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TUE, JAN 14, 2003 Oliver Willis is a blogger. His Web logging site is "Like Kryptonite to Stupid." We asked him, "Why do you blog?" His answer is below. WHY I Blog (a k a "I Like to Hear the Sound of My Own Voice") Everybody in America wants to be famous. Some people, like Michael Jackson, take this the wrong way and do the best they can to be infamous. But most of us, with half a brain in our head, will do anything we can for our fifteen seconds of notoriety. Even the most brilliant minds and intelligent leaders grovel at the altar of the bully pulpit, often reducing great thoughts and important policies to the quick-hit of a sound bite. Why? Because it means they can be a part of the media world. My blog works like this for me, it's my own personal tv channel rendered in text that I have complete control of. It's a playground for my gigantic ego, and it amazes me every day that people show up to read it. Sometimes people like to focus their blogs like a laser on a specific issue or topic, but I'm too scatterbrained for that and it's one of the reasons I love blogging. If I were writing for someone else, it would have to be logical and fair. On my blog, I can deride the Bush tax cut one minute, followed quickly by an in-depth analysis of Britney Spears and exactly how many clothes she is(n't) wearing. Unless you have the mental dexterity to flip between C-Span and MTV, you can't do that anywhere else. The people that read my blog consistently amaze me. In the past, when I had questions about something -- perhaps an issue I didn't understand -- I would have to do my own research and try to comprehend it. In the blog world, I can throw out a question to the audience and most times be rewarded with a response from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. This two-way avenue is the stuff that really makes blogs special. Instead of throwing words out into a vacuum, blogs link to each other creating big conversations -- refining conversations and adding a multitude of opinions you just never see in print or broadcast. Like anything else that becomes popular, there's a desire to make it more important than it should be, or something that it isn't. Because they involve the written word, many people like to call blogs "journalism." Other than opinion journalism, there isn't much investigation to be found in the blog world. It exists, but is usually done by people who make their living doing journalism (like Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com). The rest of us act more as interpreters of the news that comes down from the big companies (AP, Reuters, New York TIMES, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY). I don't define this interpretation as "journalism," unless we're willing do define "mouthing off" (what most bloggers really do) as journalism. To compare my mouthing off with people actually doing work is pretty silly. The downside of blogging is that it is like all the other modern mediums out there. A quick hit comment on an issue is all that is usually given, and all that is asked. People are even less willing than in the past to patiently slog through a detailed reasoning of the issues at hand, preferring a "here's the link, here's what I think" approach to issues. Self-selecting the blogs you read also reduces many people to the "echo chamber," in which all the opinions they see and hear are of one voice. It creates a sort of reality distortion machine in which opinions going against the orthodoxy or outside of your political/cultural sphere just aren't heard. More than a few bloggers and their readers are guilty of this crime. Lamentably, television and newspapers aren't much better. Blogs are revolutionary, but they're also part of the same-old, same-old. I'm just glad I can do what I want with mine -- and nobody can take it away.  |
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