When faced with the dilemma of how to fill a few column inches, a problem exacerbated by the summer recess triggered absence of local politicians, whose grotesque antics are always good for a juicy scandal or two, less traditional targets might stray into the journalist’s sights. Recently the prospect of a couple of book deals for bloggers on the brink of making the reverse transition to the old medium of print from the new of the computer screen has elicited shudders of unconcealed distaste from the newspaper establishment. The “upstart press” to quote from Trevor Butterworth’s extended piece Time for the last post in the venerable Financial Times magazine, which appeared long before the “silly season” (18th-19th February 2006), “a raffish army of citizen journalists”, were no longer content to poach readers from home, but appeared to be laying siege to the bastions of privilege, thudding at the gates with a battering ram, not quite the done thing.
As befits the institution in whose employ he puts pen to paper (or perhaps, to avail myself of a more contemporary image, fingers to keyboard), Butterworth peppered his article with statistics: “At the close of 2002, there were some 15,000 blogs. By 2005, 56 new blogs were starting every minute”.
In spite of this explosion of popular interest, online expression might have remained on the margins, dismissed as a mere sideshow by the complacent arbiters of what constitutes worthy copy: “Still, blogging would have been little more than a recipe for even more internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media and the conventions by which they control news. And one of the conventions that happened to work in blogging’s favour was the way the media take a new trend and describes it as a revolution”.
According to Butterworth it was in run up to US elections in 2004 that an exposé concerning Bush’s national guard service catapulted blogging into the consciousness of the opinion-formers: “This seemed to prove one of blogging’s biggest selling points – that the collective intelligence of the media’s audience was greater than the collective intelligence of any news programme or newspaper.
It also showed that blogging was irrepressible – that power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society that would have gladdened the heart of the philosopher Karl Popper. And it solidified the belief among conservatives that blogging was a way to take down their longstanding enemies in the once impregnable fortress of the liberal press.
As syndicated radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last August, ‘It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information revolution is advancing – or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly”.
We are witnessing ‘the dawn of a blogosphere dominant media,’ announced Michael S. Malone, who has been described as ‘the Boswell of Silicon Valley’. ‘Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies’”.
Enthusiasm about this new discovery (a scoop is always a feather in a hack’s cap) generated a series of overblown predictions, spouted with the gusting and gutsy hyperbole of the trend-spotter. Butterworth was not so easily seduced by the self-appointed prophets: “But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ‘new economy’ a few years ago?
Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one – especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?
I suspect so, not least because the ‘dinosaur’ businesses of the old economy have a canny ability to absorb, adapt and evolve”.
To consolidate his depiction of blogging as more sound bite than substance, Butterworth goes on to quotes Choire Sicha, (senior editor at the New York Observer): “The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things – the purview of old media – is arguably more important.
‘As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure,’ he added. ‘But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they’re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China’”.
Between them, Butterworth and Sicha have touched upon a highly pertinent issue: imbalances in the resources available. Newspapers command the kind of the kind of resources the average blogger, in splendid isolation, cannot even dream of, let alone match. Of course, by this I mean time, staffing and financial clout as well as the sheen of authority that accrues from a painstakingly built up role within wider society and the ability to regulate membership of the profession. Even a semi-promising lead can be followed up by an aspiring youngster keen to make his or her mark without a catastrophic impact on the budget. Newspapers have successfully withstood the onslaught of television because they have recognised their strengths: in depth coverage of events, more penetrating analysis at one remove as opposed to the more superficial running commentary as events unfold from TV correspondents huddling in a bomb crater with their satellite phones, stories that television may have neglected or ignored, human interest tales, interviews, dispatching an intrepid undercover reporter with a hidden camera to pose as a member of the care staff in old folk’s homes and reveal the appalling treatment of the elderly and the like. Newspapers have not cornered the market in intellectual capacity, however, for all their smug self-righteousness. Only the leisured elite with a mission beyond blowing thousands on the latest accessories and gimmicks and sipping cocktails on the decks of their private yachts might aspire to risking life and limb in pursuit of a more authentic glimpse of the suffering engendered by entrenched hatred and conflict. The rest of us are constrained by the dull necessity of keeping up our day jobs. This does not automatically disqualify us from having anything worthwhile to say, however. Only snobbery and the condescension of peering down into the unsavoury depths from an exalted perch would induce the observer to contend otherwise.
Butterworth relentlessly catalogues what he perceives to be the inherent shortcomings of the phenomenon: “(…) another under-acknowledged weakness of the blogger uprising: to make it in blogging seems to mean making it out of blogging”, and, on the subject of context: “Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable business, the economics are daunting.
