In “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which I’ve perused through but never read to completion, Milan Kundera writes:
One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
Kundera may have written about novel authors, but there’s little parallel with blog authors and the communities and connections they spawn.
Photo credit: Robin Hamman @ Flickr
…which leads me to question those who say blogs are dying.
Is The Economist correct in its view of Jason Calacanis and other high-level technologists that blogs went mainstream, echoing recent commentary in Wired by Paul Boutin that wannabe bloggers should give up?
Is Harvard Business Review former executive editor Nick Carr correct that blogs are lacking personality and experiencing a midlife crisis? Or is Chris Brogan on target that people are writing less and shifting to podcasting and video blogging?
Are Helen Duffett and Duncan Riley on the money that blogs are shrinking and blog networks are dying? Or should we agree with Alan Patrick, Steve Garfield, B.L. Ochman, and Mark Dykeman that the death of blogging is premature and nothing more?
Should we listen to Trevor Cook of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that blogging and the rest of the social media revolution is stalled? Or is fellow Australian technology consultant James Dellow correct and it’s OK for people to have different viewpoints?
I understand the argument. With approximately 50 million blogs in the world — 7 million updated in the past four months and 1.5 million updated in the past week — I grasp the uncertainty.
But these questions are always asked every few months and the recent spat by The Economist and Wired provide nothing new.
I agree there is online saturation but I don’t think we’ve reached deafness and incomprehension.
Do you?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I don’t understand the question
I added an afterthought to the post you so kindly linked to, in that although it is clear that the Big Blogs are chasing MSM outcomes, and the DiaryBloggers come and go (to Facebook) the low entry cost still allows a huge number of good “small cap” blogs to carry on as they have been doing since 2004 odd – ie fomenting ideas and chatting to each other. I’ve called it “Le Blog Epoque”:
http://broadstuff.com/archives/1363-Le-Blog-Epoque.html
Mine’s an Absinthe next time you’re at the bar
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Good post, Ari, and I love the Kundera quote.
Different people, including myself, have talked about the “firehose” effect of social media, whereby the huge deluge of content which comes from following a lot of other users can seem overwhelming. I think this is was Kundera is talking about when she writes that “the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”
However, it’s fairly simple to filter or control the noise if you really want to.
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I agree with you that blogs aren’t dead but to see their point that the industry is very saturated and losing personality. That’s because people view it as a business and less as a hobby now. Because of it I think blogs are beginning to be viewed in more of a journalistic point of view. The more niche bloggers or small timers who do it more for fun, you will usually see more personality in their writing.
Great post Ari and one of my favorite books. I don’t think blogging is dead and as a person who is involved in writing for over 15 years (and reading even longer), I do believe people will always want to write. My question is more around vlogging, will that take over, will people speak more and write less (Hyde Park style discussions)?
@Alan: Blogging existed long before 2004. You could trace the notion of free-form idea generation and sharing to the early ’80s and bulletin boards, where people replied to each other as we’re doing now.
@Mark: Your firehouse analogy is what I call noise. But there are ways to filter that, as you know. And it’s not necessary to follow everything. Oh, and Milan is a he.
@Craig: It’s funny you say that. My target reader is one who runs ads with their business. But I don’t run ads on this blog. Which proves once again that ads are not the best indicator of a business and blogs don’t necessarily needs ads to sustain. I’m just sayin’.
@Yael: Video blogging won’t overtake blogging. Though, oral speech has existed longer than written language.
Will video comments overtake written comments?
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