Joanna Mang’s postmortem of Shakesville over at The Outline is a great read but I’m not sure it’s also the corrective history of the golden age of blogging it purports to be. One blog’s sordid, complicated, and all-too-human history doesn’t somehow damn an entire era.
The 2013 “sundowning” of Google Reader ushered us into the age of the algorithm; an invisible engine would now select your favorite content for you. Today, your online social interaction is most likely facilitated and mediated by a multi-billion-dollar corporation. If you go out searching for articles or YouTube videos on your own, you’ll see what Google wants you to see. So it’s easy to be nostalgic for a version of the Internet that’s never coming back. It’s easy to create false memories of a web of niche hangouts you sought out yourself or found linked on favorite blogs.
While it’s true that the golden era of blogging is “a version of the Internet that’s never coming back”, its current era is full of people trying to find, or code, ways out of the fast and furious context-free indications-not-interactions that social media has turned so much of the online commons into.
What the pre-social media internet had, and this wasn’t, of course, just blogs, was an emphasis on, yes, “a web of niche hangouts”. It lacked an effective means of creating a commons between and among those self-selected islands of found cohorts, but what we’ve ended up with primarily is just the commons and not so much with the niche hangouts.
Those niche hangouts, though, really did exist, and, yes, of course many such places still exist online. What happened at Shakesville is the risk of what happens with communities which form around charismatic individuals doing what they love. It’s not unique to blogging and it doesn’t impugn what happened in those years.
There’s a difference, to be sure, between acknowledging there really was a golden age of blogging—and part of the problem in Mang’s piece is that in focusing so closely upon “the left blogosphere” it’s trapped in the dynamics of that one particular part of the larger blogosphere—and looking at that age through rose-gold-colored glasses.
I’m not aware, however, of anyone who’s ever claimed that the golden age of blogging was some sort of utopia.
The excitement, though, was real, as was the power of interconnecting so many instances of self-expression, and the communities were real, too. I’m not sure anyone’s ever going to say there was a golden age of social media (maybe a heyday?), but blogging’s golden age really did exist, and it still today carries lessons that can release us from “the age of the algorithm”.
Addenda
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I got to thinking about my old blogging and remembered that after I was done with Portland Communique, I had a personal blog called FURIOUS nads! (whose web design was vociferously and aggressively hostile to readability) and browsing Wayback just now I stumbled upon the post where I presented the full version of an op-ed that had run in The Oregonian about why I ended the Communique experiment. I want to pull out one thing here.
Blogging as a form fulfills an increasingly important function of filling in the cracks between traditional news coverage and expanding access to a larger pool of citizen voices.
I think that’s still true today, in ways that social media, whatever its own strengths and advantages, can’t match or capture or quite replicate in its emphasis upon indication over interaction, excitation over expression. Blogs are still the way we can build webs of context rather than just feeding content as rapidly as we can into advertisers' algorithmic maw.