21 January 2009

I’m hearing on the radio today some fellow local citizens talking about blogging and its associated perceptions, misconceptions, etc., and I have to admit, part of me wants to cringe, just a bit.

What is blogging? It’s a freeform publishing means for writers in which they, more often than not, set their own boundaries in terms of what they will write about, and how they will go about writing it. It’s also a weird contraction-made-verb of the term weblog which, of course, is a derivative itself (world wide web + journal/record/register/ledger/log).

All that to say I have a personal distaste for the word ‘blog’. (For what it’s worth, I also have a general distaste for anything to do with contemporary or popular culture.) People sometimes approach me and say Hey, I read your blog, and I think to myself, Oh yes, I do have one of those things you could call a blog. But I don’t call it a blog. I call it a journal, just to satisfy myself.

Anyway, the larger issue talked about in at least the first third of the radio episode (I couldn’t really take any more than that) is that of how people might perceive these things called blogs. The big problem is that ‘bloggers’ don’t usually have the luxury of being attached to a larger, more credible, usually in mass print, establishment, and thereby might be perceived as less credible. But of course, we should all know that there are plenty of terrible writers being printed every day. Being printed doesn’t make you credible. That’s what it comes down to. And I think they got to this point on the radio.

What’s important is for good writers to have a good publishing path. That path may be the newspaper, a magazine, a book, the dreaded blog, or whatever, and they should gain readership not by the perceived importance of path, but by their skill in presenting a relevant content (and of course other non-tangible values like truth, accuracy, depth, perception, etc).

It seems to me that we’re past the point of needing to defend the worth of the blog. They’ve been around long enough for CEOs of huge companies to see the value in them. Granted, other paths of publishing have had much more time to establish themselves as probably credible, but we don’t go around defending the worth of magazines, of books, of newspapers, etc. They are what they are, and they attract who they do. Before blogs we had photocopied ‘zines. They didn’t need to be defended because the right people got them, understood them, cherished them.

So, what’s this all about, anyway? I read blogs. I keep something like a blog, but I hope we don’t have to call it blogs and blogging like it’s a new phenomenon for too much longer. It’s just another publishing path, one with a lot of potential to reach a larger readership, but let’s not deceive ourselves by thinking it’s the golden path. I am aware of a huge population of our city that doesn’t have such regular access to the Internet. And for them a more accessible path remains the printed word, the audible or televised broadcast, word of mouth. Sometimes I wish I dwelt among them.

I don’t mean to discredit the importance or value of blogs and how they’ve completely and forever altered the publishing landscape, for better or worse. I mean to open up for questioning the way in which we talk about them.

I read blogs. Blogs are great.