generally:
“Following Vattimo’s theory nihilism is a recognition of the plurality of meanings, and the beginning of new social paradigms in which truth is understood to be inescapably subjective…Questioning the message is a default position.” (Lovink, 2007a:8)
That being said Lovinks conclusion that therefore “a blogger is an individual who lives in self-conscious confrontation with the meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power” (Lovink 2007a:9) seems to attribute a level of critical self awareness which is inconsistent with much of his argument about the uncertainty driving the more confessional aspects of blogging (Lovink, 2007a:5) and the tendency to stay on the surface of issues rather than interrogating them which he identifies as “foundational in blogging” (Lovink, 2007a:10) addressed later in this paper.
It would seem that in some instances journalists are highly critical of bloggers (e.g. Cohen) interpreting the practice as a challenge to traditional journalism. This narrative highlights the informality, subjectivity, and perceived lack of accuracy of blog reporting (Bolton 2006) often choosing to cast bloggers as diarists who are “unworthy of journalist credentials” (Boyd 2006, Cohen 2006:165-6) Boyd continues: “…On the one hand journalists feel intimidated by bloggers’ ability to rapidly cover new material’ on the other journalists are dismissive of bloggers’ lack of code with respect to neutrality and checking of sources.” (Boyd 2006) Mainstream media coverage of some high profile bloggers’ decision to call the 2004 US election early in favour of Democratic candidate John Kerry is an often cited as an example of this. (Carlson 2007: 264) Carlson concludes that this oppositional discourse arises from the ‘dynamic relationship between blogs and traditional media” and constitutes a “struggle by journalists to define what counts as journalism and to stave off incursions from competing” sources of information with blogs having the potential to give rise to “different ways of producing and consuming political communication” (Carlson, 2007:275)
One suspects that this preoccupation with speed, facts and normative practice on the part of some bloggers is what Lovink refers to when he laments the failure of the blogosphere to create its own autonomous paradigm. (Lovink 2007:13) Boyd notes that many ‘journalist-identified’ bloggers are concerned with professional practice and seek the legal protection of being recognized as such. (Boyd 2006) Cohen suggests that this is attempt to ‘draw antiseptic barriers between the objectivity of journalism and the subjectivity of blogs” is more to do with idealised liberal traditions of journalism than actual practice. (Cohen, 2006:167)
The ‘new media’/ ‘old media’ dichotomy quickly becomes unsustainable in a convergence culture. This is particularly the case where the incorporation of blogs into mass media outlets websites has on journalists working in mainstream newsrooms. Matheson analyses this with regards to the Guardian’s blog, concluding that its use enables a greater range of expression and topic choice as well as a way of engaging with audiences which are seen as being less likely to consume news products. (Matheson 2004:460) Matheson finds that the blog in question rearticulates existing journalistic norms, in particular “‘some of the epistemological foundations of newswork” (Matheson 2004:444): “the weblog moves away from the rather abstract authority assumed by news text to a more situated authority in which we hear a journalistic voice choosing material as well as multiple and often discordant journalistic voices accessed through the links. In this context, meaning must be more actively constructed by the user” (Matheson 2004: 460-1)
This feeds into Lovinks point about the death of authority (Lovink 2007b) Nihilism, the ‘default postmodern position’, he argues, comes about in response to the continuation of old media paradigms in the face of the overwhelming certainty of utopian theorists that these systems would be overthrown. In this sense then, to be nihilist is simply to question the validity of truth claims made by authoritative sources be they state, ecclesiastical, corporate or mass media (Lovink 2007a:8, Lovink 2007b) In contemporary society then, “there is no a higher authority that sanctions the Truth, but the Media” (Lovink 2007c) Thus the practice of blogging “celebrates the death of centralised meaning structures and bears witnessed to a new crisis in existing belief systems.” Again the universalism of the statement is difficult to grapple with, however, it is certainly a useful and thought provoking idea – agreeing with the conclusion however relies on one having a similar world view to the author. As Boyd points out the diversity of practice and content is hardly unique to new media (Boyd 2006)
Lovink is critical of the failure of bloggers to analyse discourse, to employ considered rhetoric, and to go beyond the surface of issues. How should they overcome “the meaninglessness without falling back into centralized meaning structures?” (Lovink 2007a:3, 10) “Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go: there is no other world.” (Lovink 2007a:7) This is suggestive of earlier conceptualisations of the internet as constituting a new Habermasian public sphere. If understandings of media are accepted as being key to democracy then the participatory and dialogic potentials of new media technologies understandably give rise to some excitement. (Papacharissi, 2002:12) Although widely criticized for its exclusivity the idea of an informed public engaging in rational debate, it seems at least feasible that the interactivity offered by blogs could provide for a broader spectrum of dialogue and debate as well as a forum for the publicising of alternative and dissenting views. (e.g, Cohen 2006:167, cf Kahn & Kellner, 2004:93)