The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them”.
Firstly, not every blogger is motivated by a lust for fame, nor is it true that every “fabulous writer” will be rewarded, whisked off Cinderella-like in a glittering coach to meet the handsome agent who will transform her dreary existence forever with his glass slipper of redemptive adoration. The sheer proliferation of sites mitigates against discovery.
Secondly, it would be a mistake (albeit one all too commonly made) to equate popularity with quality in any transparent sense. Here the analogy with best-sellers is apt: just because it shifts from the shelves does not make it more valuable to humanity in absolute terms. The sales figures for Kritik der reinen Vernunft might not justify its inclusion in the Top Ten lists (except perhaps of works by German philosophers), but this is surely not the measure of its contribution to human knowledge.
Nor does such a “crude” numbers-based approach dovetail with the founding conceit of the work of art (based largely on scarcity value and the entitlement of a group of consecrated experts, the critics, to pass their verdict on inclusion in the canon) so brilliantly dissected by Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production: “There is in fact every reason to suppose that the constitution of the aesthetic gaze as a ‘pure’ gaze, capable of considering the work of art in and for itself, i.e. as a ‘finality without an end’, is linked to the institution of the work of art as an object of contemplation, with the creation of private and then public galleries and museums, and the parallel development of a corps of professionals appointed to conserve the work of art, both materially and symbolically. Similarly, the representation of artistic production as a ‘creation’ devoid of any determination or any social function, though asserted from a very early date, achieves its fullest expression in the theories of ‘art for art’s sake’; and, correlatively, in the representation of the legitimate relation to the work of art as an act of ‘re-action’ claiming to replicate the original creation and to focus solely on the work in and for itself, without any reference to anything outside it” (The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1983, p36). Some bloggers will be inspired (and derive solace in the face of their relatively poor visitor stats from the notion of a concomitantly refined and exclusive audience) by such a pretension. Bourdieu beautifully captures the underlying and obscured dynamic as well as the tensions at play: “In other words, the specificity of the literary and artistic field is defined by the fact that the more autonomous it is, i.e. the more completely it fulfils its own logic as a field, the more it tends to suspend or reverse the dominant principle of hierarchisation; but also that, whatever its degree of independence, it continues to be affected by the laws of the field which encompasses it, those of economic and political profit. The more autonomous the field becomes, the more favourable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers and the more clear-cut is the division between the field of restricted production, in which the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large-scale production [la grande production], which is symbolically excluded and discredited (this symbolically dominant definition is the one that the historians of art and literature unconsciously adopt when they exclude from their object of study writers and artists who produced for the market and have often fallen into oblivion). Because it is a good measure of the degree of autonomy, and therefore of presumed adherence to the disinterested values which constitute the specific law of the field, the degree of public success is no doubt the main differentiating factor. But lack of success is not in itself a sign and guarantee of election and poètes maudits, like ‘successful playwrights’, must take account of a secondary differentiating factor whereby some poètes maudits may also be ‘failed writers’ (even if exclusive reference to the first criterion can help them to avoid realising it), while some box-office successes may be recognised, at least in some sectors of the field, as genuine art.
Thus, at least in the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry), the economy of practices is based, as in a generalised game of ‘loser wins’, on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains), that of power (it condemns honours and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalised cultural authority (the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue)” (op. cit., pp38-9).
If, however, we focus on filthy lucre, Butterworth gives bloggers who might indulge in a reverie of transforming their output into a viable livelihood a cold shower: “After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.
The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.
That is one reason why advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media. The other has to do with the very basic selling point of blogging. ‘There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,’ said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. ‘The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketeer’”.
It therefore smacks of empty histrionics to invoke an apocalyptic scenario, the terminal decline of the traditional print media triggered by blogging, although, as we shall see, certain moguls, eager to portray themselves as having a nose for innovation, as cool, hip and savvy and anxious to carve a niche for themselves in history as the first to spot the next big thing, might expatiate on the subject.
When assessing the likelihood of blog entries standing the test of time, Butterworth predictably airbrushes out the toll taken by the relentless contractual obligations under which journalists churn out vast screeds: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium”. He clarifies his intention as follows: “The point is, any writer of talent needs the time and peace to produce work that has a chance of enduring”.
