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Sun. Jan 02, 2005

Another Year of the Blog

It’s the Year of the Blog, so they say. No, it wasn’t 2001, when the number of blogs seemed to triple as people sought a way to express themselves and communicate in the aftermath of tragedy. And the people who did year-end pieces in 2002 declaring that was the “Year of the Blog” were also premature. As were those in 2003. It’s apparently this year.

Because for the majority of Americans, a year ago, “blog” probably sounded like something you might cough up if you were ill. But the past year saw blogs get credentials for the conventions, RatherGate (among other blog-driven issues), and millions of blog-dollars raised for both parties. And from the end of the year hub-bub and back slapping, most seem to think bloggers emerged as unsullied shining knights, the best thing for human communication since the Gutenberg press, Saviors of Democracy, and the inevitable replacement for something they refer to as “MSM.”

I beg to differ. At rambling length.

On what basis? Well, I guess I should give a bit of background, because I know some of this is probably going to sound wrong, patronizing, or simply old-fogey-ish. But I’ve been doing this a long time. Longer than most. I started doing “observational reporting” at the Olympics in 1996, have had an organically grown web site ever since, and have been doing what people call “blogging” since the summer of 2000. 2000 was “The Year of the Blog” for me, as I discovered Blogger in July, and spent the rest of the year getting a grip on what blogging meant to me. I don’t even know if new bloggers do that anymore, since they start off with so many templatized and popularized examples, so many well trodden paths to follow.

I was a part of the “Second Wave” of bloggers, and I was probably lucky that I was able to work things out in a much less fractious and competitive environment. There was no Instapundit, no Atrios, no dozens of “standards bearers” to fantasize about matching. No Technorati, no Blogger Ecosystem Rankings, No Blogads, no Trackbacks, and nobody was seeing 100,000+ visits per day. In the summer of 2000, those were all mere daydreams.

In addition, according to the surveys I’ve read, at 46 I’m about twice as old as the alleged “average” blogger, and that may bring a different attitude to it (cynical and curmudgeonly, some might charge). Perhaps most importantly in terms of the view I took in of the past year, unlike the majority of bloggers, I did not ardently declare myself red or blue.

So I look back at 2004 quite a bit differently than most. And I am clearly in the minority. The number of year end BlogArticles is stunning. Read about The Blogosphere’s Smaller Stars, or Why There’s No Escaping the Blog from Fortune, or John C. Dvorak’s Understanding and Reading a Blog, or Bloggers, Citizen Media and Rather’s Fall—Little People Rise Up in 2004, or James Lileks’ The Blog of the Year, or the Year of the Blog? Poynter Online tells us What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers, and What Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists.

Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch, Mena Trott, and Ben Trott were all named People of the Year by PC Magazine, because of the contributions they’ve made to the blog tools we use. ABC News proclaimed People of the Year: Bloggers, and “Time magazine named Twin Cities-based Power Line the ‘Blog of the Year,’ the first such award from the magazine.”

Whew. To name but a few. There’s no doubt it has been a big year for blogs, both in numbers, and especially in terms of elevated awareness in the general public. But some say this wasn’t the “year of the blog,” they say “this was the year blogs grew up.” I would argue this is the year blogs became teenagers. The “elevated awareness in the general public” often came from pointed rebellion against established authority, and sometimes simply from being loud and obnoxious. All of which is the result of sudden rapid growth, in size and capabilities, and new awareness of the ripples they can create with these new abilities. Like a teenager.

Others are quoted as saying that blogging is “revitalizing democracy.” In terms of enabling easier participation, I would certainly agree. But in terms of advancing conversation, or revitalizing political discourse, I think blogging has been like sandpaper toilet tissue. It does the job, in a way, but draws much blood in the process, doing a lot more damage than good.

And most everyone was so bloody righteous about it, too. As Jim Henley wrote, “The blogosphere had no clue … This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or ‘MSB?’) This wasn’t ‘The Year of the Blogger’ at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election.”

Like a teenager. Or a rookie. And it ran out of control. Because it was fun.

Aside from the fact that it’s fun to break windows, why does the broken window invite further vandalism? Wilson and Kelling say it’s because the broken window sends a signal that no one is in charge here, that breaking more windows costs nothing, that it has no undesirable consequences. The broken window is their metaphor for a whole host of ways that behavioral norms can break down in a community. If one person scrawls graffiti on a wall, others will soon be at it with their spray cans. If one aggressive panhandler begins working a block, others will soon follow. In short, once people begin disregarding the norms that keep order in a community, both order and community unravel, sometimes with astonishing speed.

