It’s no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.|Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they’ve been used. —John C. Dvorak
—Co-opting the Future (PC Magazine)
This article seems to presume that many (if not most) bloggers are trying to blog for profit.For a person who has Internet access, the cost of producing a blog is minimal or nil; likewise, reading a blog costs nothing. One reason I bloog, and give away my ideas for free, is because I know that I benefit so much from the freely-given ideas I have read on other people’s blogs. I hope there will always be professional writers, but I also rejoice that so much amateur content is being produced, shared, enjoyed, and put to use in the world. The vast majority of bloggers aren’t in it for the money.
“Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers,” he says. But that presumes that professional writers don’t write voluntarily. Yes, writing is tiresome, and except for a few superstars, writing doesn’t pay very well, so many professional writers have made economic sacrifices to feed a compulsion that drives them to write. I recall a conversation I had with a struggling young actor who finally announced her decision to stop taking acting roles that were good opportunities but that didn’t pay anything — yes, they looked great on her resume and yes, she learned a lot, but all the time she was spending rehearsing or auditioning for free wsa time that she couldn’t spend looking for paid work. I feel the same way about my blogging, but quite frankly I’ve been fortunate enough that, while I don’t get paid directly for my blogging, as a new media teacher I feel that I need to blog in order to participate in the cyberculture I am teaching and studying.
Most academics don’t get paid for the academic articles they write, and get paid only very little for the books they write. When I give a talk at a conference, my university will pay my way (up to a point). Of course, this wasn’t true when I was a grad student — since there is very little research money in the humanities, I had to pay my own way to conferences, while students in engineering (for instance) had travel budgets from the corporations bankrolling their professors’ research. While grad students in the sciences thought of their research as a job, we in the humanities often didn’t even earn enough money to pay our tuition, so we ended up paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of marking stacks of papers and teaching lower-level classes. It came with the territory.
There are professional speech-givers who wouldn’t dream of giving a speech and getting reimbursed only for travel expenses, but as an academic, I’m expected to deliver papers at conferences. Yes, it’s a bother, but it comes with the territory.
I feel the same way about blogging… on a Saturday night after the kids are in bed, what am I doing? Blogging. A few years ago I might have been watching Saturday Night Live; now, rather than sit still and absorb media produced by someone else, I am spending a half hour or so creating someting of my own, and posting it for whoever finds it.
Dvorak cites the statistic that most blogs have a readership of 12. So what? If they are the right 12 people, and the blogger gets sufficient satisfaction, what’s the problem? Traditional diaries theoretically have a readership of one, but that shouldn’t devalue their importance in the culture of literacy. I think most professional writers do understand concepts such as self-expression and personal discovery. If each of a blogger’s 12 readers also has a blog, and each of those reader-bloggers is read by an overlapping but not identical group of 12, then the dynamics of producer and consumer, author and reader, authority and readership are completely re-written. This is part of the whole paradigm shift in new media.
I think what attracts me most about the blogging experience is the ability to interact with the blog’s author through comment features like this one. I’m not as likely to read a blog without it; I like having a voice in the conversation.
And I simply refuse to agree with Dvorak’s protest on the issue of returned links. I really could care less what anyone else’s motive is, or if they’re only linking to me so that I’ll link to them. It still amounts to one thing: another potential source of readers for my blog. And getting my voice out there, whether for friends, strangers, or potential employers (as has happened recently), is what blogging is about for me.
Yes, I must agree that many who have started out with wild enthusiasm in their discovery of blogging–probably because it costs little to nothing finanacially–have gone from dwindling entries to total abandonment. I’ll look at a list of say, 350 writing/writers blogs through Blogwise or one of the major compilers and find a good percentage of the blogs inactive. But for the majority of writers, the possibility of hitting the big time is next to nil, and they must prostitute themselves at some menial job that doesn’t pay much, or at least get some joy as copywriters, editors, journalists, etc.–much as the creative photographer who must do weddings to make a living. But blogging still serves an audience for personal fulfillment, companionship, ego, group focus, etc. and there will be those who will be blogging for a long, long time–unless something even better comes along. We depend on the internet for information now. Blogging often consolidates that information into easier to find bases, and provides the ability to discuss it with someone as well. Forums on websites have proven that there is a need for the camaraderie that was threatened by the computer, and now is being provided by computers. We’re tied into these contraptions no matter how we try to deny it. Since we’re going to sit here anyway, it’s nice to know a friend is just a couple keystrokes and a click away.