Whereas I agree that with the exception of a few prodigies the scribblings of a teenager might not yield deep insights into the human condition, that writing style, like good wine, takes time and continual honing to mature he is nevertheless falling prey to a widespread misconception about the nature of blogging. A blog is what its author makes it. There is no commandment stipulating that it must be updated on an hourly or daily basis in order to fit into the category. Many blogs do conform to those parameters, but these are likely to be the most ephemeral, the most vapid, although I would not advance this as an unbending proposition. After all, poets might be seized with a godlike spark of inspiration and within minutes produce a literary masterpiece. There is much wisdom and poignant truth to be gleaned from the seemingly banal, as a brief perusal of Sei Shonagon’s pillow book will reveal. Rapid updates do not constitute an imperative. The flighty and capricious clicker might not make the effort to return if nothing new is forthcoming for a few days or weeks, but frankly the dwindling of their interest is hardly worth worrying about.
He hammers home the accusation in his conclusion: “(…) the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the world-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news”.
David Nicholson reflected the ambivalence and unease provoked by the internet in print media circles in Newspapers need to get a handle on the internet threat (The Independent media weekly, 27th February 2006) summarising the contributions made at a conference in Cambridge held at the Judge Business School Media and Business conference: “Most alarmist and gloomy was Andrew Gowers, until recently editor-in-chief of the Financial Times, who compared print to vinyl records. ‘Ink on dead trees,’ he called it, with the entire industry facing a ‘wrenching change’, unlike any previous upheaval. ‘The digital revolution takes in all income streams,’ he said, dismissing new formats and DVD giveaways as ‘sticking plasters’ on the dying patient.
In the US, households apparently spend 30 per cent of their media time online, whereas advertisers are spending only 8 per cent of their budgets there. Dollars are going to migrate, along with eyeballs, Gowers predicts. Classified ads are just one element: property and job adverts are going ‘helter-skelter’ online, he says. This means that hundreds of millions of pounds, traditionally spent on print, are ‘going to go down the gurgler’. Or down the Googler, perhaps.
Google, of course, presents an altogether more frightening threat than any mere alternative ads sales site, as it can divorce advert searches from any kind of journalistic content, making the print ‘bundle’ of editorial in an advertising context redundant”.
The tenacity of the newspapers was once again the upbeat message designed to reassure those prone to fretting: “Last (…) onto the stage was Independent News and media’s chief executive Ivan Fallon. Fallon played the elder statesman, remembering how (…) the doom-mongers had predicted that radio, then colour TV, would be the death of newspapers. ‘Each time, papers have changed and adapted,’ he said”.
Bloggers do not figure as a threat and, echoing Butterworth’s optimism about the only slightly diminished attractiveness of the traditional media to advertisers, Nicholson forecast a bright future: “Certainly, the financial markets seem not to share the more pessimistic forecasts, still putting high premiums on print publishing businesses, presumably figuring that whatever shifts in technology, distribution and content come along, the incumbents are able to adapt and exploit new opportunities. As for print itself, why would Rupert Murdoch be investing a rumoured £600m in new presses if the world’s biggest media tycoon thought it was a dying industry?”
Ironically, only a couple of weeks later Owen Gibson chronicled a startling volte-face on the part of the ultimate magnate in Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch (The Guardian, 14th March 2006): “Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers to explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a ‘second great age of discovery’”.
Bloggers had appeared on Murdoch’s radar: “‘Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry – the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,’ said Mr. Murdoch (…)
Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. ‘A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it,’ he said”.
Suddenly we were deemed worthy of being taken seriously: “The owner of Fox News added: ‘never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds’”.
Indeed Murdoch’s tough business rhetoric must have sent shivers down the spines of those who had taken their cushy number for granted: “(…) he declared: ‘I believe we are at the dawn of a golden age of information – an empire of new knowledge’.
But he combined his new-found enthusiasm for the digital future with a ‘change or die’ message for the monolithic media empires of the 20th century.
‘Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall,’ he warned. ‘That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet’”.
Not that he foresaw complete obsolescence for his stable of papers or those owned by his competitors: “He had some words of hope for his industry peers buffeted by declining circulations, free titles and the internet. ‘I believe traditional newspapers have many years of life, but, equally, I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers,’ he said, predicting a future in which ‘media becomes like fast food’ with consumers watching news, sport and film clips as they travel, on mobile phones or handheld wireless devices.
‘Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart,’ he enthused.
Following its chairman’s change of heart, News Corp has splashed out close to $1bn (£578m) on internet investments.
Most tellingly, the company spent $400m on MySpace.com, the social networking phenomenon that has proved hugely popular with 35m regular users on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Murdoch has undergone a Damascene conversion, admitting he hugely underestimated the power of the web. He said last night: ‘It is a creative, destructive technology that is still in its infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything in its path. We are all on a journey, not just the privileged few, and technology will take us to a destination that is defined by the limits of our creativity, our confidence and our courage’”.
