Clay Shirky, star digeratus and influential web thinker-tinkerer, ponders on the 80/20 rule, equality and future of blogging. Building on an interesting article from a couple of years ago, he affirms that if the blogosphere appears to be mercilessly elitist (in terms of results, not chances), this should not bother us very much. This is just a sign of healthly openness and diversity of choice, he thinks. I don’t necessarily disagree with this view, but I am less optimistic as far as his rosy future of blogging is concerned. The fact that blogging uses the star system for validating success and motivating the newcomers might be its eventual demise.
The future and the eventual demise of blogging is driven by the fact that this publishing method is primarly an avenue to go to or come from other media experiences. This is its strength and will be its eventual downfall. Top bloggers are successful only in so far as they succeed in filtering and remixing existing media content. As they become more and more institutionalized, they are forced to start producing their own content. Yet, when this happens they cease to rely on commenting, linking and interlinking as an engine for growth. (Instapundit, for example, does not use comments anymore.)
A-list bloggers are behaving like traditional media outlets and for them, like for any other star, the value of being “part of the crowd”, declines with every minute they spend in the information stratosphere. Their leaving of the masses behind reduces the incentives of those who are emulating them to try as hard (and to link to them as hard) as they could to reach them .
In essences, as the success of the top dogs becomes less and less replicable, the value of blogging will decrease, and less individuals will want to publish their precious thoughts or to spend their limited supplies of time and energy on trying, since the promise of reaching the blogging stratosphere ain’t what it used to be.
What will put the final nail in the blogging’s coffin is that new types of media experiences will for sure move the public attention to other methods of social mixing and matching media content (Just as blogging moved our attention from newsgroups and virtual communities of all sorts). Technologies such as wikis, digg.com, slashdot, etc, although sociologically speaking very similar to blogging, phenomenologically are quite different creatures and will bring with them different cultures, star systems, etc. Blogging will thus live for an eternity and a day, as they say, before they will be plowed under by the socio-technical logic of decentralized information technologies.
The net giveth, the net taketh away…
Given the discussions of A-listers and “power-law” distributions in the story you recently linked to:
Perhaps these anti-diplomatic aspects of blogging come up the most when we take a diplomatic form and develop a competitive product out of it (as with the advertising on Gawker and others). In these cases, we see a tough intersection between democratic forms and the competitive nature of capitalist enterprises (an issue that lies behind a number of problems in the U.S.?).
IF THIS IS TRUE, what happens when wikis and other decentralized formats go commercial? (This isn’t a challenge- I’m really curious).
Well, actually blogs are intesely competitive and rife with conflict and controversy. They did not need to wait for capitalism to do the job of separating the stars from the grains of sand…
In the marketplace of blogs the same old rules for community creation, integration, and segregation apply through a different medium. Competition between ideas derives from the competition between idea peddlers– in this case the bloggers who are segregating themselves as the second step in entering the medium. Rogers, Strogartz, Ormerod, and others talk about the stages of diffusion, then consolidation, then maturity which can be applied in any medium or market. Bloggers have exerienced the explosion and innovation of blogging as a new phenomena, they are now taking on more sedate, expert roles as the dozens of stars emerge from the thousands of initial bloggers (consolidation), and next we’ll see blogging become mainstream.
Blogging won’t die or go away– no form of media has ever died out. (People still carve on tablets and make scrolls…) They just loose their interest for users who move on to different media. The Internet’s first true mass medium – the discussion group- is still around and used by millions of people.
I guess I’m interested in the ways that blogging (along with other developing media) is democratic versus the ways it is competitive (e.g., when does the number of hits become important, or when isn’t it, besides with advertising prices).
In addition, what exactly is the “end” of the blog? Surely, there will still be people who use the framework from time to time, but when does the number of people who “lose interest” in this particular medium reach a mass critical enough to signify an “end” within a culture (if we can talk about culture so monolithically)?