Please Don’t Turn Blogging into TV
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There’s an interesting debate ponging around the ’sphere over whether bloggers should video blog. And so a few words, at least partly intended to be taken seriously, but entirely calculated to provoke the debate.
In a word, no. Please don’t turn blogging into TV.
I moved to the internet in part to flee what TV had become. I didn’t want to be informed by the likes of Anderson Cooper; he of the rubber boots, gusty places and immovable hair; I have nothing to learn from chirpy announcers with the 5 top stories of the day. I wanted to be provoked. And the internet was where the minds were. I want to read Frank Rich and Slate and The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Nation and The Huffington Post and Matt Drudge and Bourque. I want to read Nick Carr and Jeff Jarvis and Michael Geist and Jeff Pulver and Tim Lee and Andrew Coyne and Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans, and Stuart MacDonald (if darn it he would blog a little more). I want to wrestle with what they think.
People certainly want video - the YouTube-ization of media is in full swing, and it’s a remarkable thing that people have the opportunity to produce their own video and choose from a dramatically expanding array of video. But video is almost always passive entertainment. I’m not arguing that it can’t be emotionally powerful, or that it can’t sometimes powerfully inform. I do think, though, that that for the most part it’s about brief engagements with simple ideas and pretty things. I think we now know everything we need to about video’s power to marginalize, simplify and dumb-down intelligent discourse; the mass market audience’s inclination to lazily channel-surf instead of actively engage in the content will inevitably infect video-ized blogging as surely as it infected TV.
To me, the real question for bloggers, then, is this: who do you want as your audience? Do you want to entertain, or do you want to inform? Do you want to perform, or do you want to engage? Do you want to wrestle with big ideas and your ability to present them? Or do you want a more emotional, passing and perhaps artistically creative engagement with your audience?
There is certainly room for experimentation, lots of it, and I hope people dive in - the past is not the future, and perhaps new forms of media will emerge that will more successfully bridge the divide between passively and actively consumed information and entertainment. (And indeed there are artists like zefrank who can more effectively than others bridge those two worlds - but that is an exceptionally rare talent.) But I believe that even if that happens, the audience that prefers to be intellectually challenged will stay with print.
It’s where the minds are.
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oh, you’re going to have the vloggers on you soon!…:)
Then it seems my aim is true.
:)
Rob,
You talk about blogging and the internet being where the minds are and wanting to wrestle with what the great thinkers are blogging about.
In today’s New York Times (one of the items you mention above that you like to read,) there is an interesting interview with Lee Siegel the ex blogger of the New Republic who took the pseudonym Sprezzatura and posted by that name to his own blog.
Lee states
“…the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it.”
Putting aside his (1) tactic of anonymously posting to his own blog and (2) his right wing political leanings, I would be very interested in knowing what you think(feel?) about such a statement, basically he believes blogs are where emotions are, not necessarily logical rational thinking minds.
url for NY Times article mentioned is http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_q4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Wow - great comment and a fascinating observation. Estelle, I want to chew on this - I’m driving for 2 days starting tomorrow am so it’ll be a couple of days before I resume the conversation.
Hi Rob,
Are you saying that electronic media threatens to evolve into a venue/tool for a mob? If so, it’s an interesting point.
Television, the first mass electronic media, appeared to have a higher quality of content overall in, say, 1960, than today. Was that a result of it being a new world then, inhabited by the few who grasped its potential and not yet dominated by the masses?
The internet, being interactive, is evolving on a somewhat different path, with the additional difference of the business community having first access, but there are similarities, now that it is starting to bloom as a provider of entertainment to mass markets.
You know my business plans, which aim to create high quality spaces and experiences for communities of more sophisticated users. Business aside, I believe this aim has its own merit in how we develop and build the places that don’t yet exist in this new frontier.
If the only effort invested in building new spaces is to target the highest number of users for the biggest bucks, then those spaces will be mass driven, and the more analytical and contemplative minds are likely to retreat to ‘gated communities’ and ‘private clubs’.
Ironically, the natural evolution of that would see the financially successful builders of these places for the masses taking membership in the sphere of the ‘elitists’. It’s a cynical view, and one that I instincitvely protest.
My personal beliefs are both capitalist and egalitarian, built on a foundation of personal responsibility. It’s my conviction that those of us who wish to see and engage in interesting and sophisticated communities have the opportunity and the obligation to build them.
I’m not familiar with Lee Siegal yet, being pretty new to the blogsphere, but don’t get the linking of logic to rhetoric (unless it’s just a lack of context) …although I’m sure my American husband might. :)
I would, though, like to draw a distinction between naked emotion and instant gratification.
The intensely personal connection that has been made possible by this new media is fascinating. Where we can go from raw emotion is totally up to us.
I don’t believe that intense personal connection is incompatible with complex thought, analysis, etc.
I doubt there will ever (in our lifetime) not be a majority who’s imagination does not move past instant gratification on its own. For those of us not in that majority, IMO we have a personal choice to watch it grow and gripe about it or to do something. We’re not going to change human nature. To me it’s a question of sitting back and watching or diving in and taking an ownership.
I made a little documentary about ethnic food a while back. I could see vlogging segments about ethnic restaurants– seeing is descriptive in a different way than talking, the settings, the techniques and the ethnic chefs and customers are all interesting in and of themselves.
What I can’t see is sitting there and reading, or improvising, my thoughts or reviews, complete with nose scratches and “um”s. Cold text is infinitely better than that. So vlogging has its place, but it’s NOT doing the exact same thing that blogging already does in cheap, crappy video form.
Estelle,
“Look, putting a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone with an obesity problem in a chocolate factory.”
Well, that’s just hysterically funny. And how very true.
So, “Seriously, the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it.” I’m not sure I would have said that it strips rhetoric - often what I read is pure rhetoric, fuelled by pure emotion. But I do agree that the comment is often true. I think we see this most in the political ’sphere, which seems like an echo chamber of angry boys and girls shouting at each other. The rhetoric comes in the form of intellectual preening; I say this because there is often no pretence at attempting to win someone over with argument - simply the use of clever words and argument to establish one’s cred. But ultimately, often circularly and without any eventual goal other than self-indulgence.
I’m certainly guilty of it too.
But that is why I stopped reading the political ’sphere. I’ll pick it up again when the adults arrive :)
I’m definitely going to have to buy Siegel’s book.