Arianna Huffington’s Now the little guy is the true pit bull of journalism (The Guardian, 14th March 2006) cast bloggers in a positive light, arguing that conventional and more innovative formats did not have to engage in mortal combat, but could peacefully cohabit: “I am frequently asked if the rise of the blogosphere is the death knell for Big Media. My answer is that Big Media isn’t dead; it’s critically ill but will actually be saved by the transfusion of passion and immediacy of the blogging revolution. Blogging and the new media are transforming the way news and information are disseminated, as evidenced by the number of traditional media outlets (…) dipping their collective toe into the blog pond.
Blogs are by nature very personal – an intimate, often ferocious expression of the blogger’s passions. You’re much more intimate when you’re writing a blog than when you’re writing a column, let alone a book: the conversational nature of it, the way that it draws people in and includes them in the dialogue. You may set out to write about politics but, in the end, you write about yourself, about the things you care about beyond politics. And this creates a close bond between blogger and audience.
It really does become a conversation. I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together from different parts of my life and facilitating interesting conversations. In the past, these have taken place around dinner tables. Now, via cyberspace, those conversations have gone global. And they are happening in real time”.
The egalitarian aspect exerted a clear appeal: “Blogging has empowered the little guy – levelling the playing field between the media haves and the media have-only-a-laptop-and-an-internet-connection. It’s made the blogosphere an invaluable tool for holding the mainstream media’s feet to the fire”.
Bobbie Johnson reinforced the impression that we were to be allowed in from the cold in Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers (The Guardian, 18th April 2006): “Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a ‘disproportionately large influence’ on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although ‘active’ web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.
More than half the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net – through messageboards, websites and blogs – are helping change the national conversation, say researchers”.
Johnson sounded out one of the participants in the project, Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research: “Although unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population, they are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters. Mr Smith says businesses, media organisations and advertisers reading blogs should be wary of making assumptions about their wider significance, but that their muscle cannot be ignored.
‘They’re not representative of the larger audience, but what they’re saying does matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a good straw poll – a snapshot of the verbal conversations going on that we can’t measure’.
‘That’s exactly right,’ said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. ‘Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ – the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed’.
There are now more than 35m blogs around the world, according to search engine Technorati. While most bloggers only write for small audiences, they can sometimes achieve wider fame or become the focus of consumer campaigns”.
Johnson closed with an affirmation of bloggers’ clout: “Mr Reynolds admits the idea of small groups being able to pressurise wider decisions is nothing new, but those who ignore online buzz do so at their peril”.
Nothing lasts, particularly not in a setting where restlessness is the driving force, where snuffling about for the sensational can boost profit margins. Not that blogging is an unsullied paradise of blue skies with no clouds on the horizon.
Mary Dejevsky in There’s a good reason why women don’t write blogs. (The Independent, 29th June 2006) speculated on the root causes of why male bloggers vastly outnumber their female counterparts. She began by taking a certain Iain Dale, Tory MP, to task for certain crass and execrable statements on his site: “‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem bloggers,’ he wrote, ‘you won’t find many written by women’. He went on to observe, admitting the sexist stereotype, that women, ‘being much better gossips than men, ought to be ideally suited to the world of blogging’. I curtail his prolixity, but he concludes: ‘There must be some reason why women don’t blog as much as men in the political sector’.
Well, Iain, I venture to correct you on one point. It is not just in the political sector, as you call it, that fewer women blog. Except in areas such as childcare and gynaecology, it is across the board that women bloggers are few and far between. And it does not take a huge [leap] of the imagination to suggest at least two reasons why.
The first is that, for all the efforts to educate men and women equally, to encourage them to compete for honours, even to feminise the education system by introducing coursework, women (still) tend to be more bashful than men about what they think. It is not that, as veteran male gender-warriors might growl, we have much to be bashful about. It’s rather that we tend to be less confident than men that the rest of the world wants the benefit of our opinion.
Men seem to take it for granted not only that they have something to say, but that the rest of us should find it worth hearing – or, in the case of the blogosphere, reading”.
I agree with Dejevsky that the traditional discourse of femininity has actively discouraged women from expressing their opinions forcefully, preferring to confine us to the role of shoulder to cry on, by definition a supporting role, the affirmation we give through empathic listening recognised by Susan Maushart as one element of “wifework”. Stifling our ambition, or for that matter any hope of fulfilling our intellectual and creative potential was the norm. Instead of excellence and achievement we were fobbed off with the consolation prize of drudgery (or stagnant and decorative docility depending on our economic status) in the bosom of the family. Our energies subsumed into our reproductive activity. In the past outspokenness was incompatible with the socially sanctioned demureness that women were encouraged to cultivate, that was posited as our very nature and essence. Accusations of being a “harridan”, a “shrew” or a “scold” served to keep us in line with the weight of disapproval and harsher penalties.
