Blogs as Broadcasting

This morning I listened to KQED’s Michael Krazny interview Scott Rosenberg, who wrote the recently published book Say Everything (2009), a history of blogging and an argument for its importance and staying power.  Scott Rosenberg is co-founder of Salon.com.  He blogs at: http://www.wordyard.com/

I heard about the interview through the blog of a friend, writer Rashaan Meneses, who blogged about it a few days ago.  She made some interesting notes on the show and riffed a little herself on the art of blogging.  (Read Meneses’s post.)

Specifically, Meneses mentioned a laudable caller, a writer who used blogging as an “open studio.”  Meneses writes, “Blogging allowed her to share work with like-minded artists and receive feedback.”  This is similar to the praiseworthy premise of Meneses’s own collaborative blog, Ruelle Electrique, where she hosts a salon of writers who write mainly on the craft of fiction.  They write to learn from the practice of writing and from each other.  They share technique as they showcase their skills and develop stronger voices as they go.  It’s collective learning, practice and publishing, and it’s an outstanding use of the blog.

The writer who called in to the show to mention her open studio blog was a welcome jewel in the broadcast.  Yet, as the interview went on, Krazny’s cavalier slights had Rosenberg in a continuous defense of blogging.  Krasny was dismissive of and cool toward blogging, which is understandable.  It’s threatening his turf: media broadcasting.  Krazny seemed to use the show to continue the waning trend of tossing bloggers into the category of narcissistic exhibitionists and record keepers of trivialities.

For example, the first caller Krasny’s producer chose to put on the air was a woman whose cats blog.   Yes.  Her cats blog.  She praised the rise of the blog as a publishing platform because it gave her cats a voice.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I, for one, will never turn up my nose at comedically anthropomorphized cat prose.  However, a cat’s web log isn’t really a full representation of the democratizing power of blogging.  (Although, if cats would like to vote, I support them entirely.)

Having heard countless people praise the Internet as a revolution in communication that rivals the printing press, I see blogs as the fuel behind that revolutionary force.  Each individual with access to the internet has the ability to write, speak, post photos, or vlog–to broadcast media–publicly.  Access and media literacy remain limited, but are growing fast.  If one’s voice is reasonable, credible and the content is important to many, a single voice can be heard and amplified through responding, commenting, forwarding and linking.  Through that process one voice becomes the voice of a collective.

In sum, the blog is a phenomenal publishing platform, one that is rapidly leveling outmoded hierarchies of knowledge dissemination and media distribution.  I mean, look at what it’s done for the cats.