Many people withdraw and tune out, regardless of whether the incivility occurs in a chat room, on a talk show, in a newspaper column, in political campaign ads, or on the floor of Congress. This is the real danger of incivility. Our free, self-governing society requires an open exchange of ideas, which in turn requires a certain level of civility rooted in mutual respect for each other’s opinions and viewpoints.

What we see today, I am afraid, is an accelerating competition between the left and the right to see which side can inflict the most damage with the hammer of incivility. Increasingly, those who take part in public debates appear to be exchanging ideas when, in fact, they are trading insults: idiot, liar, moron, traitor.

This is how the broken windows theory plays out in the marketplace of ideas. If you want to see it working in real time, try the following: Log on to AOL, and go to one of the live chat rooms reserved for political chat. Someone will post a civil comment on some political topic. Almost immediately, someone else will swing the verbal hammer of incivility, and from there the chat degrades into a food fight, with invective and insult as the main course.

This illustrates the first aspect of the broken windows theory, which we saw with the car in Palo Alto. Once someone wields the hammer — once the incivility starts — others will take it as an invitation to join in, and pretty soon there’s no limit to the incivility. And if you watch closely in that chat room, you’ll see something else happening. Watch the screen names of people who make civil comments. Some — a few — will join in the food fight. But most will log off. Their screen names just disappear. They leave because the atmosphere has turned hostile to anything approaching a civil exchange or a real dialogue.

This illustrates the second aspect of the broken windows theory: Once the insults begin flying, many will opt out.

Edwin J. Feulner: “Commencement Address to the Hillsdale College Class of 2004”

And it was those “broken windows” of the Blogosphere (“idiot, liar, moron, traitor”) that left the predominant impression on me this year. No doubt, some big achievements were made, from gaining official access to the conventions, to bulldogging the media on legitimate issues of accuracy and bias (left and right).

But there was oh-so-much more. And to put it bluntly, if you could convert those “good” accomplishments into cash, and dump it in a barrel of blog from the past year, it would be like grabbing a $100 bill by going up to the shoulder in a 50 gallon barrel of foul human waste. It’s highly debatable if it is worth the effort to extract what’s desirable from what surrounds it.

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you know I’m not normally one to blow my own horn or say “I told you so.” But if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you also know that I’ve been writing about “partisan hackery” months before Jon Stewart made it cool, at least, as it applies to weblogs. And if I do say so myself, I’ve been fairly prophetic:

Domains, Responsibility, and Conversation (04.14.04) — “It’s my opinion most of the political spectrum has been coarsened by this ‘partisan hackery,’ and it fully infects our process of choosing leadership. It’s got to stop, or we will get exactly what we deserve; a fractured country which no one can lead.”

The Lynching Of Objectivity (04.22.04) — “There is serious hay to be made while the Election Year Sun is shining, both in terms of traffic and ad bucks. And the obvious way to keep those turnstiles churning is more ‘preaching to the choir.’ But come November, one side or the other is going to be saying, ‘you know, we didn’t convert enough people to our side.’ And looking back, all that ‘preaching’ isn’t going to seem like as much fun as it does today. So enjoy it while you can. Because you may pay later.”

Make That Ugly Middle Disappear! (04.25.04) — “Why do you need candidates to piss you off, when their supporters are doing such a superb job of it? [...] No matter who wins, there’s going to be a huge mess left afterwards, and very close to half the people who came to the party will be hungover and surly.”

Sick of Ourselves Yet? (06.29.04) — “I’m still open to arguments from both sides, and still seek them out. But when the arguments evolve to be more about mocking than about substance (insert favorite Bush/Kerry slur here), I’m a departing trail of electrons. I’ve apparently made the subconscious decision that if you can’t discuss today’s politics without stooping to insults and slurs, you’re not worth my time. It’s amazing the places I don’t go anymore.”

Trashing the Field (07.08.04) — “This has been going on for months … and once you’ve heard both sides endlessly describe what a Big Loser the other guy is, all you’ve end up convinced about is that we have a choice between Two Big Losers. Nice job, folks. But you’re done now. What will you do for an encore?”

Rookie Mistakes (08.23.04) — “This year there are blogs at the conventions. This is ‘the big debut.’ Perhaps it is inevitable that we would collectively handle it like rookies, let our passion and emotion overwhelm our reason, and affect our performance.”

Rookies. To be sure, the rookies scored some touchdowns. But when they scored, did they waggle their ass and shove it in their opponent’s face … like a rookie? Yep. And the some of the time, we’d then hear the rhetorical “watch me, I’m gonna score again,” followed by the factual stumble out of bounds flat on their face.