The wholesale transformation of the media and political discourse, however, is problematic. (Poster 1995) Romanticising the democratic potentials as somehow inherent in the medium lapse into technological determinism and as such fails to accord sufficient attention to the ways in which the media is embedded in social and economic contexts. (Bolton: 2006) Even if blogs facilitate conversation on issues or news reports, these opinions are subordinated to the writer in the first instance: Lovink points out that the form of blogs prevents an equal partner in dialogue (Lovink, 2007a:12) As Williams puts it “…media can only take effect through already present social processes and structures and will therefore reproduce existing patterns of use and basically sustain existing power relations.” (Williams in Lister, 2003:72, 81)
Moreover, and as Lovink points out somewhat obliquely, the expectation that that publics would be massively politicised by the arrival of the internet in a time when significant numbers of people are reporting a lack of interest in politics, institutional and otherwise. “Given the dominant patterns of global capitalism, it is far more likely that the Internet and the new technologies will adapt themselves to existing political culture rather than create a new one” (McChesney in Papacharissi 2002: 20) Simply giving ‘the public’ a voice doesn’t put those voices on par with the influence of mainstream media. Moreover, not all truths are created equal, some discourses are systemically and systematically privileged over others, which means that some voices are more likely to be received, accepted and perpetuated than others.
Lovink identifies the techno-social practice of blogging as a cynical, post-political condition, largely constituted by Foucaldian confession, in which conventions conformed to without any belief in their overarching validity (Lovink 2007a:5) Viewed in this light, its difficult to criticise bloggers for “expressing a kind of stylized uncertainty about what to think, like and believe” (Lovink 2007a:6) and the failure of radical alternative ways of understanding the world is rendered understandable.
Blogs, Lovink contends, are not about publics, but are chiefly “used as a tool to manage the self…their essential element is not the interactivity of the media but the sharing the thoughts and opinions of the blogger” (Lovink, 2007a:9-10) Through the process of gathering and ordering different texts, bloggers constituting themselves in a normative way as the capacity to craft links between content chunks” (Lovink 2007a:11) perhaps seeking validation through interaction with other like themselves. (Boyd in Lovink 2007a:12) Lovink is critical of this identifying the creation of ‘archipelagos of inward links” (Lovink 2007:a12) to in which everyone agrees and it would seem that this doesn’t expand public engagement or discourse.
Lovink seems surprised at the sheer amount of anodyne, overly self referential content of many blogs, however it would seem to this writer that his thesis that contemporary culture can be understood as nihilist and postmodern where truth is inevitably subjective could be interpreted as causing such fragmented, personalised narratives rather than the development of a radically different paradigm. (Lovink 2007a:13)If the vast majority of the content in the blogosphere uses standardised forms and comprises little more than a public affirmation of the ‘normality’ of the producer then the embrace of the underlying cultural norms is understandable, in the same way that expecting the widespread interrogation of privilege and dissent is counterintuitive in this context.
While blogs might give users in developed nations, with the necessary financial resources, hardware and expertise the ability to talk back to the mass media interests and perhaps to challenge dominant paradigm, it doesn’t mean that the voices get heard. Lovink posits that the vastness of the blogosphere means that conflicting opinions can co-exist without it becoming contested space .(Lovink, 2007a:12) which problematises the subversion of the dominant paradigm.
What Lovink fails to deal with that the nihilist societies he describes are also advanced western liberal democratic societies – and postmodern or not, some discourses are systematically and systemically privileged over others. If blogging software is a commodity which makes users feel like they are engaging in dialogue with news media as well as about news reports, then it could be argued that blogs are playing a hegemonic role, at least in neo-liberal capitalist societies. Lovink seems to suggest that the only possible reaction to current society is to accept that “there is no other world” With all due respect this both a denial of agency and an unnecessarily defeatist. Blogging and other new media forms are able to accommodate plural truths however, the practice of blogging and traditional understandings of journalism would seem to be influencing each other in a process of convergence.
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