I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of blogging, and what it means in certain contexts. In a lot of cases, bloggers are breaking news before mainstream news sources do. Other times, blogs are putting a new, different, perspective on something that is currently happening. It’s part of what happens on the internet, and it’s become almost common knowledge at this point.
You’ll find mainstream news sources picking up what prominent bloggers say, and using it as a source for their own reporting. Other times you find bloggers picking up what other bloggers are saying, and building off of that. It’s almost as though bloggers have become the front-line filter between what’s happening, and what gets reported.
Recently, one of my friends wrote about his thoughts on political issues, which he doesn’t normally do. I’ve been finding a lot of what this particular person writes to strike a certain chord with me, and it hits home more than what I find myself reading elsewhere. I acknowledge I’m biased, and I acknowledge that a lot of what he writes isn’t exactly synthesis of what’s going on around him, but more his general view on the world.
This concept made me wonder what bloggers are actually doing. Yeah, a lot of them are reporting things first, but many do also put their own outlook on it into their writing. In terms of fact, you tend to need to sift through the opinion stuff. That said, there’s a lot of good material, and many times, the opinions are well thought out.
What you’ll often see when reading through blogs is that they’re addressing a current political issue, seemingly in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will read what they have to say. I think this seems to be the crux of the issue. You find mainstream news sources (I’m looking at you CNN) occasionally taking posts from the internet (or blogosphere, if you prefer that term. I don’t) and using these posts as a basis for their reporting. How do they pick what they report on?
Because of the apparent level of opinion on a topic that gets put into blog posts, it’s clear that blogging isn’t just idle writing by people who are bored. It’s clear that people think they have an audience, or they wouldn’t continue doing it. Presumably these people’s audience tends to agree with the people writing, or they wouldn’t continue to read the writing. What this means, in the end, is that there are large amounts of people with similar opinions on issues, expressing these issues on the internet. One would think politicians would pay attention to this.
What seems curious to me is this: Arguably all of these bloggers, and readers, and commenters, and people linking to other blogs all have valid, viable opinions that are worth discussing. Why aren’t their views being discussed until after they filter through the mainstream news media? It seems as though it’s because there are just simply too many people, all talking at once. Consider for a second the general metaphor of signal in the noise (derived from old broadcasting terminology, the signal is what you’re looking for, the noise is a bunch of other junk that is also broadcast, but not useful). It seems, at least superficially, that all of these bloggers (and subsequently commenters, etc.) have opinions at least relatively worth listening to. If we follow the previously mentioned metaphor, all of these bloggers are signal.
Clearly there’s a lot of other stuff going on (the noise in our metaphor), but even still, the signal should be getting picked up. To a degree, it is. Things like the Huffington Post try to take the best of their pool of bloggers, and give it a public face. Places like CNN tend to take stories that are showing up in a lot of blogs, and synthesizing them further, then reporting them. Is this really where blogging is headed? Are bloggers really just the front-lines of news? Does news really have to go event->blogs (potentially repeated 10 times)->mainstream news->the masses? That’s potentially n+3 times of interpretation of what happens (where n is the number of bloggers the stuff goes through before it hits the final blogger that then causes mainstream news to pick it up).
I’m not sure what my point is, it’s 2:15am, and I should’ve been asleep an hour ago. Ultimately, it seems as though bloggers aren’t being heard the way they should be, which really boils down to the idea that the masses/governement/mainstream news isn’t really listening to the opinions of the people. Yes, bloggers have a lot of signal in the scheme of the overall broadcast, but I worry that even this signal from the bloggers is too noisy. That is, by the nature of blogging, and having lots of people doing it, the signal becomes a type of noise in it’s own right. How do we find the signal in the signal in the nosie?
) some sort of up and down groove. It’s just what it is, I don’t have an answer one way or the other.
