Are Blogs Becoming the New Viral Email?

By John Ballard

Most active Internet users left viral email behind years ago. Of course one never "leaves it behind" any more than junk mail or unsolicited phone calls, but as credible sources of new information forwarded emails are as dated as vinyl records. Snopes, Truth or Fiction and Urban Legends are still around but there are too many other ways to validate new information without going there. Who drinks tap water any more when bottled or filtered water is readily available?

Back in the day of newsgroups and message boards readers learned to evaluate new information by following chat streams and such, but the effort was often wasted because with screen names one never knew anyone's real identity.

The advent of MySpace and Facebook intersected neatly with smart phones and PDA's to spread like the seasonal flu through an increasingly tech-savvy population. At first a generational phenomenon with kids leading the way, Facebook is now as ubiquitous as cell-phone snapshots. Grandparents and distant uncles now have Facebook accounts who a few years ago looked forward to the local newspaper.

We now have a stratified media mix which seems to be messing with our politics and public opinion, and not in a good way. As all leaders instinctively know, narrative always trumps details. Whether its a teacher who promises to do something fun as soon as we finish our work or a president calling for war, most people are more interested in what's to come than paying attention to what's between now and then.

As today's civilized tyrants know well, book-burning, forbidden lists and censorship have been important tools in the toolbox of tyranny since forever. Whether its the leadership of the People's Republic of China or the power-brokers of corporate America, the most important advisers to those in control are pollsters in one form or another. That's the real reason that Wikileaks is causing such a stir. Even without the details, just the threat of a disrupted narrative is all it takes to shake the foundations of power.

In the same way that technology intersected with the social media to create a combustible social change, the advent of Twitter is starting to eclipse the more measured -- read slower, more thoughtful, nuanced -- mediums of blogging and periodical commentary. Twain's dictum that a lie can find its way halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes is still partly true, but these days, thanks to technology, Truth skips the shoes (and pajamas) and grabs a smart phone instead. As Wikipedia illustrates the "wiki" phenomenon has become the new shaper of narrative. Words like hivemind and crowdsourcing are no longer mere clever neologisms.

Blake Hounshell puts a heavy point replete with documentation into 140 characters or less

 

He already got stuck in another tar baby trying to follow a pissing contest between Wired and Glenn Greenwald.

I love a good blog fight as much as anyone, but after reading several thousand words of accusations and counter accusations being slung between Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald and Wired's Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen, I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out what, exactly, this particular dispute is all about. For those of you who haven't been paying attention, first of all: congratulations. Second, here's a quick synopsis...[etcetera.]

The Felix Salmon piece linked by Hounshell's tweet is what set my mind to wondering if blogging may be on the way to the dustbin of media castoffs, along with newsgroups, message boards, chat rooms and comments threads.

What we�re seeing here is the professionalization of the blogosphere � Greenwald and Poulsen both get paid to blog, as do I � and the way in which that has led to the less journalistic parts of blogging moving over to the informal and freewheeling venue of Twitter. I was happy to take a small part in this debate over Twitter this morning, for instance, but I�m concentrating on meta-issues here, partly because I�m clearly conflicted: I have a big story in the latest Wired magazine, and might well be appearing on Wired.com�s blogs in future, too. On Twitter, such conflicts don�t seem to matter, or need to be addressed, in the way that they do on a professional blog.

This development is not, in my mind, a good thing. It robs from the blogosphere much of its naturally conversational element, which has largely moved to Twitter. Back in 2004 or so, it was easy to follow debates back and forth between blogs just by clicking on links; now, it�s much harder, and professional blogs are much more likely to link to straight news stories or just break news themselves than they are to link to other bloggers. Discussions and debates on Twitter aren�t archived in the way that they were on blogs, and they�re functionally impossible to search for if you�re more than a few months away from the event.

This particular debate is big and loud enough that bloggers are following it, archiving it, and linking to important tweets. But most Twitter discussions never reach that level, and therefore will disappear in a way that blog discussions never did. At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.

I'm grabbing this bit of flotsam quick before it gets washed away in the waves. I think Salmon is on to something. I don't really think blogging will go the way of viral email but that made for a catchy post title. However, unless and until the Tweet World gets better organized all we can say about it is that it's a cyber echo of the Tea Bag phenomenon. A bit more cute, perhaps, but no better informed as most Tweetstreams will attest.