Davos Discovers the Blogs
I can't say I was surprised to find that this year's World Economic Forum included a session on blogs. If, as Ben Franklin says, (via Dick Cheney's Christmas cards) a sparrow can't fall to the ground without God noticing, then certainly a hot media trend like blogging can't go on too long without showing up on the agenda in Davos.
The session -- "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?" -- was actually better than I expected, despite the lame title. Looking at the list of panelists before hand, I got the impression it would be a collection of media sharks and clueless journalism professors. But three of the five speakers have their own blogs:
Jay Rosen, the chair of the department of journalism at NYU.
Joi Ito, CEO of a company called Neoteny, a Japanese venture capital firm and "consulting practice focused on corporate venture development."
Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of a French company called ublog, which I suppose does something touchy feely involving blogs. Just a guess.
The non-blogging panelists were Orville Schell, the dean of the Berkeley Journalism school (and author of a number of terrific books about China) and a German media consultant I'd never heard of before.
For the most part, I'd say these guys got it -- particularly Rosen, who drew some interesting comparisons between blogs and the original newspapers that appeared in the London coffee houses of the early 18th century. Those early broadsheets, he noted, were largely the work of individual writers, who commented on political or economic or foreign events they learned about through their private correspondence with other writers.
Rosen's point, I think, is that communications technology may be moving in a great historical cycle. The invention of the printing press -- followed by radio and then television -- created a progressively more capital-intensive media industry, with an increasing division of labor among reporters, editors, printers, advertising whores, um, I mean, salesmen, etc. The invention of the Internet, however, has shifted the balance back towards the individual writer/publisher, doing his/her own thing, reporting or commenting on events they find through their own research, either on the web or off.
The difference, of course, is that what was once limited to a small literate elite in the 18th century is available to millions of people the world over in the 21st. This is a revolution by anybody's definition, and could even, in time, spell the end of the mainstream media as we know it. Or, as Rosen put it: "The age of the mass media is just that -- an age. It doesn't have to last forever."
Ito -- the Japanese venture capitalist -- described himself as a "technologist," which is the kind of technobabble that usually makes me tune the babbler out. But he actually suggested an interesting schematic for the blog ecosystem, in which memes start at the bottom, among the hundreds of thousands of small, obscure blogs, then get "amplified" by "social network" blogs that keep an eye on certain topics or regions, and finally get picked up by the "power blogs" -- the Atrioses and Instapundits and Talkingpointmemos of the blogging universe. From there they may even enter the mainstream media.
I've seen theories of "thought contagion" in the financial markets that work somewhat the same way. Transferred to the blogging culture, it's an appealling democratic vision. But I don't think it's quite correct.
My sense is that most, though not all, blogging memes start at the top -- with an event or a piece of information that is absorbed by many people at once, usually from the mainstream media. Howard Dean's Iowa "I have a scream" speech is a classic example. Once an event like that happens, the bloggers closest to it in media space (to indulge in some technobabble of my own) start to do their thing.
In Dean's case, political bloggers immediately climbed all over the story (except, of course, for me, floating out here in Davos space.) But the people who really made it fly where the guerrilla multimedia artists who began remixing the audio and the video, creating a satirical explosion that guaranteed the incident would metastasize across the Internet (and just about destroy Dean's campaign in the process.)
It's not that memes have to start at the top -- sometimes they do percolate up through the blogosphere, picking up steam as they go. The experience can be astonishing for the blogger who starts the chain reaction -- as I discovered last year when I published my collection of WMD quotes from the Bush administration. Suddenly, you feel like you've been shoved at warp speed into the center of the universe -- until the next meme comes along, and you drift back into the outer darkness.
I guess the metaphor I would use in place of Ito's amplifier would be earthquakes -- which occur by the thousands all over the world every day. Most go unnoticed, unless they happen to hit a densely populated area, in which case they become news. If a really big one hits a remote area, it might become news, if word eventually gets back to the metropolis. But it's less likely to become a big story.