Susan, yes indeed — I find blogging much more rewarding than TV. Blogging is work, but that’s the point — I’d rather spend some time and end up with something to show for it, rather than drop that time down a black hole and give control of my senses and my brain to someone else. (OK, OK, sometimes I do appreciate escapist entertainment, like anyone else). Mike, I’ve often thought of blogging as a game. And yes, blogging as we understand it now is probably going to go out the window when the next thing comes along, but I think it’s probably safe to say that whatever will replace blogging will build on the collaborative/community aspects of blogging. Open source communities are (or should be) about giving intellectual property away for the good of all, rather than giving only as much as will benefit you personally. If we had a robust, user-friendly open source alternative to Windows, our computers would cost a lot less. There are, of course, open source operating systems, but they were designed by geeks for geeks, and you have to be a geek to use them effectively, but that’s beside the point. Actually, at the moment I don’t know exactly what the point is… so I’d better submit this comment before I edit it out of existence.
Thanks for turning us all on to this article. I agree that blogging is SO much more than Dvorak claims. In a nutshell: Dvorak’s column is textbook defensiveness. As a columnist, he feels threatened economically and paradigmatically by blogging culture, so he’s lashing out by writing it off entirely. I think it’s interesting because here a computer columnist has voiced what I hear so many fiction writers saying about it, too: that it’s mostly free advertising (without valuing the dynamics of the discourse itself). Yet Dvorak’s observations still carry a modicum of truth that bloggers should be concerned about: blogging IS being coopted by big biz; the vast majority of blogs DON’T and never will have staying power; the motives behind blogging often DO viel a hidden agenda (whether commercial or psychological); and blogging very well COULD be more of a fad than the paradigm shift bloggers think they are. Writing (or content providing) is work — it takes discipline; it takes sacrifice. Some bloggers have a big picture view, but most can’t sustain it, because they have unrealistic assumptions about their audience and they don’t get enough payback for all that energy and effort. Ego-strokes and free advertising through link-backs simply for more link-backs isn’t as meaningful an enterprise as it might seem…it’s a game of sorts…and people are only willing to give away so much “intellectual property” to this game before they feel ripped off. Open source communities require equality among the participants; not all bloggers are or ever will be equal or have an equal stake in the game. The more I blog, the more interested I get in the psychological investments that bloggers put into this game. I think Dvorak just doesn’t want to play. And the sad truth is that so many good writers don’t either. I wonder what this is costing us in cultural riches, even as we finally have access to voices that would have been silent without the ascension of blogging technology.
As a subscriber to PC Magazine, I’m familiar with Mr. Dvorak’s opinions. But hooray for you to defend the idea of blogging. That there are thousands of people blogging out there indicates to me that many people are tired of the ideas being fed to them by TV programming that is geared toward the masses (oh, CSU has high ratings–let’s make more just like it). And many professional writers who can scribble things out quickly will follow suit with their books as well. I’ve literally perused hundreds of blogs in the past month and a half since I’ve jumped on the bandwagon, and have noticed that: 1)a great number of them are creatively designed, grammatically pretty correct, well written and interesting, 2)many people have hidden talents that were not being expressed until they found a voice in blogging. Somehow their opinion hold more weight when preserved upon a computer screen with the possibility of being “heard” rather than lost in verbal shouting at the TV screen whereupon it’s lost except for dirty looks from family members. I believe that blogging is just one of the ways that audiences are being pulled away from their TV’s.