One way to keep a finger on the evolving pulse of blogging is to check the occurrence of such terms as ‘blog’, ‘weblog’, and ‘blogger’ in the news regularly. Google News, which is a “news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention” is perfect for this in that it offers both a ‘sort by date’ and ‘sort by relevance’ presentation of inclusions from over 4,500 news sources worldwide.
Of course, such a perspective represents just what established news sources are thinking and saying about blogging at a given time, and not necessarily what bloggers mostly might actually be thinking and saying and doing themselves. Thus, perusing news reports of late about blogging, one could easily come away with the impression, if one had no previous conception, that blogs are all about war—that there are warblogs and anti-warblogs, with hardly any more varieties of flavor whatever.
Of course, the news media is deeply preoccupied, even ‘embedded’ in the current war effort, so it is no surprise to find it steering interpretations of all forms of emerging culture into a single reinforcing war spectacle. This doesn’t mean that the news’ representations are abjectly ‘wrong’—there are, indeed, subsets of blogs which could primarily be considered ‘warblogs’ and their dissident counterparts. But it does remind us that the temptation always exists, and the occasion sometimes occurs, for the news media to synergistically slant reports to coincide with its own generative interests and fascinations.
You and I, of course, know that such a characterization of blogging is woefully inadequate. In fact, I suggest, on the contrary, that the real strength and significance of blogs today, given the established media’s current passion with primatizing the spectacle of war, is to balance the ‘dark news’ of the battlefield with a rich portrayal of life in every form aside from that battlefield also. Not that the preponderance of blogs will necessarily embrace just the ‘light side’ of things or wholly ignore the impact of war. Nor should they. But that blogs generally, undriven by the need to hype a spectacle for purposes of securing a revenue stream, can now balance this driven media frenzy with individual, day-to-day, wide-ranging published portrayals of how precisely ‘Life goes on within you and without you.’
So it is Spring. And I am contributing to no war effort by writing this. But neither am I detracting from one. I’m merely gazing out my back window at my brown garden, waiting for the flowers to bloom so that I can more fully appreciate the miracle of rebirth. I’m also gazing up at the sky and wondering if there’s an asteroid out there on an impact course with earth that will someday make today’s ‘Shock and Awe’ seem comparatively ludicrous. Never forget: the Earth is a spaceship upon a cosmic odyssey. And we are collectively its –nauts and nuts, astro-nomically considered—and otherwise.
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