There is no doubt that blogs are the most egalitarian form of mass communication ever to come down the pike. The only thing even close to comparable was when printing presses became practical and cheap enough for one person to own and operate. And we know what happened then…
The work of Tom Paine and his fellow pamphleteers can easily be said to have changed the world. By distributing revolutionary thoughts and ideas to a country full of rebellious souls starved for them. Starved for change…starved for a change from monarchy and despotism. Starved for a new kind of freedom.
I’m pretty sure that it was Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash who pointed out that for every revolutionary development in “mass” communication there has been a corresponding social revolution hard on its heels.
Hard on its heels is of course a relative term, historically speaking. But from way back in the times of the beta version of Clay Tablet 1.0…..The ability to preserve, store and most importantly, distribute information throughout the land has changed societies and ‘civilization’ itself. Now I am not a historioranter like our beloved Moonbat, so I am speaking generally here, not accurately, lol. But when the Code of Hammurabi was carved into a stele for all to see….and then distributed to all the courts of the land on clay tablets, The Rule Of Law was born. (And survived all the way To George Bush!) ‘Modern’ commerce was also born, as written records could be kept and stored efficiently for the first time.
Then came papyrus and paper, streamlining and lightening the whole process of storing and distributing info, making it much easier and much more common. (Mailmen everywhere breathed a sigh of relief!) Real books were possible for the first time and of course libraries, etc. The effects are nearly endless.
Then the printing press itself, and for the first time, true mass communication came into being. As many (rich) people could share and distribute the exact same info without having to laboriously copy every word. The ability to share ideas with….everyone. (Who could afford it)
And on to newspapers, truly mass distribution of information, to anyoe with a penny….just a few of the huge amount of consequences of newspapers were things like, a journalistic standard of objectivity, editorials, exposes…and a truly informed citizenry regarding the actions of its government. The true Power of the Press was born.
Next to radio…and the real establishment of one of the cornerstones of modern society…..mass advertising! As well as mass distraction….the circus of distractions (and news) beamed directly into our homes for the first time.
And then of course ….television. 60 years later and we are still trying to understand all of the ways television has changed our society. But it cannot be denied that it has changed it to a truly revolutionary degree
And that brings us to the World Wide Web and….blogging. Depending on which innovation you date it from, a new medium of mass communication just about one decade old…really just in its infancy. Especially in regards to the social revolution it has the potential of sparking. Despite the very real obstacle of the availability of the tech….and the Digital Divide, iow the economics involved in participating on the Net, for the first time not only can ordinary citizens publish their ideas, but they also have the capacity to communicate peer to peer…face to face…with nearly anyone in the technologically advanced areas of the planet.
Who knows what the implications of that will end up being? What social revolution that will spark….that it IS sparking?
We are on the cutting edge of a powerful new medium. And we bemoan its limitations! We all wish that the rest of the world could feel and experience and participate in not just the liberation of being able to obtain news and information of the world free of powerful political or corporate filters, but also experience the freedom and empowerment of talking to other people, REAL people (for the most part) on the net and sharing ideas and concerns and uniting in thought and action to ….make a difference.
In his essay Guerrilla Media Warfare, Gabriel D shared his thoughts on how to reach out even farther to the rest of the …non-blogging….world. Before starting Docudharma I spoke at length with some of the leading lights in the blogging world about an even more ambitious project than DD. Of the next step in blogging, looking forward past the current giants of blogging, Daily Kos and Huffpo…to the next mini-revolution in the greater revolution we are a part of. The next step in distributing information interactively.
We are struggling to either get out of…or expand the Silicone Cage, as BruceMcF aptly names it. Internet usage will only keep growing, so we have got that going for us…which is nice.
But! That also means that there will be more content to sift through. Not all of it as enlightening as we wish, and mimicking the worst of what television has brought us.
So the challenge isn’t just growth, but also focus. In some ways, the current version of blogging has topped out or plateaued. It IS time to begin writing the next chapter, not just of the blogging revolution, but of the social evolution that accompanies it.
Since what we do here is ideas (between bouts of silliness) let’s put our thinking caps on and try to anticipate what the next revolution will be. So we can both help to facilitate it, and be part of it….or perhaps even spark it!
There have been talks about building some kind of Supersite….and the financing and logistics needed to do that, lol.
Patriot Daily suggested a bloggers union
The distribution of user generated multi-media is assuredly part of the next phase.
What else? What will it look like, what will it feel like?
I’m not expecting (though it would be nice!) to come up with The Answer in the comments, lol. But this is definitely one of the aspects of Blogging the Future, and something we need to be constantly thinking about and revisiting. So…get those big brains fired up!!! And let’s keep talking about it.
