ketan.org >> pedantic

Friday, June 01, 2001

So here we have, in partes dos, a look at the Weblog "phenomenon" by journalist JD Lasica : parte uno parte dos

A quote from the article, courtesy of Doc Searls (he of the Cluetrain Manifesto):

Searls believes that blogs offer the news media a means of "re-personalizing journalism," through their subject matter and by connecting journalists to other journalists' journals and to expert sources. ... Searls says the media remain blind to the cultural and technological changes that are overtaking traditional modes of communication.

Be that as it may, I don't foresee any earthshaking changes in the structure of journalism. The strength of the weblog, as articulated above, focuses on the individualism of the weblog. Individualism, however, doesn't scale. A news site like CNN will never be supplanted by any weblog. Weblogs work on a small scale. They work from a single perspective. They're opinionated, argumentative, discursive. You will not find out about a train wreck from a weblog. You will not discover the results of an election in Scripting News. The Morning News will tell you about all sorts of wonderful information about graphic design principles, but for updates on the war(s) in Central Africa, well, you're out of luck. Weblogs cannot do this. Even if Dave Winer (of the aforementioned Scripting News) achieves his dream of bringing publishing to the masses, nobody wants to visit a dozen weblogs every day to get a coherent picture of the world. And I'm being optimistic to think it will only be a dozen. Traditional news sites will continue to exist to gather information from far-reaching sources and agglomerate it into a coherent, comprehensive source. Information. How fun. Now, obviously, that's not the only reason people read the news. Opinion sections would do much better as weblogs. They'd be more interesting, more varied, and much less sanitized. But that's not what people want out of The News. Searls acknowledges this, but Lasica does not emphasize it. Weblogs will remain niches. There must be a lowest common denominator for the news, because some things demand the resources of a news agency.

So then. Weblogs remain niches. Very good niches, though. Inter-personal communication is terrible. Most people don't know very much about each other, even the people they consider best friends. People just don't talk about very interesting, personal things. Weblogs are easier that way. Your audience is far away. Out of sight, out of mind. The message is easier to send, and easier to receive.

The kicker, though, is the obvious one. You remove the middleman. Information transfer is no longer mediated by the, well, media ("Allow myself to introduce... myself." **). All of a sudden, you can know directly what people elsewhere are thinking. The media never really tells you that. And even when they do, they never get enough people's perspectives. Everybody knows about tornadoes. When a twister comes through, the news goes and finds the most ignorant, dirtiest, inbred hillbilly they can. "It was pandelerium, Ma!" Or, on spring break, they always find the people whose vocabulary consists exclusively of "Whoo!" and "Dude." With a weblog, you can avoid that. Ideally. We'll see if that works for real.

** Pet peeve #392: I hate the (mis)use of myself. It is not a subject; that is I. It is not the standard object; that is me. It is the reflexive object. You only use it when the subject and object of the verb are the same. Everyday I hear someone use it as the subject of a sentence. "Mike and myself were at the bar..." Or an object. "They came to see Gopal and myself." Most of the sentences are like that. People can get a handle on difficult, hard-to-use words like I and me when they are the only subject or object. As soon as someone else is thrown in there, it becomes myself. This is not hard, people.

Pet peeve #25: While we're on the subject of grammatical unorthodoxy (to put it kindly), there's the other one. Improper use of the conditional. As in, "If I would have known they were going to be late, I would have driven more slowly." Uh uh. Didn't you people take French? Don't you know the SIMPCON? Si - Imperfect - Conditional. The condition clause is in the imperfect. As in, "If I had known..." The hypothetical clause is the part that takes the conditional. This is also not hard. Personally, I lay the blame for this on John Madden. I heard him misuse this several years ago on Monday Night Football (what? why are you looking at me like that?). A whole nation was exposed to this grammatical perversion. But we cannot give up. We must join together to protect the sanctity of the English language from this perversion.

This doesn't make me an anal jerk, does it? It does? Says you. Well nuts to you, go away.

Welcome to my webpage of hate.

¶ 132 Posted at 12.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( pedantic | web )