Bloggers: Responsible To Their Readers First, or To Themselves?

[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.