Is blogging killing the internet?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Something I've noticed in the last year is an increasing number of people replying to forum posts with "I wrote about this on my blog!" which is an interesting shift from the former community and discussion-minded orientation of the earlier years. In the meantime, forum posts everywhere I've been have been declining, while comparatively self-focused "social networking media" like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest thrive.

It seems as if perhaps the Internet has finally outgrown its roots as a medium for people to interact, and is growing into the most grim possible outcome predicted for it in the 1980's; a series of high-tech TV channels on which every individual broadcasts everything about themselves. Of course, the potential worst-case-scenario for this this evolution is an Internet as useless and obsolete as television or telephone party lines, but then my question is, where are the other people going? Inevitably, as self-aggrandisement media has spread and taken over one medium, people who actually want a forum, an exchange of ideas, a breeding ground for dissent from the social norm, have found other places in which to thrive.

Where is it, now? Or is humanity really receding into self-contained capsules of Me, Me, Me?

I don't believe that will happen as a constant, sustainable state. Human beings crave interaction and feedback to a profound degree, and blog comments are a horribly inefficient way of maintaining that kind of interaction. Is internet discussion being abandoned for bars, cafes, and meetup groups?

Where are we going from here?

[EK WAFFLR]

This is really interesting. I have seen the same thing, on other forums.
I have no idea where we are going from here, but some of the busiest places I know of online are in hidden facebook groups.

[Placid Dingo]

I agree forums seem to be on the way out which is a damn shame. I didn't peg blogs as a cause though. I suspect facebook and co have simply made it so easy to communicate with people you know that most people don't connect to the people they don't.

[Doktor Howl]

I agree forums seem to be on the way out which is a damn shame.

People have been screaming eulogies for forums since the dial up BBS days.

Thing is, most blogging is the daytime TV of the internet.  It serves one of three things:

1.  People writing things they're experts at, but are not in a position to publish, or

2.  People feeding their vast egos, thinking millions of people are breathlessly waiting to hear what they did that day, or what they think on a given topic that they know nothing about, or

3.  Stalkers.

It all comes down to taste, in my opinion.  Forums are small, community minded, and range from things like PD, to horrible shit like Capitol Grilling.  Facebook serves the same people that Oprah Winfrey makes her money on, and personal blogs serve people as mentioned above.

Personally, I am of the ECH school of thinking...As much as I bitch about lack of traffic, I'd rather have you guys posting once a day than millions of people belching out their ignorance on Facebook.

[Cain]

I would also say that, back in the heyday (2002-6), in terms of political blogging, there was a lot more variety of opinion, and that the best known bloggers had a lot of back and forth between them on the issues of the day, regardless of party affiliation.  You'd often find one blogger actually discussing things, for days at a time, in another blogger's comments.

Then, newspapers and political groups started hiring from the best bloggers, giving them fancy gigs at places like Foreign Policy or Heritage or the CNAS.  This was inevitable, but it created a professionalized tier from among the most productive writers, who were then elevated in such a way that a) they were removed from the mainstream internet back and forth and b) were now doing this for a living, and so often had to meet productivity quotas, write papers and adhere to the employer's line on certain issues.

Basically, like with the mainstream media, you have a top 200 or so bloggers now, all paid, who link to each other exclusively and have some influence on the mainstream media, and everyone else.  Who are pretty much locked out of the top tier for forever.

So even the vaunted "variety of opinion" that blogging allegedly represents is not really the case.  As some have correctly pointed out, there was a curious bias in that most of those who got hired had a) neoliberal sympathies if a Democrat and b) supported the Iraq War if a Democrat and c) were crazy Bushista psychotics if on the right. In other words, it came to mirror the bounds of acceptable political discourse as set through the mainstream media and political climate in the US.  Everyone else was left screaming into the void.

Also, the biggest non-commerical blogs are still run like commercial enterprises now, with a number of writers, moderators and merchandise to sell.  The individual aspect of the blog has been broken down by the necessities of babysitting a community and - given how most comments on the internet can be summed by the dreaded "Youtube comments" description, this means bloggers who used to spend all their time arguing with others now spend their spare time cleaning out the spam filter, making the flow of conversation pretty much all one way.  Actually getting someone on a well known blog to even comment back is pretty much impossible these days. 

[AFK]

I said this before in another thread earlier, don't remember which one.  But I really think that internet forums and boards ARE on their way out.  Not that they will ever completely go away.  They'll still exist here and there, and hopefully this one will hang on in some viable and productive form.  But I think, overall, the internet message board medium's best days are behind it. 