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is that my project, with the help of everyone, will become so successful that it will no longer be needed. All the people will be reading it on the net themselves. Contributing to the content. Engaging with us.
Until then, we’re at the crossroads. In the midst of the revolution. Where it ends, I dunno. But I know where I’m trying to push it. 😉
… I think distribution is indeed the problem.
How could we advertise? How could we get a big list of emails and send out a nicely done blurb of this site with a link to get folks curious?
I was also thinking of New Yorker magazine (and others like it) … they sell little tiny ads that a lot of folks read … maybe that could be an option.
I don’t like the idea (yet) of a supersite or a union of blogs. Just don’t think we’re ready or that it’s an organic kind of growth.
Other than that I haven’t a clue!
Followed closely by it’s adaptation for porn.
on who you are trying to reach. Some people are readers. Some are listeners. Some are chatty. Some are not. Some will never engage, period.
I don’t know that you can expect a single place for everyone.
But god, I hope it isn’t Second Life. I find that to be just way too much overhead for conversation.
Mostly I think I want a pub.
The big question is what scale you want to act on – you can have meaningful conversations, leading to new ideas, only with a relatively small number of participants, giving you the time to think about what you read, think about what you write, and join in. But to have an impact, you want to get read by more.
So you need a blog on the scale of DD or ET to discuss things, create ideas and finetune messages, and a loudspeaker like dK to spread them out – or a distributed medium like blog networks, but then you never know what will catch on or not…
The balance is never simple.
What good is Common Sense if you couldn’t find it at the library?
We generate volumes of content, some of it is even good, nay great, but we’re hampered by poor retrieval, especially at Docudharma. We need a better way than bookmarks and tags to retrieve existing essays. Google search isn’t working well.
There is NO point in creating insightful analysis or commentary if it only exists in the moment. We need a better way to retrieve the information.
as in magazine’s with sections and a table of content? like the poems could be collected in one place and same with the literature and politics. An archive not just a dust gatherer.
What is our goal here to bring in more participants? I worked in print marketing and my major at art school was advertising design where the starting point was Who What Where Why. Technology may change the form but the basics of good advertising is still the same.
First ‘where’ that came in my head was utube. Your billboard idea wasn’t half bad. Enough talent here for great visuals. I also like kj idea of a print out, but in order to be affective it would have to creatively entice to the site both visually and copy a teaser.
I liked that little widget that news corp had on this morning.Some thing little not google generated but fun and small. I like Buhdy do not understand the tech part of the tubes but I liked that it had linkies was easy to install and quite entertaining. Obama has used the net and hooked it up nicely with the ground reality.
A antidotal thing: my grandaughter is throughly plugged into the net. When she stays with me she insists that I let her comment under my uid at dkos because she says I can take on those stupid lawyers. Her hangout areas online are utube and facebook. She loves the fray and is like most her age political. Our audience is those that feel at home blogging and interacting, not the ones who feel threatened internally and from the system with discourse and the responsibility of sorting it out yourself.
Once again what is our goal here? More traffic, more new users, more influence? The What is tough as I do love the freedom to roam this wide open space. Having found a range for ponies that lets me rip I have mixed feeling about consolidation. Sorry to ramble on.
for a while now and probably don’t have much to offer. I know nothing about the “tech” side and have no experience with journalism.
What I do think about is how many liberal leaning friends I have who never blog and don’t plan to (most of them think I’m a bit “off” for doing it in the first place). It might be that the plateau that has been reached is that blogs have garnered all those who have always been considered political junkies.
If there is a larger audience to be reached, it would be those who need some of the information we have access to, but not as much of it – or in a simplified form. And I’ve always thought that the addition to “news” that blogs bring is more in the commentary than in the breaking news. Its in the framing and understanding of events more than the events themselves.
So, with all that, if you want to reach my friends who think blogging is a bit odd, providing a frame for a few current events is short form might interest them.
Of course, us political junkies would still need someplace to get our fix.
First, the funny trivia one. One of my professors mumbledy years ago said that most history books date the arrival of the first printing press (in what is now the U.S.) to the delivery of an English-language press in the mid-1600s CE. Not so, the Prof said. The first printing press arrived approximately 100 years before that–but it was a Spanish-language press and it was delivered to what is now the southwestern U.S.
Second, about sifting through the vast amount of info… Somebody at DKos wrote about how very few Kossacks actually filled out their blogrolls. After thinking about it, I just got around to doing mine, because I’ve found some great sites by following links on other people’s blogrolls. It’s a very unscientific way to sift through the huge volume online, but it does help a little. I’ve also found some very useful sites through StumbleUpon, but it’s certainly not efficient.
BTW, did you see this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02…
Somehow I think the Book of All Democratic Politics would have to be updated too frequently to be useful…