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 In 2004 'blog' was declared Word of the Year. The word, which is actually short for 'weblog', gained this status largely because it outed Republican Trent Lott as an inveterate racist for remarks that he made at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Although the event was a public one attended by mainstream media, it was only the bloggers that picked up on the incendiary comments that were made. What followed was an explosion of media interest in Lott's political career at the invitation of bloggers who unearthed priceless info nuggets, including a 1984 interview with Lott in The Southern Partisan exposing his segregationist views.
It culminated in Lott's resignation as Senator and a demand from Bush for a public apology. Wired magazine's report on the 2002 incident remarked that Trent Lott probably didn't know what a blog was before he "flushed his reputation down the toilet". Does anyone really know?
The word morphed, as so many words do in the petri dish of the internet, first into a verb and very quickly into a cultural phenomenon. The original etymology (a weblog is simply a record of any given entity's daily sojourn on the web) has been lost to antiquity in less than a decade. Blogging is now such a global phenomenon that specialisms include topics as diverse as "A Blog for Cats that look like Hitler" and the even more ridiculous jalopnik.com, a so-called "automotive blog" where you can read about the "speed-trappiest towns in the USA". Opinions on blogging are just as diverse.
Elizabeth Osder, a professor at The University of Southern California’s School of Journalism, calls bloggers navel-gazers and says that "they’re about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books.”
The self-conscious musings of veteran blogger Justin Hall who, after 11 years and 4 800 pages of blogging, abruptly stopped his rant at the ripe old age of 31, seem to validate Osder's claim that blogging comes unnervingly close to worship for some: “The Web is my constant connection to something larger than myself...but what if something you do, something you practice like religion as a dialogue with the divine, drives people away from you?”
Josh Marshall of talkingpoints.com, who led the charge in the Lott affair by dredging up the incriminating interview, points out that traditional media only follows up on stories that still have legs after 24 hours. Blogs, by contrast, can keep a story from expiring and can, if they are not too obsessed with belly button fluff, act as early warning systems for journalists.
Another take is that blogs, now fed to capacity by RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by providing automatic news aggregate via newsbots from millions of different sources, are the future of media.
So what of 2015?
Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson have conjured up a flash-animated hypothesis of the future from the viewpoint of the fictitious Museum of Media History called EPIC 2015 to illustrate the implications of their predicted convergence of computer-generated newscasts and blogging. A further coupling, with Amazon's consumer predeliction predictions, produces Googlezon, a highly individualized system linked to the "Google Grid" which "automatically searches all content sources and splices together stories to cater to the interests of each individual user" without the involvement of any "actual new organisations". By the time the slumbering Fourth Estate wakes up it is too late: The New York Times has gone offline and becomes "a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly".
In its place the rest of us are fed a "collection of trivia" generated by EPIC 2015.
Much of it is untrue.
© Debbie smit – The Sunday Independent
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