aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Pooh poohing blogging and podcasting: a rebuttal
I just listened to David Coursey on Web Talk via IT Conversations. He jokes that virtually no place he’s worked is in business anymore and, after listening, I think maybe that should have told me something.
Wowee, does he NOT get it.
He prefers email to RSS which he considers “just another way to subscribe to something,” apparently missing how it makes surfing for news a joy. The iPod is an over-praised overnight sensation three years in the making. And on blogs he says people will “realize the limitations both of the medium and of the people who create it.” He considers all of it hype from a tired technology press hungry for the next big thing.
Pretty much, in general and in particular, I don’t think the guy gets any of it at all. He’s sooo stuck in the twentieth century.
His major summary point is that there’s no business model to make any of this grassroots media work. It takes a long time and a lot of work to do it well and there simply isn’t the money to make it worth it:
[my transcription @ 38:43] I’m sure there’s a lot of egos out there that feel much better until the amount of work for the amount of ego gratification received starts, you know, sliding in the wrong direction… some people will build a business doing podcasts but as a hobby I think it’s going to be awful time consuming to do it well and a lot of the content is going to be highly suspect… Information viruses spread by podcast… what people seem to be excited about is, you know, real sort of low end personality driven and I don’t think that that will last.
Hm. Where to begin. The elitism of high-end v low-end always bugged me. Broadcasters set the production standard and want to hold us all to it, not the other way around.
I love high production values and will always appreciate them. I love high-end photography and will always appreciate it. But a huge percentage of the photos I look at come from amateurs. And I don’t judge them by the professional photography standard. I’m able to appreciate them despite, even because of, the difference in production values.
I like them precisely for what they are and where they come from. I don’t judge the local church choir by the standard set by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Instead, I appreciate the joy of my community coming together to raise its voice in song. That thrill is real and legitimate all by itself.
But more, I don’t think our current system finds the best talent. I bet there’s some great talent right here in my little town that our star/studio system hasn’t figured out how to find. I think talent is distributed everywhere and these technologies can set it free. I really do.
Now here’s the romance I’d like to associate with blogging: At the time of our nation’s founding, a time before movies and television and professional sports or any of the other modern leisure time diversions, at that time politics was sport. Civic engagement was recreation. Politics and civic life were engaging.
Citizens then were engaged in not just the consumption of culture, but the production of culture. And their motivation was cultural, not commercial. I like to think that because of the new and emerging technologies we’re seeing a return to that today. And that return is good and valuable and inevitable. Many in the business of content creation don’t tend to like it, but it can’t be stopped. And I will do everything I can to help speed it along.
SEE ALSO: Information Viruses Refuted and Apple makes podcasting mainstream.
