A recent blogggingheads episode pointed me to this piece, Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. I know Melissa McEwan mostly due to her being hired and fired by the John Edwards campaign in 2007 (word of warning: don’t hire bloggers unless you have “checked them out”).
I won’t comment on McEwan’s blog because I haven’t read it much (really, at all). But the thesis of the piece seems to be that the way the author characterizes the blog can somehow reflect and illuminate the general tenor of the golden age of blogs. She also argues that the things we hate about social media were already there in blogs. There is nothing new under the sun.
Obviously there is something to the argument. People are people. The medium is not “controlling” us. Some blogs became quite cult-like. But what about something like Andrew Gelman’s blog? Can you really compare it to the rants you saw elsewhere?
The production of authors on blogs, like on social media, was always quite diverse. But the difference is that on social media it’s all packaged and bundled together. Sometimes you want to indulge yourself with a cupcake. Sometimes you want to dine on a fine steak. And then there are the instances when you want a simple and elegant salad. On your Twitter timeline, it all blends together into a fine gruel. There’s no disaggregation. You get the sweet frosting with the steak, as well as the tang of arugula paste.
Quantity has a quality all its own. That’s what Twitter teaches us.
In the end , is not much different from what she said (but with a positive spin): «It always confuses me when people talk about social media echo chambers. Filter bubbles notwithstanding, I see all sorts of online content I could do without. I go to Facebook and see your cousin complaining about immigrants; Instagram thinks I’m in the market for a subscription box of hideous pastel “personalized artist designed enamel pins”; people will never stop retweeting fucking Ben Shapiro videos onto my timeline. Meanwhile, at the height of the platform’s powers, a blog could easily assemble a readership that spoke with one collective voice.»
But perhaps for the people who used RSS feeders there was not much difference?