Wikis, blogs, moblogs and more

It could seem like it’s only very recently that mainstream media has caught up to the fact that there’s this whole new media world existing out there in cyberspace: or at least, only recently that they are starting to get rattled about it.

In fact many journalists - who after all are generally computer and Internet-savvy people - have known about blogs, news sites and opinion-gathering sites for quite a while and of their potential for breaking news stories (think of the Drudge Report for instance).

What is new perhaps, is both the proliferation of such new media - especially apparent after September 11 - and the associated fact that the targets and goals of its practitioners have grown, as curiosity about the new media has increased. There are all kinds of people from all walks of life, and from all kinds of backgrounds, blogging these days and the best blogs and opinion sites attract many readers.

It’s still very much a male-dominated world, but I think that’s because blogging replicates the “old-media” combative world of the opinion column, not a place that’s proved particularly congenial to women, who generally tend to be less confrontational (if no less opinionated) in their approach to public issues. But women are also putting more than a toe into the briny waters of the brave new world.

I’ve had a fair bit of writing experience in new media, both in contributing to online magazines and blogging, as well as reading a wide range of sites and blogs. There’s also been a fair amount of “convergence” for me, in that things I’ve written in “old” media outlets such as magazines, newspapers and so on, have ended up on the Internet, being “reprinted” and also discussed. The whole experience has brought up a number of interesting issues.

First of all, as a reader, it has expanded my reading experience, rather than narrowed it. I can now read newspapers and magazines from around the world online, as well as blogs, and am not locked into a particular newspaper’s editorial bias. I haven’t stopped reading newspapers - though I’ve probably bought fewer of them - preferring to read many online. But I have extended my subscriptions to print magazines, especially those like the Atlantic Monthly where the old journalistic virtues of thoroughness of research and investigative reporting are still uppermost.

However, it’s also had the weird effect that we hardly ever listen to radio any more, at least in terms of news, when before we would have clicked on both morning and evening. Perhaps it’s radio that’s going to be the most immediate sufferer in the fallout of the new media, at least in terms of news gathering. The immediacy of radio, and its nimbleness in updating stories, was once what gave it a huge advantage over print - an advantage that, of course, the new media have captured.

TV, of course, had an advantage in terms of images, and though that’s been under assault from the Internet’s video clips and immediate uploads, it still hasn’t eaten completely into that particular comparative advantage. What the new media’s exploding popularity has done to print and broadcast media is to begin to force it to re-evaluate itself - long overdue in many consumers’ opinions.

The big problem for “old” media in dealing with “new” media is that, at least certainly in terms of the English-speaking world, the modern trend (encouraged by media courses in universities) has been for an “opinionated” tone to creep into just about every piece of journalism. Writers seem to imagine that their thoughts on a given topic are of equal importance to their readers as the actual facts of the matter. The true reporter is a rare bird indeed these days, and worth his or her weight in gold.

By its very nature, however, and by the internal closed-shop culture it inhabits, news media tends to only give space to a limited number of opinions. And so, if subjective opinion dominates the mainstream media, then it begins to look lame indeed beside the very much more wildly diverse, individualistic and opinionated new media, thereby losing its advantage.

People have lost a great deal of trust in the mainstream media because they believe it peddles opinion and bias much more than it reports fact. I believe that newspapers, radio and TV can only cope with the assaults of the new media revolution if they return to a less opinionated and more thoughtful and accurate ideal, with opinion firmly placed in the space devoted to it. A good journalist - who is different from an opinion columnist - ought to be able to check his or her ego firmly at the door, and be open to the world he or she is reporting on, not constantly booming in an echo chamber of opinion. Good feature writing and investigative reporting as well as straight reporting are the huge advantages the “old” media still have over “new” media; and before it’s too late, those ideals should be restored.

Those are my views as a reader and a consumer of the new media. What about as a writer and a creator? Well, I’ve had a rather mixed experience there, more mixed than as a reader (which I would say by and large has been a positive experience).

Writing for online magazines, with limited comments facilities, has been a similar experience to writing for print publications. Your work is commissioned or you submit it, it goes through an editorial process, and it is then published. Usually, you get little or no feedback about the piece itself, at least feedback that reaches the magazine (again this is similar to print media). However you may find your piece discussed in blogs and discussion groups all over the Web, and perhaps you might get requests for reprinting (although this is not as often as when it’s published in print ).

But blogging is quite a different kettle of fish.

In 2003, prior to blogging myself, I conducted a survey and investigation of a few bloggers worldwide, in a piece entitled “The Blogosphere”, published in Quadrant Magazine in June 2003, and now available online. One of the questions I asked bloggers then was what were the advantages and disadvantages of blogging. Most people nominated as a great positive the fact you could air your opinions and ideas in a way that you regulated yourself, without being subject to the vagaries of editors, and also the immediacy of the contact with readers. However, the latter was also viewed as a big disadvantage by most bloggers, because of the extremely unpleasant and confrontational nature of some comments, and the way in which some people seem to only respect “free speech” if you agree with them. The following year, when I was invited to blog on the group blog Troppo Armadillo I discovered some of those things for myself.

At its best, blogging, for the writer, can be a terrific experience, enabling you to have genuine discussions with readers, and engage in the kind of thoughtful and illuminating speculation that can often inspire new ideas and new trains of thought in you. However, that is the ideal situation, and it’s rare, and precious. All too often, what the comments box turns into is a kind of dialogue of the deaf, with the original post hopelessly lost in a welter of tangents, parti pris positions, shouting matches, and a certain amount of intellectual bullying which I have found quite intimidating at times. It’s not that I’m a stranger to unpleasant missives - if you write publicly anywhere, you’ve got to expect negative as well as positive feedback - but I think that the medium itself has an atmosphere which makes people confrontational.

In part, this is a feature of cyberspace itself - since email has become more common, I have tended to get more rude communications than I used to when people had to write a letter. But the problem is magnified in blogs, and that may well limit their readership, and the writers who will blog. However, comments boxes are also useful because they actually archive all those reactions, and readers not involved in the shouting matches can draw their own conclusions. People who are new to public writing often forget that and don’t realise just what it looks like later when their intemperate words are visible in black and white for the world to see, for as long as the blogger cares to display them.

Now there is talk of “wikis” - a kind of constantly evolving blog, able to be updated and changed by anyone who cares to - as the new thing. But I think wikis’ strength and appeal are limited to groups of friends or class groups and so on. For the rest of us, it’s a bit like the “Choose your Own Adventure” fad of the 80s, distinctly underwhelming and with a limited life.

There’s also talk of new ways blogs could be delivered, especially as “moblogs” through mobile phones. But though I think blogs are here to stay, and the best bloggers will build up the kind of trust among their readers that some “old media” writers have, I still think it’s easy to become too sanguine about the life-changing, world-changing potentialities of new media, particularly blogs, Their individualism is both their strength and their downfall. Sites such as On Line Opinion, which deals in an interesting convergence of both “old” and “new” media, are different and will, I think, thrive as more and more baffled readers try to negotiate the wild world of new media.