And I think it was inevitable when the social media sites started to blow up.  Those sites are far less about discussion and about grabbing attention.  And we live in an age when attention and notoreity are king.  People don't care about deep, meaningful discussions about any particular topic.  They want people to look at them, to pay attention to the minutae of their uninteresting lives.  Facebook provides much more immediate gratification in that way than message boards do. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

It think the forums have had the same kind of life cycle that Usenet had. It began as discussion/debate and it eventually became overrun by trolls, generally meaningless arguments, and arguments about the arguments. Facebook, Twitter etc don't lend themselves to strong debate, but they also don't lend themselves to the sort of trolling and argument that plague forums and Usenet.

I think that relatively few people really want to engage in discussion and debate, fewer still want to engage in discussion and debate while battling trolls and useless arguing. If someone writes an article and posts it in a forum, its open to all sorts of valid criticism, invalid criticism, trolling, bullshit and thread-jacks. Posting the same thing in a blog format reduces the trolling, bullshit and threadjacking... but it also reduces valid criticism. I think many people don't really want the criticism anyway. Further, many forums have a strong hierarchy of users (old timers vs noobs) which is another layer that you don't have to deal with if you simply publish your own blog. When you look at most (but not all) blogs, the comments are from people that like the author, like what the author writes and generally behave like an echo chamber.

If we look at PD as an example, there are many "Discordians" who would be chewed up and spit out if they posted here. On the other hand, if they publish the same thing in their own blog, with their own user base... they don't have to deal with Discordians that disagree with their views. I've noticed similar trends in some other forums as well. People want to believe that what they write is good/awesome/inspired, the blog format can much more easily reinforce this belief.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would also say that, back in the heyday (2002-6), in terms of political blogging, there was a lot more variety of opinion, and that the best known bloggers had a lot of back and forth between them on the issues of the day, regardless of party affiliation.  You'd often find one blogger actually discussing things, for days at a time, in another blogger's comments.

Then, newspapers and political groups started hiring from the best bloggers, giving them fancy gigs at places like Foreign Policy or Heritage or the CNAS.  This was inevitable, but it created a professionalized tier from among the most productive writers, who were then elevated in such a way that a) they were removed from the mainstream internet back and forth and b) were now doing this for a living, and so often had to meet productivity quotas, write papers and adhere to the employer's line on certain issues.

Basically, like with the mainstream media, you have a top 200 or so bloggers now, all paid, who link to each other exclusively and have some influence on the mainstream media, and everyone else.  Who are pretty much locked out of the top tier for forever.

So even the vaunted "variety of opinion" that blogging allegedly represents is not really the case.  As some have correctly pointed out, there was a curious bias in that most of those who got hired had a) neoliberal sympathies if a Democrat and b) supported the Iraq War if a Democrat and c) were crazy Bushista psychotics if on the right. In other words, it came to mirror the bounds of acceptable political discourse as set through the mainstream media and political climate in the US.  Everyone else was left screaming into the void.

Also, the biggest non-commerical blogs are still run like commercial enterprises now, with a number of writers, moderators and merchandise to sell.  The individual aspect of the blog has been broken down by the necessities of babysitting a community and - given how most comments on the internet can be summed by the dreaded "Youtube comments" description, this means bloggers who used to spend all their time arguing with others now spend their spare time cleaning out the spam filter, making the flow of conversation pretty much all one way.  Actually getting someone on a well known blog to even comment back is pretty much impossible these days.

This is an interesting analysis of the political polarization of the blogosphere... thank you. It reinforces my impression of blogging as largely no more likely a source of an audience for most people than just standing on a streetcorner shouting.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I agree forums seem to be on the way out which is a damn shame. I didn't peg blogs as a cause though. I suspect facebook and co have simply made it so easy to communicate with people you know that most people don't connect to the people they don't.

I am lumping social media like Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter in with blogs because they are individual-based and largely one-way communications, the content of any given page of which are controlled by the single user who "owns" that page.

They are basically ways for people to go "LOOK AT ME!"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I agree forums seem to be on the way out which is a damn shame.

People have been screaming eulogies for forums since the dial up BBS days.

Thing is, most blogging is the daytime TV of the internet.  It serves one of three things:

1.  People writing things they're experts at, but are not in a position to publish, or

2.  People feeding their vast egos, thinking millions of people are breathlessly waiting to hear what they did that day, or what they think on a given topic that they know nothing about, or

3.  Stalkers.

It all comes down to taste, in my opinion.  Forums are small, community minded, and range from things like PD, to horrible shit like Capitol Grilling.  Facebook serves the same people that Oprah Winfrey makes her money on, and personal blogs serve people as mentioned above.

Personally, I am of the ECH school of thinking...As much as I bitch about lack of traffic, I'd rather have you guys posting once a day than millions of people belching out their ignorance on Facebook.

Annnd THIS.