Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?
Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):
We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.
“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.
Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:
We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”
Let’s unpack this.
“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.
Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.
Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.
After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (”journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.
In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.
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Comments
Of course, such distinctions will be in the eye of the reader...and the bloggers. Am I a problogger because I blog here at OS and get acknowledged in ways that prove I'm not crazy, even though I don't get paid ? Or are only paid writers/journalists (such as at the NYT etc) probloggers? What about famous people who blog for free but have high credibility? These are the questions that will get chewed over endlessly.
Glad to have the professional among us idle amanuensiacs. I do use a keyboard and I do not write long hand, does that matter?
So when they take away that freedom to be broke and blogging away I'll be just another voice without a platform.
"I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on."
That pretty much describes my blogs, in a nutshell. You can bet that I don't have a proof-reading staff and that I don't have fancy software making your butt warm while you browse ... but I got the raw deal on name-your-topic.
Your a writer and a pundit. Like it or not that's the label you got stuck with when you stepped up the plate.
However, journalists are not we. Nor is Bill O'Reilly for that matter...
Anyone using either of those terms could be determined to be neither. The possibilities are endless.
This needed to be said. Thanks for being there.
This particular conversation has been happening since the dawn of blogging. I once thought it would vanish as blogging matured. Now I think it is an inevitable accompaniment to the form, which has an element of introspection as part of its DNA.
I love the fact that journalists are blogging. I love the fact that folks who say they aren't journalists (and what *is* a journalist, anyway, in this context?) are telling such great stories and inspiring such discussion. The civic discourse piece is one part of doing journalism.
One quibble: I think of professional bloggers as those who have their own blog and are making scads of money off it via advertising and merch sales. (Dooce.com comes to mind.) I don't think journalist bloggers--even if they're paid as journalists--are the same thing, because the nature of their commentary is different. They're not telling their life stories in print. Still, it's a form in motion. I'm very interested in the nexus of all these things, and how first-person journalism has evolved.