I part company with her over our lack of confidence, although she admits to not buying into her own argument fully: “Our female bashfulness, I submit, may be gradually being drummed out of us by a combination of good teaching, co-ed schools, and the example of opinionated women expressing forthright views in other parts of politics and the media. The second reason why women don’t blog, however, is more serious, because it is more intractable: women simply do not have the time.
Earlier this week, I heard Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development, speaking in London to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage in Finland. They were the first women in Europe to gain the vote. And the record of women’s participation in Finnish life is as laudable as one would expect from Scandinavia.
Yet, as Ms Paula Lehtomaki noted, without the diffidence that might attend the same observation in this country, the next frontier had to be the home. Women had come a long way: safeguards against discrimination, for equal pay and opportunities were all in place and largely observed. But the fact was that in joining the workforce on equal terms, women were all too often tied to two jobs: equality, even in enlightened Scandinavia, all too often stops at the front door.
How many homes are there – here, or in high-tech savvy Finland – where the man will think it quite excusable to shuffle in late for dinner because he has been reading or writing his online diary, but would greet with ridicule or fury the prospect of dinner being late (or non-existent) because his partner had been delayed in the blogosphere?
And for dinner, we can substitute baby’s bathtime, the children’s high tea, the regular taxi service families run between sports and after-school clubs, the elderly parents that need looking after. It is this old-fashioned, and persistent, division of responsibilities that frees men to indulge in the time-consuming fashion of the day, and the gadgetry and self-aggrandisement involved in blogging only make it that much more attractive”.
There may well be paragraph after paragraph of legislation on the statute books prohibiting wage discrimination, yet the pay gap yawns ever wider. Dejevsky is right to lament the persistence of leisure and “me time” disparities that deprive many women of the opportunity to develop their own voice in a blog.
By way of a corrective to both Dale and Dejevsky’s contention that few women venture into political blogging, I turn to Kira Cochrane’s The third wave – at a computer near you (The Guardian, 31st March 2006): “(…) there has been an explosion of feminist blogs, including many that have a highly professional edge, and a large, loyal readership. The feminist movement has always produced plenty of meaty writing and lively debate: witness Sylvia Pankhurst’s newspaper, the Woman’s Dreadnought, through the pamphleteering of the 1970s second wave, and the vibrant ’zine culture of the 1990s’ ‘riot grrrl’ movement. Prior to the blogosphere though, distribution remained local for all but a few major publications, such as Spare Rib, Ms, or, latterly, Bust and Bitch magazines.
Now though, the third wave (a movement often dismissed as a myth) has gone online”.
In quantitative terms: “A recent estimate put the number of feminist blogs at 240,000, but, given that this posited the number of ‘active’ worldwide blogs at 4m (some figures out it as high as 27.2m), and the proportion of women who are self-described feminists (a British survey this month produced a figure of 29%) the true figure could be much higher” (and not all women bloggers regard themselves as feminists, which suggests that rather than there being a dearth of women writers in the blogosphere, the real problem is the comparative lack of publicity given to them except where they conform to an easily distinguishable, unchallenging profile as ditzy singletons looking for love in the Bridget Jones mould, or dispense sex tips. How many women academic bloggers are ever included in the occasional review of the delights the blogosphere has to offer? If you cannot be easily pigeonholed you might as well resign yourself to eternal obscurity).
Cochrane too is aware of the limitations arising from blogging being the preserve of those who can afford it, those who have the time and money at their disposal to embrace it as a hobby or something more serious: “But is it all just sound and fury? The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there’s a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism.
Nina Wakeford, a sociologist at the University of Surrey, is cautious about blogging’s influence. ‘I think the way blogs can provoke debate is useful,’ she concedes, ‘but it isn’t clear how much they feed into activism. In the past, there was a clear role for women’s organisations as regards representations to government, but I’m not sure whether women can affect public policy through blogging. Just who are they representing?’
This last question is interesting. As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women. ‘Blogging is still somewhat limited, of course,’ says Georgia Gaden, a postgraduate researcher who has studied feminist blogs, ‘because although we take our access for granted, many women, globally, don’t have that luxury’”.
