One of the charming things about blogging is that most of us are still waiting to find what it is we’re doing. 

The motive is clear, nicely captured by Kevin Kelly.

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.

But what, exactly, are we accomplishing with all this duty and passion?

I have a couple of suggestions, each of which I intend to dress up as “model” on the grounds that this will make it sound more authoritative and plausible.

1. The bubbler model

Here in Connecticut, in the winter, people put bubblers around their boats to keep them from becoming part of the ice flow in the sound. And I like to think blogging is a kind of bubbling that prevents any topic fixing itself in public discourse. Blogging is for thinking and rethinking and provoking that “on the other hand” reaction.  Indeed, in this red state/blue state era, were it not for the bubbling of the blogs we would all have found ourselves committed to an ice age of ideological extremism long ago.  This is incidentally a true public service and it must be driven by duty or passion because no one is going to get a red cent of compensation otherwise.

2. The infill model

I think bloggers now take up locations two places on the idea continuum.  First, we stand between the newspaper journalist and the magazine journalist.  Second, we stand between the magazine journalist and the academic writer.  In both cases, we are more contemplative than the former and much faster off the mark than the latter.  I think this participation must mean that the intellectual division of labor has become more rich, more various and more speedy, but that remains to be seen.  As to compensation, once more only the lucky few are making a livelihood here.

3. the terraforming model

If I may now quote myself from an early post.

Blogs are experiments. Each of them says, in effect, what happens to this way of thinking if we apply it to a variety of topics for an extended period? Do the ideas flourish or wither? Do they evolve or merely repeat? Do they scale up in their complexity, or, forgive me, bog down.

If things go well, I guess, blogs go off like an alpine ecosystem: tiny flora make a platform for minor flora which make a platform for major flora. Pretty soon, there’s a forest on a slope.

Actually, in the best case, blogs terra form. By steadily converting ambient resources, own and others, they create a sustainable intellectual space where none before was possible. They make their own worlds, and so prove the possibility of these worlds. They “discover” worlds by creating them.

This is where we do get paid, assuming that the experiment actually pays off.  Nothing that will sustain us body and soul, of course, but the life of the mind may flourish. 

4. the Peter DeLorenzo or audition model

All praise to this guy Peter. BusinessWeek tells us that his blog entries at Autoextremist.com   sometimes win him consulting contracts with the Detroit executives he dares to criticize. And this is a splendid model. Driven by passion and duty, and our alpine meadow motives, we blog everyday.  And occasionally, one of our readers says, “that was interesting.  Come in and say more like that.” We make a little money.  We have a chance to see our ideas work in the world.  We come home and reinsert our head in the clouds. 

Naturally, we have a formidable marketing job ahead of us. Peter has the attention of Detroit executives.  I am betting most of us do not get a reading by the senior marketing executives who could engage us in this capacity. Hmmm.   

References

Kelly, Kevin. 2005. We are the Web.  Wired Magazine. 13 (8 August). here.

 Kiley, David. 2005. Motor City’s Motor Mouth: Peter DeLorenzo blasts the Big Three on his blog–and then they hire him. BusinessWeek. July 25, 2005, pp. 82-83.

McCracken, Grant, 2005. Blogging: what’s for, how it pays, January 05, 2005.here.  

Kelefa Sanneh (left)                                                                                                                                    Kanye West                  

There is something a  little eerie about Kelefa Sanneh’s piece  in yesterday’s New York Times.  It’s called Kanye West’s Argument With Himself and it notes a tension in  Mr. West’s current work:

But since Mr. West excels at both rhyming and composing, watching him in the studio is like watching a man have a long discussion – sometimes an argument – with himself.

The eerie part is that this essay is accompanied by what the Times calls an "audio slide show" in which Mr. Sanneh gives a voice-over account of the same subject matter.

Sanneh and West are, both of them, mixing their media.  Actually, it’s a meta mixing of the media:  one mixing to illuminate how the other mixes. 

To be sure, there is a simultaneity and a complementarity to West’s work that Sanneh does not have or need.  (We cannot hear West’s music without his lyrics.  We can read Sanneh’s article without looking at the slide show.) 

Indeed, while Sanneh and West appear to engage in roughly similar projects, there is no evidence of  "discussion" and/or the "argument" in Sanneh’s case.

This won’t last long.  Let’s review.

1) I am prepared to bet a tidy sum that Sanneh wrote his essay and then, at the prompting of the Times, he banged off the audio slide show. 

2) It’s clear that the Times is desparate for on-line content for which it can charge.  So the motive here is clear.  Left to its own devices, I expect, the Times would continue to ignore the contradiction of talking about music without ever playing any of it.

3) But now that the Times has insisted on audio slide show, something interesting happens: it  can’t go home again.  I don’t care how patronizing, opportunistic or experimental the audio show was as a gesture.  It so improves the journalistic function of a piece, that no one will suffer grey text again.

4) Thus do organizations back into the future.  All the Times  meant to do was "jazz up a couple of stories in the Sunday paper," and now consumers take it for granted.  As long as you refuse to contemplate what Sanneh’s calls the "discussion," the "argument," you may perservere as the Times, a grandly logocentric magazine that is still a little distrustful of color photographs.  And, who knows, the Times may have been naive enough to think that they could add slide shows and sound as a discretionary, occasional, fully optional gesture.  Hah!  Ladies and gentlemen, you have joined the"discussion" in more sense than one.  The optional is now obligatory.  One little experiment and you are no longer a "newspaper." 

5) It’s interesting to see what the discussion might, if joined, look like in Sanneh’s case.  He is in point of fact, not nearly so gifted a "voice over" as he is a writer, but this is no doubt partly because he is such a very good writer.  (I mean, so good it’s really irritating.) 

6) But the discussion is there, even if neglected.  Sanneh is more candid, more vivid, more opinionated in the spoken word than the written one.  The Times wanted something summary and reductive.   They got something different.

7) And this is where things get really interesting.   As it stands, the slide show is entirely post hoc.  But eventually, and much sooner than it would like, the Times will have be asking Sanneh to do the two together, and then an argument will occur.  Sanneh will be viewing every story from two quite difference points of view.  Two distinct voices will be competing in his head. This is where, potentially, Sanneh becomes West, and the Times becomes…not the Times at all.

Let the discussion begin. 

References

Sanneh, Kelefa.  2005.  Kanye West’s Argument With Himself.  New York Times.  July 24, 2005. here.