What this means, of course, is that the blogs are not quite as democratic, or decentralized, as some of us would like them to be. The overwhelming majority of readers still seem to cluster around a relatively tiny number of popular blogs, which thus have the greatest power to originate and disseminate memes. And breaking into that charmed circle can be hard, since there are no diminishing returns of scale on the Internet -- no natural limits on the ability of the winners to become even bigger winners.
That same tendency, however, tends to contradict the other big argument I heard in Davos: That the blogs will somehow destroy the public commons -- fracturing the media audience into such small slivers that a coherent debate about broad national or international issues will become impossible.
Schell, the Berkeley J School Dean, was particularly worried about this -- which demonstrates, I guess, that someone can be an unassailable expert about one thing (China, in his case) and know next to nothing about something else (blogs).
The truth, of course, is that blogs are doing more than just about any other modern institution (if institution is the right word for something as anarchistic as the blogosphere) to recreate a common communication space, and encourage maximum public participation.
Just because the web is decentralized doesn't mean it's fractured. Thanks to the miracle of Google (not to mention the even more powerful search tools coming on line) any piece of information or artistic content that exists anywhere on the web is also accessible everywhere on the web. This is why experiences (Dean's yeaaahhh!!!) can shared so widely. And the sharing is two-way. I can sit here in Davos and make fun of the scream, and others can flame me for helping destroy the greatest presidential candidate in American history.
What draws all this yacking together into a common space is the natural human desire for community -- for a place to exchange thoughts with other people who share similiar interests or experiences. But that's where the blogosphere begins, not where it ends. How many of us in the 'sphere have had the experience of following a chain of links to a topic we've never encountered before? How often have we exchanged opinions or information with people who are experts in areas that we know nothing, or next to nothing, about?
That's the fundamental difference between the web and the mainstream mass media, which is strictly top down. By splitting the audience into narrower and narrower fragments, based on interests or demographics, the mass media does destroy the public space, and replaces it with a bunch of pipes, or information "stacks" -- as in a processor chip -- that run from Time-Warner-AOL-Capital-Cities-Disney-ABC-Viacom-Fox (or whatever) down to the target audience. There was a joke a few years back that this trend eventually this would spawn magazines targeted at individual subscribers, with titles like Bruce Illustrated, or Modern Kathy.
Blogs, on the other hand, are the exact opposite: magazines created by individual publishers and aimed outward at the vast universe of the web. And these pipes run horizontally, as well as vertically, creating (to use another lame tech metaphor) a neural net of writers and readers, producers and consumers. The net is capable of deciding -- in a completely democratic way what topics it wants to explore. In effect, the news agenda is put to a continuous vote, with Google counting the ballots. Everyone and anyone is free to contest the results, but if the blogosphere wants to talk about, say, Dean's scream, then that will become the metaphorical equivalent of the lead story on page one -- until something comes along that attracts more votes.
This is what terrifies the mass media: the threat of losing control of the news agenda. There were a number of mainstream journalists in the audience at the
Davos session, and after the speakers had spoken they stood up one after the other to protest the Brave New World they thought the panel was trying to sell.
One guy from Business Week was particularly outraged about the whole thing. He waxed eloquent about the importance of the news "filter" (in my day we called it the gatekeeper function) as mankind's last best defense against the barbarian hordes. I felt like I was listening to a buggy whip manufacturer, circa 1910, talking about the growing threat of the automobile.
Actually, there was a time when I probably would have agreed with the guy -- back when I was on his side of the fence and thought journalists played a valuable watchdog role. But after watching the steady deterioration of the profession over the past ten years or so, I have no patience for such self-serving crap. Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the web, but a mass media that gives us Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage on a regular basis, and that devotes more coverage to Michael Jackson's legal problems than the Iraq War, isn't in a position to lecture anyone about standards. The truth is that the blogs are getting better and better, and the mass media is getting worse and worse. If the credibility lines haven't crossed yet they soon will.
The more serious problem, I think, was raised by Le Meur, the French blogger, who argued that blogs have the potential to become for the news media was Napster was for the music industry. Indeed, the impact on existing business models might be even worse -- Napster only allowed consumers to copy content; blogs allow them to create their own. The traditional media might not be able to cope with the competition, particularly at a time when some of its traditional revenue sources, such as classified ads, are already migrating to the Internet.
