[Warning: small rant ahead.]
Via Corvida at SheGeeks, here comes another post related to the deluge of information that this age of connectivity has ushered in. This time, Steve Hodson of WinExtra ponders whether or not bloggers should be considered the digital equivalent of cable news anchors:
As this tsunami of information keeps rolling over us at an ever increasing amount these aggregators [i.e. FriendFeed, Google Reader, Twitter] have become almost indispensable for a lot of people but I wonder if at some point bloggers who use these new social media tools correctly will become the better aggregator - or better yet a personal news anchor for the people that read their blogs or follow them on the various social media outlets.
He later concludes:
Where bloggers can be the most useful to their readers and / or social aggregator followers is by learning how to use all the social tools available to us and basically act as a filter. After all this is our social network and it only exists because our readers / followers find value in what we bring to them whether it be through our blogs or on a social aggregator. We in effect become their news hub. We might be one of many but at some point they have developed a sense of trust in the news we send their way. We have in effect I believe become news anchors providing our readers with a way to manage their daily information flow.
While I appreciate the angle Steve is coming from, I very much disagree.
First, I take exception to his calling social networks “ours” (and by ours, I assume he means bloggers’). Social networks don’t belong to anyone. Individuals have their social graphs, which intersect with others’ graphs; the combination of these webs of connections is a social network. Digital social networks don’t exist only “becuse our readers [...] find value in what we bring to them”. Digital social networks exist because human, analog social networks exist. It only makes sense for analog systems to render themselves digitally in one way or another. The idea that bloggers “own” social networks is not only false, but frightening.
I also take exception to the idea that an individual’s daily information flow should be outsourced to others. Of course, I absolutely agree that bloggers can be guides to and recommenders of information. After all, that’s what Tropophilia is all about. Whether we simply relay interesting posts to you via Monday Morning Links or generate original commentary, our primary goal is to share interesting ideas with you that you might not have otherwise considered.
But Steve states that bloggers can be “most useful” by essentially filtering information for readers. Our task, he says, is to master the online tools of aggregation and organization in order to let you know what’s important. Or, as Corvida puts it:
If you use any type of social media to share information, you’re contributing to the filtering process. If you blog, you’re contributing to the filtering process, while also adding to what could be noise for some.
Is that really filtering, though? Because I am writing a post about this topic rather than the potential Yahoo!-Microsoft merger, does that mean that this topic is more important or interesting than that? Nope. Besides, dozens if not hundreds of other blogs will choose to write about Yahoo!-Microsoft instead. If one hundred bloggers are presented with one hundred topics on which to write, and each chooses a different one, then is anything really being filtered?
My take is that the role of bloggers (and I distinguish a blogger from a digital journalist) is to write about and share what is important to them. When they choose information to share, they shouldn’t feel an obligation to find what is most “important” to the reader. The only real obligation they have is to themselves.
Obviously, this is different when you’re blogging for money. To get paid you need pageviews, to get pageviews you need an audience, to get an audience you have to write about things that will interest people. And yes, I suppose there may be some obligation to stay “on topic” vis-à-vis the subject of one’s blog, though that obligation is loose.
But, on the whole, I think that bloggers are most useful when they care about what they’re writing about. Blogging is personal, and they can choose to be as “useful” and “responsible” to their readers as they see fit.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Duchamp.
Jrod, I think you’re distracted by verbiage here…seems to me that you’d actually agree with Steve Hodson. I think you get hung up on this idea that bloggers have an obligation to serve as absolute news filters for their readership. If that’s the obligation, bloggers might find it necessary to alter the topics they cover to include anything that might be of utmost importance, instead of (as you suggest) blogging about topics that interest the author. But I think your concern and rant are off base because of the nature of the blogosphere:
1. blogs gain readership precisely because the topics covered are interesting to readers. But as you well know, no blog would be good unless the author(s) contributed personal expertise, opinion, and interests to the mix of topics covered and commentary offered. SO I would argue that blog readers ALREADY recognize (and, in fact, DEMAND) bloggers to follow their passions because that’s what attracted them to the blog in the first place.
2. the best blogs form relationships of trust with their readers; this makes the filtering effect valuable. If I trust certain bloggers to bring interesting and important things to my attention, they’re contributing to a more fulfilling experience for ME, the reader. I’m not going to get all of my news from one place, but if each site I visit satisfies an information desire (news about clean tech, environmental news, political news, info about the next Office episode, etc) then I’m better off visiting sites run by authors who I’ve discovered share many of my interests.
3. You say:
“My take is that the role of bloggers (and I distinguish a blogger from a digital journalist) is to write about and share what is important to them. When they choose information to share, they shouldn’t feel an obligation to find what is most “important” to the reader. The only real obligation they have is to themselves.”
I would counter that good blogs do this, but only attract readers because “what is important to [the blogger]” is interesting and important to readers. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what Hodson suggests, and I think you’re distracted by semantics and somewhat vague language (for instance, I don’t think he means “our” social networks in the possessive way you interpret, but rather is referring to the social networks built around blogs and social feeds…isn’t the Tropophilia feed ours, just as the items we share in google reader “ours”?)