Before proceeding to examine two recent polemics directed against bloggers by well-known columnists, I would like to dwell for a moment on the social make-up of the journalistic profession, with which bloggers are routinely assimilated by the unimaginative (this narrowly conceives of blogging as a news-oriented and news-dependent format). Richard Garner and Ben Russell’s front page headline in The Independent, Stranglehold (15th June 2006) inaugurated the debate: “The private school system still has an extraordinary stranglehold on top jobs in the UK and their grip on the most influential jobs in the land has increased rather than diminished over the past 20 years, a series of reports shows.
The latest research, published today, reveals that the percentage of top positions in the British media going to former private school pupils has risen by more than 10 per cent since 1986. The report on the media follows similar reports on the legal profession and on MPs, which reached similar conclusions.
The research, published by the Sutton Trust education charity, shows that of the leading 100 media opinion-formers, 54 per cent came from private schools, compared with 49 per cent 20 years ago. Thirty-three per cent of the remainder came from selective grammar schools – while only 14 per cent were from comprehensive schools, which cater for 90 per cent of all pupils”.
Labour’s pledge to enhance social mobility was clearly foundering: “What is most alarming for Mr Blair is the feeling among leading professionals that the trend towards more privately educated people getting top jobs is likely to grow. This was especially evident in the media, where senior journalists and broadcasters warned that people from poor homes were unlikely to be able to survive the low pay and job insecurity at the start of a career in the media”.
The statistical evidence was eloquent: “The report shows that only 14 per cent of the leading 100 journalists attended comprehensive schools, 33 per cent were grammar school pupils and 45 per cent had been to Oxford or Cambridge. Oxford predominated, with 37 per cent.
It lists five reasons: the privileged can survive on the low pay and high insecurity of the early years in the profession; they are more able to afford to live in London in the early stages of their careers; they can afford the fees for postgraduate journalism courses; are more likely to have personal and family connections in the trade; and exude more confidence and networking skills. There were similar findings from surveys of barristers and judges (…)”.
Peter Wilby picked up on the theme in All you need to succeed in our meritocracy is privilege (The Guardian, 17th June 2006): “We cannot say we weren’t warned. In his dystopian satire The Rise of Meritocracy, published in 1958, Michael Young warned that meritocracy wouldn’t lead to equality but to a new, more vicious form of elitism. That is exactly what has happened. Inequalities of wealth and income are as ever, but, more importantly, the new elite makes no apologies for its privileges, including the privilege of ensuring an easy passage through life for its own children.
Journalism, for example, was once one of the most democratic occupations: people started on their local papers at 15 or 16 and rose to top positions in the national press. Now, as research published this week by the Sutton Trust shows, it is among the most elitist. Most leading journalists and news broadcasters went to fee-charging schools. Only a minority went to comprehensives, which have educated 90% of the nation’s children for the past 25 years.
This is not surprising, since entry to journalism, now a more powerful and coveted career than it used to be, brings into play the triple advantages of the upper-middle classes. First, you need a degree, preferably from Oxbridge, and the fee-charging schools are factories dedicated to getting the necessary A-levels. Second, you increasingly need family money, to finance you through either a postgraduate diploma or an unpaid internship. Third, you need connections – and preferably a metropolitan base – to help you get a foothold. Only after that does your talent as a journalist come into it”.
Other less immediately apparent factors also had a part to play: “US researchers have found that the average three-year-old born to a professional family has had 700,000 ‘encouragements’ addressed to him or her, against 60,000 for a child born to parents on welfare. No wonder there are few people from deprived backgrounds in journalism, an occupation that requires a large ego and boundless confidence in your own superior wisdom”.
Will Hutton joined the chorus of righteous indignation in The British middle class is operating a closed shop (The Observer, 18th June 2006): “But, as the Sutton Trust report accepts, school and university are necessary preconditions for access to high-status jobs, but alone they are not sufficient. To succeed in the media, you have to have the means to live in expensive London while receiving dirt-poor initial wages; you need connections to get a first job in an industry where entry is notoriously undemocratic; and you need the inner self-confidence and external capacity to present yourself well. The privately educated score better on all counts against their state-school rivals”.
Alongside these barriers, we must go back to Bourdieu for a framework in which to evaluate the spiteful ruminations of Janet Street-Porter (whom I confess to having a lot of sympathy for on other topics): “The struggle in the field of cultural production over the imposition of the legitimate mode of cultural production is inseparable from the struggle within the dominant class (with the opposition between ‘artists’ and ‘bourgeois’) to impose the dominant principle of domination (that is to say – ultimately – the definition of human accomplishment)” (op. cit., p41).
