Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Is Blogging Declining?

Recently Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posted asking this question, and getting few answers. He posed it in terms of some people arguing that it has gotten boring and unexciting, but the real issue may be has it been superseded by Facebook and Twitter as the cutting edge source of news and discussion, just as blogging displaced the revered internet lists some years ago in this way, although some such as our own Michael Perelman's revered pen-l continue to truck along. A weird straw in the wind may be that reportedly media mavens are now not going to the Drudge Report (a good move in my view) and are looking at Facebook and Twitter instead, with the recent role of Twitter in reporting the events in Iran being a real straw in the wind. If so, this would seem to be part of a larger trend, the bottom end of which is the decline of the print newspapers, which some such as Brad Delong trumpet as a good thing.


I think blogging will continue as a source of important discussion, at least in economics, even if it loses some of its cutting edge quality as a source of new information. However, I would emphasize that a loss of the bottom end, the print newspapers, would be disastrous in all this. Why? I cite my own experience back on maxspeak in the case of reporting about the problems of Kurdish people in Harrisonburg, VA, who were being mistreated by the FBI and the courts. The maxspeak files unfortunately remain inaccessible, but I posted here an update on that about two years ago.

A crucial aspect of the original blog about this matter on maxspeak, which got picked up by lots of other blogs and went around the globe before even the mayor of Harrisonburg knew what was going on, was that there was a lot of blowback from other blogs (especially the widely read Volokh Conspiracy) to the effect of "How do we know you did not make this up, where is the link to a newspaper story?" In the end, we were able to find an obscure story buried deep in a an earlier edition of the local paper, the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record, which reported on the ongoing prosecution of the Kurds, but which was buried so deep and was so favorable to the prosecution side that no civil libertarians or pretty much anybody outside of the local Kurdish community and a few supporters among the local Mennonite population even noticed it. But in the end, that ability to link to some sort of hard copy source in a print newspaper was crucial for support, and this blog report did have really positive consequences. Maybe twittering will be able to get around this, but twittering and Facebook can be manipulated, and fraudulent reports can be manufactured. Ground verification will still be needed for breaking news.

5 comments:

Orlando Roncesvalles said...

Yes, of course, the value of a traditional newspaper isn't that it's on paper but that it has trusted editorial content, as well as superior archived evidence (even if considered as double hearsay in the courts).

Shag from Brookline said...

Just as with traditional newspapers, certain blogs earn trusted editorial content. And those blogs should survive. I don't twitter or Facebook and don't intend to at age 78. But good blogs augment traditional newspapers. I would be interested in learning how much time people spend on twitter and Facebook.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I recently got myself on Facebook, but spend little time on it and mostly use it for social communications. I do not twitter. I am still on a few internet lists, but mostly ones that are very low key, such as the History of Economics list. Some of those are still good news sources, such as the Russia List run by David Johnson, who aggregates material from many different sources.

Eleanor said...

I do facebook. It isn't set up for comments of any length, which makes for limited discussion. I think of it as conference chatter -- you know, when you go around a party at a conference and touch base with everyone, but only briefly. I can't imagine it replacing blogs. But I may (of course) be wrong.

Shag from Brookline said...

My mail delivery this afternoon included the Summer 2009 issue of The Wilson Quarterly that includes an article by James Morris titled "Divided By" with this description: "Oversharing is the newest social disease. A hundred Facebook friends aren't worth a half dozen of the to-the-death, flesh-and-blood sort." Perhaps it is my age, but Barbra Steisand's song for me is transposed: "People who DON'T need people are the luckiest people in the world." Morris says: "I'm struck by the new divide between those of us who still hoard our privacy as shrewd nations once hoarded gold and those who've erased the boundary separating their private and public lives, who've decided, apparently, that there's nothing so private it can't be, shouldn't be, shared in public." I refuse to have a cell phone, enjoying that I cannot be contacted by others when it suits them. Leave a message, please; maybe I'll return the call. In a few years I'll be completely unplugged literally and perhaps I should prepare for it. Don't call me; I'll call you. Tweat and out; in your Face-book!