The Blogosphere did indeed have some big accomplishments this election. But at the end, to my eyes, it was bashed and covered in dung, filled with gloating and talk of secession/immigration. Here and there, we can find a glimmer of new realizations in the aftermath. But many of the rookies were either talkin’ trash in the end zone, or pitching a crying fit, and/or spouting pure irrationality.

Over the first few weeks after the election, the level of venom and vitriol from both “winners and losers” was disturbing. Perhaps much of it was needed venting. Perhaps it will settle out.

But all the Red Blue Bull, the talk of the “states that hate homos,” or “the red states are the same as the slave states in 1860” (umm, Ohio was in the Confederacy?), and other broad brush rhetoric is a sadly slippery slope. There’s specific examples, like Ron Schmidt: “I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we’re not going to visit them now. It’s all Republicans there. We have family in Indiana and I don’t want to go there either.” Hmmm, 44% of his home state voted for Bush, most of the non-coastal regions … will he only drive in select counties?

And there’s the more generic charge by those who believed the exit polls on “moral issues” (because the exit polls were such a ragingly accurate success this year), and now say that entire states, indeed, entire regions of this country, are homophobes. Religious bigots. Moral crusaders. One homogenous people with little if any variation among them.

This ignores the factual, that Kerry “won” Pennsylvania by about the same slim margin that Bush “won” Ohio next door. Neither state is purely red or blue by any means, yet the rhetoric paints them so. It ignores the granular, that the Berkeley leftist who wants his state to secede shares that state with 44% Bush voters, or the fact some say Georgia is nothing but Bush-loving rednecks, when the large county I live in went for Kerry by a 2 to 1 margin (population 674,334, larger than the population of Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, or Wyoming).

It also ignores simple morality. This is akin to those who say “all Muslims are anti-American, and most are terrorist supporters,” or those over a century ago who said “all blacks are good for is manual labor, and they don’t deserve rights.” Hateful and ignorant generalizations.

There’s a danger of becoming the thing you claim to hate; a person so fervent in their One True Way they make gross and unsupported generalizations that “all those people” are evil/stupid/whatever, and deserve no consideration.

It’s quite unbecoming for people who otherwise proclaim intellect and high values. It’s perfectly predictable for others, merely an extension of their tone during the campaign. Maybe it will settle out. Maybe.

But when I see people I thought of as fairly rational thinkers go off the deep end with that kind of simplistic “red-blue” rhetoric, I get a bit concerned. And I’ve been that way a while.

After deciding I was Done With The Parties in early September, I was able to view the partisan shenanigans without favor. I watched many people … on both sides … drag this country through mud and sewage all while claiming they were just trying to make it better. Afterwards, there was talk of Jesusland, or secession, or immigrating away from the very country for which you’d just waged a hard fight, and even a suicide at Ground Zero.

Is the irrationality of much of this past year clear yet?

The forest has grown much stronger in the past year, but I’m still looking at the trees. Not so much the new ones, as there are just too many. I mostly track the big ol’ trees I’ve known for some time, and can therefore more easily see the changes. I’m certainly not going to name names, but even if I did, it would be hard to express the respect I’ve lost for a sizable number of people this year, on both sides of “the divide.” So I’ll speak in general terms. These were mostly people I used to visit because, though they might have very different opinions from mine, they were seekers, and their process was as interesting to me as the position at which they arrived.

But when it appeared to me the process had not only stopped, but blinders had been put on, I began to view them differently; that’s where I go if I am looking for Partisan Viewpoint A. And if I want Partisan Viewpoint B, it was reliably on view at Site B. Every day, without fail, and without question. But the truth is, I even found a way around having to view those Partisan Viewpoints. Because it became so freakin’ predictable. Memeorandom would not only show me what news articles were getting linked, it would show me the top six or eight people linking to it. It made it so very easy to filter my reading … “ah, I see only Lefties linking this page, and only Righties linking that page. I can safely skip those.” It would slightly sadden me, but saved me lots of time. And severely shifted my surfing habits. You’d be amazed the places I don’t go anymore. Because they became ugly to me.

I’ve always been a Prime Proponent of personal publishing, and believe it is a case of the more the merrier. Unfortunately, it seems to be events, not intent, that drive this revolution. We saw a wave of new blogs in the aftermath of 9/11, as people felt a need to communicate. This time, we saw a huge wave related to election year, from the campaigns, their supporters, and independent groups. But this wave wasn’t so much driven by a desire to communicate, as a desire to evangelize. To convert. And it slipped easily into spin, propaganda, and insults. Far too easily, far too often.

It’s also possible I’ve simply had too much of a Pollyanna view of the Blogosphere, and this election allowed me to finally see “you” fully. And you’re not just puppy dogs and butterflies, some of you have it within to be really nasty pieces of work at times.

