Blogging Analogous To Telephoning

I rather liked this article:

"Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting," [Barry Diller, the veteran TV executive] told The Economist in 2006. "Talent is the new limited resource." At a technology conference that year, he declared, "There's just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs."

Diller's view echoes that of avowedly elitist polemics like Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur." According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that's spewing forth from the Web's profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It's just dross that obscures the real talent's output.

Beyond the obvious arrogance, this view misreads and underestimates the Web in several ways. It's a mistake to think of human creativity as a kind of limited natural resource, like an ore waiting for society to mine; it is more like a gene that will turn on given the right cues. Diller and his ilk envision the Web simply as a new distribution channel for the same old stuff, and human expression as a static commodity, uninfluenced by the medium that bears it or the social environment in which it emerges. Their view values each bit of expression based on marketplace worth and potential breadth of appeal, but ignores any worth the expression may have to the person who made it. Most narrow-mindedly of all, they assume that yesterday's filtering methods will remain reliable and sufficient tomorrow, no matter how radically the environment changes around them.

This is a recipe for failure. Yet, despite these flaws, despite its condescension and its inflexibility, Diller's attitude remains widespread among media company leaders. They are rightly afraid that it will be harder for them to work the same way and maintain the same profits in the new media world; but they are deluded in believing they have any choice in the matter. Already, today's Web has evolved well beyond the familiar shape of Diller's picture. It is expanding the opportunity to manifest talent even as it is exploding the agreed-upon structures for rewarding the works that talent creates. These changes are wreaking havoc with the music industry, whose youthful customers have moved into the new world faster than the companies that sell to them. The same crisis is now beginning to engulf television, movies, book publishing -- everywhere that physical goods can be replaced by digital files, and anywhere that the old gatekeeping model of talent recognition can be eroded by the demotic currents of the publish-everything Web.

Diller and his species of executive have always excelled at finding rare talents that can, at their best, enchant a mass market. But this very success has blinded them to the different, more diffuse sort of talent present among the Web's millions of contributors. Of course talent isn't universal, nor is it evenly distributed. But there is far more of it in the world than Diller's blinkered vision allows. On the Web it can reveal itself in a far wider range of ways, and far more people will have a chance to cultivate it. It will never be perceived in a uniform way; you and I will recognize it in very different places and judge it in very different ways. But it is surely there -- and, fortunately, denigrating it will not make it go away.

Because the Web comes to us on a screen, it has been easy to misapprehend it as the next phase in the evolution of television. The advent of blogging looked to some observers like the latest mutation of reality TV, which dissects the lives of ordinary people on a mass stage. But there's one defining difference: on a reality show, only a few people get the opportunity to participate, and those who win the chance remain at the mercy of the show's producers. In articles that explore how blogging can turn lives inside out, rendering the private public, references abound to "The Truman Show"-- a 1998 movie about a man who discovers his life is an elaborately staged TV program. Truman Burbank, that movie's protagonist, is a victim, practically a prisoner, with no choice in his performance. Bloggers, on the other hand, are volunteers; they may have little power over whom they reach, but they have unprecedented control over what they say and whether to keep saying it. No one can vote you off the island of your own blog.

We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone. When the telephone arrived in American homes and businesses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was some uncertainty over how people would use it and how using it would change their lives. Some social critics worried that the telephone's insistent intrusions would undermine the status of the home as a refuge from the world's pressures. Others feared that the phone would erode the shared public space of our communities and disengage us from social life. Telephone conversations were neither private nor trusted. Party lines and operators meant conversations were likely to be overheard; con artists took advantage of the new technology to prey on the naive.

...Some blogs are simply vehicles for conversation among friends. Some are exclusively public discourse. But many take advantage of blogs' potential to cross back and forth over this line. A post meant originally for a small circle of friends may "go viral" and catch the attention of millions; a broadside post from a public figure may spark a back-and-forth exchange in the comments. This mutability can be breathtakingly powerful; it can also be treacherous. Either way, whenever we observe an instance of it, we sense we are witnessing something that could only occur in this form, via this medium -- something uniquely bloggish.

Once we acknowledge that the Web inherits at least as much from the telephone as from the television, complaints about the "problem" of the Web's abundance appear in a different light. In a 2007 article, James McGrath Morris, a journalism historian, wrote, "There is a point when there are simply too many blogs. With 30 million blogs today, we may well have reached that point."

He was not the first, nor the last, to raise the "too many blogs!" alarm. In November 2008, Time's Michael Kinsley wrote, "How many blogs does the world need? There is already blog gridlock." The question, echoing a legion of similar skeptics, sounds reasonable at first. But what if he'd written, "How many telephone calls does the world need"?

...The sheer volume of blogs evokes a peevish resentment among some observers, as if the outpouring represented a personal affront. How dare all these people presume on our attention! Do they really think that anyone is listening to them? It is certainly possible to blog into a void -- to post and post and never get a visitor or a comment. But it's unlikely many of us would persist with such unrewarding labors. Most blogs have some sort of audience, however tiny -- moms and beyond. Where do these readers come from? More often than not, they are other bloggers. Observers steeped in the values of the broadcast world identify this as a failure: Look, the only people who care what you're doing are already in your club! But in fact, as they say in the software industry, this reciprocity is not a bug at all -- it's a feature.