1.) The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.
4.) In the weblog world every reader is actually a writer, and you write not so much for “the reader” but for other writers. So every reader is a writer, yes, but every writer is also a reader of other weblog writers—or better be.
—Jay Rosen —Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)
The “gift economy” thing is something I often find myself explaining to my old-media colleagues. While I do wonder, sometimes, why I spend so much time blogging, the truth is, I enjoy it immensely.
Still, here I am, giving away my thoughts “for free,” instead of carefully hoarding them and compressing them into a conference paper that I intend to read out loud to an audience of ten or twenty people, at a cost to my university of up to $1000 (for conference fees, airfare, hotel), and a cost to my family of two or three days of my absence.
I’m grading student blogging portfolios. The students were asked to include about four of their best blog entries, and samples of comments that they made on other students’ weblogs. Some students reported feeling disappointed that their best blog entries didn’t generate a lot of comments from readers. They can “gift” each other by posting comments on each others blogs, of course. But since it’s probably fair to say that even the most enthusiastic bloggers are blogging more than they really want to (since I do give “forced blogging” topics), their experience as student bloggers doesn’t really mesh too well with the gift economy.
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Good points. If I spend an hour reading 10 or 20 web pages, and I blog 2 of them, I've made editorial decisions. When a student merely reads assigned web pages, and comments dutifully when they are asked to comment, then they aren't exercising their critical skills in choosing what to link to and what to talk about, so that the most interesting (or most controversial) things bubble to the top. So far, I haven't seen much of that kind of activity. Without that interaction, it's hard to think of blogging as taking place in a gift economy, and thus hard to actualize its benefits. Now that I can see this clearly, I have a better idea of how to encourage outward-focused student blogging.
Thanks so much for this link, DGJ. One of Rosen's "ten radical things" that you didn't directly cite really spoke to me: "In journalism prior to the weblog, the journalist had an editor and the editor represented the reader. In journalism after the weblog, the journalist has (writerly) readers, and the readers represent an editor." This is the crux of what makes blogs great and the root of the problem with blogs in the first place. What happens when readers no longer edit? Is commenting and blogging another person's blog really a form of "editing," anyway? The "death of the editor" is something I'm seeing in all media venues, sadly. I love the liberty of the blogosphere, but I hate to see the trade-off in editorial standards in some venues. And at the heart of a lot of this is the issue of TRUST. Who do we trust and why? Sometimes it's a blogger; sometimes its big media.