Against this backdrop the condescending connotations of the phrase “citizen journalist” are thrown into high relief (they might be articulate and intelligent, but ultimately they are mere amateurs). It is a matter of full-time journalists in national papers fencing off their territory with barbed words in place of barbed wire. As Bourdieu puts it: “(…) the definition of writer (or artist, etc.) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc.) field. In other words, the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer. The established definition of the writer may be radically transformed by an enlargement of the set of people who have a legitimate voice in literary matters. It follows from this that every survey aimed at establishing the hierarchy of writers predetermines the hierarchy by determining the population deemed worthy of helping to establish it. In short, the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy, i.e., inter alia, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorised to call themselves writers; or, to put it another way, it is the monopoly of the power to consecrate producers or products (we are dealing with a world of belief and the consecrated writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and win assent when he or she consecrates an author or a work – with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc.)” (op. cit., p42).
Street-Porter used the vehicle provided by her weekly column to launch a blistering attack on bloggers in Blog off: You don’t want to know what I weight today (do you)? (The Independent on Sunday, 23rd July 2006). It started innocuously enough: “We’ve become a nation of bloggers who spend hours each day tapping out our innermost thoughts and posting them on the internet”.
She soon took the gloves off, however: “I’ll come clean at this point. A year or so ago, I set up a website, janet-streetporter.com, to promote my books and one-woman show – and it’s most definitely NOT interactive. You can log on, have a laugh, sneer at my old publicity photos, read some columns and log off again. I don’t crave a ‘dialogue’ with you, nor am I going to bore you to death by posting what I weight today, who I shouted at on the tube and which ex-boyfriend I dreamed about last night.
The web is fast becoming clogged up with blogs; the verbal diarrhoea of the under-educated and the banal. A report last week claimed that one in four internet users in Britain keeps a diary on their computer, and half of us – about seven million saddos – share this literary dross with other people”.
Nor could she resist taking a swipe at the opposition: “Blogs are for anoraks who couldn’t get published any other way. If I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps, I’d rather ring up a real friend and have a whinge, or go out for a drink with a workmate. And reading about someone’s sex life in all its mind-numbing detail isn’t going to make me feel better about my own. Take a look at The Guardian these days: it’s gone blog crazy. Every other page features blogs on a subject of the day. There are blogs posing as news stories and even serious comment and editorial pieces about the significance of the blog. Of course, it could be to do with the fact that the paper is desperate to promote its website – but, hey, can I ask one salient question? If The Guardian is the home of the blogger, what’s the point of hiring all those expensive writers and columnists to fill it up if bloggers can unleash a torrent of words on every subject from toe nail clippings to Paris Hilton? What happened to intelligent, well researched, cogently argued news reporting and comment? The Guardian seems, in a perverse way, to be saying that amateurs are the future in publishing – and that can’t be good for business”.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown followed in her footsteps in Hounded by assaults from cyberspace (The Independent, 24th July 2006): “The internet has already become a coffee shop for paedophiles and violent fantasists. Most of us don’t think this freedom is a wonderful liberation, not even if it remains in the realms of ideas and unfulfilled hideous desires. Most free countries already have sensible (and minimal) laws to curtail rabid expression. The internet- which opens up the skies of knowledge and exchange – is harder to monitor and even harder to constrain. Attempts to discuss the chaotic fallout are foiled or silenced.
Blogging, the latest trend filling cyberspace, began in 1994 in the US as on-line diaries kept by nerds and mischief-makers who called themselves “escribitionists”. In 2002 came the moment when bloggers became newshounds uncovering stories”.
In all fairness Alibhai-Brown did not adopt the unsophisticated undifferentiated approach favoured by Street-Porter: “Investigative journalists – sadly a disappeared species in the mainstream media – have been replaced by well connected, literate, expert bloggers who expose corruption and the depravities of the powerful. One is a good mate. Much of what he does is in the public interest, some unashamedly is not. As traditional journalism is getting both more brazen and more cautious, important stories disappear in the cracks between the two, to be sniffed out and dug up by bloggers”.
However (and here I concur, particularly as far as her verdict on one particular blogger is concerned, whose sacking recently elicited a wave of sympathy): “But with 35 million bloggers worldwide, there is also a glut of pathetic drivel and idiocy”.
She then catalogues several blog-based attacks to which she has been subjected (and which may well account for her instinctive suspicion of the blogging community) before conceding that the mainstream may not entirely deserve the prestige it luxuriates in (although the implicit plaudit to bloggers is immediately tempered by mention of the less appealing proclivities of some): “Bloggers disseminate stories that are trusted by millions. Newspapers and broadcasters are vastly less respected, although they are carriers of checked facts and considered opinion. As the public gets mistrustful of politicians and the media – with some justification – they can believe conspiracists, mavericks who feed their inclinations to anxiety and disbelief”.
