Of blogs, politics and filing cabinets

Of the reaction I've seen (admittedly not much) to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's nationwide telephone survey of bloggers, I think inhouse media critic Jack Shafer's in the online magazine Slate.com is one of the more incisive. But maybe it's just because I agree with his overall take on blogging -- the people who say it's a revolutionary new thing in the world of journalism are doing something age-old instead, they're just hyping the story.

First, the Pew report's conclusions. Here's the summary on their webpage:

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

That squares with what I've seen in the academic literature: Most blogging is personal, not political.

Shafer's piece on the Pew report notes that Technorati's "A List" of influential, heavily trafficked blogs consists of only 100 websites. I started to say "100 people," but "websites" is a better word because some of the big ones are corporate, collective enterprises. Think Wonkette, who is actually a couple of guys with a cute, feminine logo now that Ana Marie Cox has moved on to bigger (and more traditional) things. But, as Shafer notes, the Pew report is "stalking the larger universe of 12 million adult Americans who blog," and the picture is quite different. Says Shafer:

The Pew report, written briskly and ably by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox, delivers an array of provocative findings about bloggers. The most immediately startling for me was the repetition of the phrases "about half " or "nearly half" to describe various blogger attributes. About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know. Half say changing people's minds is not a major reason behind their blog, and about half had never published before starting their blog. (The margin of error for the telephone survey was plus or minus 7 percentage points.)

Pew's blogging masses couldn't be more different than the American A-listers. Most A-listers are men over 30; have published before; are in it primarily to change public opinions and not to share their experiences; know only a fraction of their readers; and don't conceal their identities.

Yet the newspaper reports on blogging focus almost exclusively on the Daily Kos, Instapundit and journalists like Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic who also blog. A-listers, in other words.

Here's Shafer again:

I'm not disparaging bloggers, so please don't treat me to a high-tech lynching. But this study shows that at this early point in the blog era, the great mass of bloggers aren't set on replacing reporters. The top 100 or top 1,000 may consider themselves "citizen journalists" of one sort or another, but the survey finds that 65 percent of bloggers don't consider their output journalism at all. They're just expressing themselves in a leisurely fashion, inspired by a personal experience (78 percent, says the survey), and their blogs are a "hobby" or "something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on" (84 percent).

Again, I'm not disparaging hobbies or navel-gazing: I have hobbies I can bore you with, and I navel-gaze. But the Pew report indicates that only a tiny fraction of current bloggers have any ambition to fulfill the blogs über alles designs some media theorists plotted for them.

Does Shafer sound a little defensive there? He might, because he's made much the same point before and got pummeled around the blogosphere for it. But I'm not about to join his lynching party. I blog, and I have no intention whatsoever of "replacing reporters" or reinventing myself as a "citizen journalist." Been there, done that. Worked for newspapers the better part of 15 years, got out of the business. Fell much better now, thank you. Whatever it is I do when I blog, it's not covering the news and influencing public opinion (although my opinions do sneak in from time to time, especially when the politicians stray onto my turf with simplistic notions about standardized testing). I'm not even sure I'd want to call it journalism, although I still think of myself as a journalist and my published writing tends to be journalistic rather than scholarly in style.

The Pew report hardly mentions academic blogs, probably because there aren't enough of us out there to show up in a random telephone survey. But the ones I'm familiar with, including mine, don't quite fit the reported categories.

For one thing, they're both personal and political. Like the bloggers in the Pew survey I follow the online news sites closely, and sometimes I wax political. But I don't like to do it too much. (For one thing, nobody's reading my blog. That part of the Pew report does ring a bell! So I'm not going to influence public policy with it.) I have three blogs, this one for journalism classes, a teaching blog and one on music that I also use in my humanities classes. While I can't resist the temptation for a little self-expression, I like to use them mostly as research and teaching tools.

When I'm doing research I post material I find, mostly but not always on the internet, to the appropriate blog(s) so I can easily retrieve it later with a keyword search. I'll also use the blogs to try out ideas I might use later, essentially as a writer's journal. They wind up sounding a lot like the op ed columns I used to write, so I guess I'm satisfying some kind of creative itch to get words down on paper at the same time.

During the spring semester I used the blogs as a teaching tool. I'd post information to the blog, assign my students to read it and base class discussions on their reading. Sometimes I had them write to a separate message board linked to my faculty webpage. It kept things fresh and timely, especially in my newswriting class but also in Native American cultural studies and, to a lesser degree, in my advertising survey course.

And finally, as I've suggested in comments on my other blogs lately, I use the blogs as a filing cabinet. That started at the beginning of the summer, when I embarked on a massive office-cleaning project preparatory to moving to a new building. Scraps of paper would come to the surface, random information like a quote from St. Angela Merici or a set of instructions for "lining out" 19th-century hymns. Most of it I'd forgotten I had. So I started posting it to my blogs. If the system resembles a filing cabinet, and I do think it does, it's a sprawling, disorderly filing cabinet with lots of folders marked "miscellaneous." But it's better than hanging onto scraps of paper that won't resurface till the next time I move offices.