You are probably right that my disagreement is almost entirely about word choice. In fact, I am continually irked by references to what “bloggers” should and shouldn’t do, how they can be most “useful”, etc. And it’s not just this post. A “blogger” is simply a writer, and I hate that it’s been construed to mean something beyond that. “Blogging” is keeping a log of entries on the Internet — that’s it. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of variations of bloggers — just like there are hundreds of variations of writers — and I generally disapprove of any sort of recommendation for how they should do what they do. Just like I would disapprove of someone saying what “musicians” or “painters” should or shouldn’t do or how they can be useful.
I didn’t do a good job of it, but I do basically agree with the fundamental point Steve is making. Bloggers (in the most general sense) can be sort of like news anchors, in the sense that they redeliver information that already exists, or they comment on information with their own perspectives. And I think that’s all fine and well, obviously, because that’s what you and I hope Tropophilia is or will become — a destination for people to learn and converse. As opposed to “filter”, I would suggest we’re lighthouses, beacons, or prisms. We don’t block anything out, we just provide a point of reference that readers trust — exactly as you say.
My most profound disagreement is his statement that bloggers should be the managers of general readers’ daily information flows. I don’t think I misconstrue his meaning there — if you read his full post, he implies that the tools of organizing, aggregating, and consuming information that are being developed today (Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc.) should primarily be used and mastered by bloggers, who in turn filter information through their own blogs or shared links to readers. I don’t think that is the right approach. I think those tools should be accessible enough so that everyone feels comfortable using them to find what they’re looking for. Readers can and should certainly continue to rely on blogs to guide and inform them, but I don’t think blogs should be the one-stop destination to which people turn for all their information. The whole point of the digitally democratic Internet is that the information is out there for everyone, and that you should not feel a need to go through anyone else to access it.
Re: your point #1 — I didn’t mean to suggest that bloggers aren’t already following their passions. I merely wanted to emphasize my belief that this should be their top priority, rather than focusing on being a “filter” for their readers.
Re: your last paragraph, I see how his remark about social network possession could be interpreted as you describe, so I suppose I recant my remarks in that regard. Steve’s whole post is a little hard to follow, both with vague vocabulary and rather poor sentence construction. :)
Buhzactly. There’s so much information out there, I find myself reading blogs not so much for the information contained within, but for the personalities they’re filtered through. If I want to read the Entire Internet every day, I will, but most likely, I’m going to find a handful of internet personalities I enjoy and I’ll peruse what they happen to be interested in at the moment.
Please tell me that I’m not the only one skeptical of bloggers people who use blogs to post very personal stories, or very political, partisan posts completely outside the realm of objectivity … and then come back and pass something off as digital journalism as if nothing happened. It especially perturbs me when “digital journalism” pieces are treated like be-all, end-all truth. That seems like the biggest problem to me.
the word “bloggers” should have been struck out. Does that tag not work here?
testCorvida has written an excellent response to my critique here. I followed up with a comment. Keep the conversation going! And welcome to any SheGeeks readers!
There are some great comments here!
@Sierra Alpha Mike - Sometimes those personal posts are what makes a post so great. The majority of the posts on my site (SheGeeks) are very much from a personal stand point. Sometimes, that’s all you can do. You can’t always speak for everyone nor remain objective on everything. You have feelings and are human. In being objective, sometimes you have to remove your personality from the posts. We can’t all do that, and I’d rather a blogger didn’t do that.
First off Corvida is right - there are some great comments here which is nice to see.
There is a lot of what you have written that I want to take some time and think about but I did want to clarify one point. When I said in my post our networks I wasn’t referring to the larger blogger ecosphere. What I was referring to was the network that develops around each individual blogger and the regular readers of that blog who partake in making and responding to comments.
In effect you have your own network here as you reply to comments made about your posts and then your readers in turn comment on them. How much more social is that and if this interaction grows over time then yes you have a network of people who if you meet on another blog you have already a pattern of friendship in place so your conversation there will be affected by that.
Additionally I would like to say to a couple of the commenters who have a problem with the whole blogger naming I feel exactly the same way. I think that the moment a blogger steps over a fuzzy line of a blog being a personal space to one where they begin offering up opinions and thoughts on things like technology they have stopped being a blogger per se. It is my feeling that they have become the equivilent of a digital columnist rather than a “blogger”.
Thanks, Steve, for your thoughts. And I enjoyed reading your related thoughts in your follow-up post on WinExtra.
Glad to see the whole “social network ownership” vagueness cleared up, and to see that we agree there! I absolutely agree with you in that regard!
Also glad to see we mesh on the too-freely-used “blogger” term. As opposed to the distinction you draw, however, I think blogger captures any person who writes on the web in a repetitive, chronological fashion: from you to me to Michael Arrington to Fake Steve Jobs. Some are journalists, others enthusiasts, others fiction writers… but all bloggers. To say a “blogger” should or should not do something — unless it involves the basic mechanics of keeping a blog — is overly generalizing, in my view.
Looking forward to hearing your other ideas and reactions after you’ve given them some thought!