Having openly declared that she hardly ever reads blogs she asks: “Where do blog writers and surfers find the time? When do they do the washing, cooking, eating, talking, cuddling, story reading to kids? Do they never help with school homework, go to the theatre, make love, read books, talk to friends, entertain?
And please don’t tell me this is democratising communication. Mass blogging may indeed be giving access to Everyman, but is he always worth listening to? When one or two bloggers inexplicably find fame, yet another wave joins the industry”.
She draws her deliberations to a close by reiterating the sentiment first uttered by Butterworth: “When there are a billion blogs to surf, who will be reading them? Death through gluttony will surely end the misery. Until the next fad”.
Both Street-Porter and Alibhai-Brown pander to the stereotype of the blogger as a solitary loser loafing around at his keyboard, with no better or more inventive use of his time than risking DVT with his obsessive surfing and inflicting his sub-standard prose on an audience of similarly anonymous and terminally boring introspectives. In retaliating it is preferable not to descend to the vitriolic register, firing off fatuous remarks about buck-teeth, an accident of birth after all, which would also inadvertently prove Street-Porter’s point. “Is that really the best put down they could come up with?” she will (correctly) shrug nonchalantly at such puerile baiting.
For the likes of JSP, humanity neatly falls into two categories, those basking in the spotlight and those banished to the darkness, the “luvvies” and the “dahlinks” and the great unwashed. The out-crowd must never be admitted to the in-crowd, and JSP is but one of the snarling Rottweilers guarding the door. Her blanket, knee-jerk write off is both overly categorical and hopelessly oversimplified. As her outburst proves, bloggers do not have a monopoly on inanity and ignorance. Nor on being wildly inaccurate, prejudiced and badly researched.
In reality, bloggers can be every bit as trenchant and many have higher academic qualifications than JSP. It is worth reminding her that not everything that makes it into print is high-minded (and how drab, dreary and tedious would absolute uniformity be?) Plenty of dross is published, such as the entire Mills and Boon range, for example, or the tabloids for that matter. In every genre you have to be prepared to trawl your way through vast seas of effluent before you finally dredge up the rare gem, the Sumpfblüte. Publishing has more than its fair share of iniquities, foibles and vagaries. The old school tie, or knowing someone who knows someone loom large in the board rooms as does playing it safe when margins are under pressure. Perusing the wares on display at the average high street bookshop you could be forgiven for believing that for your submission to have the merest sliver of a chance of making it beyond the wastepaper basket you have to be an established celebrity (as the “one-man brand” can boast built-in sales potential).
To what extent do blogs and newspapers actually trespass on each other’s territory? Is the overlap sufficiently great to justify the anxiety that haunts JSP’s venomous outpourings? Blogging may exacerbate a trend begun with TV. In a nutshell, nothing can beat television or the web for instantaneousness. If, as alluded to earlier, the reader craves more substantive analysis they will turn to newspapers or blogs. In other words, on the comment front, blogs do compete and there are good grounds for journalists to fear that the days of taking it easy and living off their reputation. Punters are sick and tired with the media’s ouroboros-like fascination with itself, its endless back-slapping and mutual admiration sessions.
For the blogger the exquisite freedom of it all is heady, addictive, intoxicating. There are no deadlines, no tiresome word limits (although I would be the first to admit that the latter can have benefits in terms of discipline, style and technique, condensing arguments, paring them down to the essence). Blogs can offer immediacy, raw emotion, escapism, entertainment, complete immersion in the consciousness of another, albeit mired in mundanity. They can be innovative and original in a way that risk-averse, profit-dependent, shareholder-serving alternatives cannot be, fearlessly experimenting with concepts. More importantly, they are not perceived as being enslaved by a commercial imperative, nor beholden to the political views of an editor-in-chief. They are less likely to be apprehended as manufactured persona, but conduits for real individuals. All of these together represent a significant part of their appeal. In one sense, both JSP’s diatribe and the prurient fascination with exposing bloggers’ identities evinced by the Daily Wail are a perverse homage to our influence.
Many who venture tentatively into the blogosphere may soon withdraw, dispirited by the experience of disappearing in the crowd. However, blogging is not a transitory phenomenon and newspapers will have to renegotiate their compact with the public if they are to retain their appeal. Blogging is not a whim or a fad. In all its colourful, anarchic splendour it is here to stay.
[My earlier cogitation on blogging may be found here and my appraisal of the blogger about whom Alibhai-Brown and I are in complete accord here].