I suppose I’ve had my moments as well. But the vast impression I’m left with after this very long year is that of being at a huge raucous drunken party featuring much mayhem and destruction … and being the only one there who doesn’t drink.

And you know, even that would be tolerable, if that’s where it ended. But I fear we infected ourselves. And blogs were a common carrier. We Americans have divided ourselves into Us and Them. And Them, well, they are The Enemy, and they must be crushed. It is now commonly talked about in military terms.

Partisan bloggers need to look in the mirror and realize who their enemies are, and where they are located. Our enemies are not even on this continent. They want what is worst for America, and I think we can all agree on that, given what they’ve show us so far; thousands dead in our own country, dozens beheaded and murdered around the world. Those are our enemies.

Then there’s these other folks. They want what is best for America. The problem is that there’s disagreement on what is best for America. They are not your enemies, they are, at worst, your opponents. They seek the same larger goal as you, they just disagree with you about the means.

An opponent is an intellectual concept, whereas an enemy is a physical visceral thing. The only physical act between intellectual opponents ought to be a handshake followed by a beer or three. Over those beers, you’ll likely see exactly what I’m saying; this guy really believes his theory is what’s best for this country. He’s not trying to destroy it, like an enemy would, he’s just … misguided … in his ideas of how best to do it.

Because now that the election is over, there’s no internment camps, no war crimes trials, and most importantly, no display of severed heads as a brutish show of victory. Those are the acts of enemies.

There’s just a bar down the street from you, nearly half filled with people who voted for the other guy. They’re still your neighbors, and you still have to live with them every day. And you both still have the same enemy.

In that respect, nothing has changed.

But my Pollyanna side is overwhelmed by the cynical certainty that there is a depressingly large percentage of partisans on both sides who simply won’t let go. They’ll claim they’re being asked to give up their beliefs and fighting for them, when in fact no one’s asking them anything but to look in the mirror. Make an honest assessment … if you’re still capable.

But I’ve seen very little since the election that gives me much hope of that happening.

In fact, Steven den Beste and Bill Quick both recently stopped blogging (temporarily, in Bill’s case), and they both talked about the impact other people had with their harping e-mails, trollish comments, and other constant irritants. It had somehow become about other people. Others simply stopped blogging after the election, possibly because there was no crowd left to try and influence, no vital cause to trumpet to the masses.

When your weblog becomes about other people, in my opinion, you’re lost.

That’s purely an extension of my personal philosophy. It goes back to when I was a teenager, trying to get a handle on radio, and “broadcasting.” The key is to speak to one person. Make the communication personal and singular. You never “visualize” a group of people, you never say “all of you ought to…” You speak to one person.

It’s the same on this web site. I write to one person. You. As I wrote earlier this year...

I’m always aware of you. I always write to you. But I don’t pretend to “know” who you are, or how I can please you every day. I know who I am, and how to at least try to please myself every day.

And that has to be enough. For both of us.

Because if it becomes all about you (or even 51%), well, eventually, I’m going to want to get paid for doing this, and then I’ll be worrying about how my comrades/competitors are doing by comparison. And how will I find my next “scoop,” or Big Traffic Pumper?

And then it will be no fun at all.

For anybody. Trust me.

My Theory of One carries over to my browsing as well. When I surf, I look at one. One person (at least, on most sites). I go in expecting the majority of their opinions to be different than mine. I welcome alternate viewpoints, backed by compelling evidence. I go there seeking them. But when I am instead greeted by arguments couched in condescension and insults to any disagreement … even when I agree with the issue position … I’m left with a bad taste.

He was speaking to another issue, but M.G. Binker nails why:

Show some respect. Respect those you are writing about. Respect your colleagues, your employer and your readers.

And respect yourself. Pettiness and petulance reflect badly on one person: the slob who writes it.

The blessing of the blog is that anyone can say what’s on their mind anytime night or day. The curse of the blog sphere is exactly the same.

And we are all guilty of falling prey to that, myself included. At the same time, we can see the outpouring of support for tsunami victims from blogs, as multiple fundraising efforts sprang up immediately. Spontaneously. Organically.

A bit like a teenager who gives you the most thoughtful, insightful, and generous gift for Christmas. And then wrecks your car on New Year’s Eve. You love him so much, are awed by his accomplishments at such a young age, see such tremendous potential for the future … and just want to wring his neck sometimes for the immature things he does.

I’d just like to see a different trend this year. Without the heat of a presidential election, maybe people can get back to basics. Get out of the binary clumping and the partisan swirl. And just be one person, writing for one other.