Now I'd say more power to blogs if they can drive the mainstream media to its knees, if not for the fact that the large news organizations -- for better or worse -- fill some news-gathering functions that blogs are not (yet) capable of handling. I may not like the spin I think the Washington Post puts on its Pentagon stories, and I may have doubts that Reuters is getting the whole story in Iraq. But I can't go out and do the reporting myself -- not without giving up my boring corporate day job, and that's one discussion I don'twant to have with my wife.
Granted, there are sources out there -- transcripts of Rumsfeld press conferences, posts from Salaam Pax and Riverbend, for example. But these only take you so far. The fact remains that much of the content on news-oriented blogs -- like this one -- is lifted from the mainstream press. According to one of the blog tracking services, the sites most frequently linked to by Whiskey Bar are The Washington Postand The New York Times, and that isn't likely to change soon.
This creates a classic free-rider problem. If the blogs eventually steal the mass media's audience (or at least, key parts of it) and the Internet as a whole continues to steal its revenues, there will come a time when those big, expensive news-gathering operations will become economically insupportable. Either the mass media will have to abandon its existing, adverstising-driven, business model, or it will have to scale back its news-gathering functions to a bare minimum. That pressure to do the latter is already extreme, as any journalist can tell you.
I can easily forsee a time when access to information of the quantity and quality of, say, the daily Reuters news feed will cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Only large corporations and government agencies will be able to afford the price -- just as only a relative handful of financial institutions can now afford access to Bloomberg terminals.
Can the blogs fill the gap? Only if the "neural net" gets a lot more self-organized, and can develop some chops at gathering the news, as opposed to pontificating on it. But that, I suspect, is going to require a revenue stream. (Or, as the cynical reporter puts in the movie The Right Stuff: "No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.")
Where are those bucks going to come from? As commercial propositions, blogs face the same problem every other content provider faces on the web: How the hell do you make money at it? The Internet is gradually destroying the market power that traditionally has allowed media providers to "bundle" content -- forcing their customers to buy the sports news along with the business news, for example. And the web seems to be congenitally inhospitable to advertising forms that rely either on passive absorption (TV) or sensory attraction (retail display.)
So where will the revenues come from, if the blogs go commercial? The German media guy, Burda, seemed to have an almost religious conviction that a viable business model will appear, if the blogs continue to attract an audience -- if they come, someone will build it. But I'm not so sure. Or, more precisely, I'm not certain a business model can be developed that won't completely compromise the independence and integrity that has made the blogs so attractive in the first place.
One of the worst moments at the Davos session was when some twinkie from a New York advertising firm stood up and described how her firm has started turning first to blogs to place ads for certain products. "What I don't understand," she said, "is why the big media companies don't swoop in and buy up some of these blogs while they're still cheap."
I didn't know whether to laugh or scream. On the one hand, this person clearly didn't have the faintest idea what the blogs are all about, or why most bloggers do what the do. She didn't understand how quickly a major media corporation could take a great blog and run it into the ground. Buy up blogs? It would be like trying to catch snow flakes.
But if the thought has occurred to her, it's probably already occurred to others. Just the fact that blogging showed up on the agenda at Davos this year is probably a bad sign. I can't shake the suspicion that the golden age of blogging is almost over -- that the corporate machine is about to swallow it, digest it, and regurgitate it as bland, non-threatening pablum. Our brief Summer of Love may be nearing an end.
I suppose the key question is whether the technology of the Internet will be enough to keep the blogs from going the way of the '60s counterculture. Rock bands and radical writers could be squelched or bought off because the corporations controlled the means of communication -- the record labels and the magazines and the major publishing houses. But while the Man can, if he wants to throw some money around, buy up individual blogs, he can't buy the blogosphere. New voices can always set up shop to replace those that move to the Dark Side.
At least that's what I hope. The potential of blogging is something I've come to believe in passionately -- as passionately as I once believed in the mission of professional journalism. I'd hate to be wrong twice.
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