“The Real Threat of Blogs”

Douglas Rushkoff has a new post up that succinctly outlines an idea that's been chewing on the back of my brain for a while. Link.

I believe that the most dangerous thing about blogs to the status quo is that so many of them exist for reasons other than to make money. A thriving community of people who are engaged for free, to me, have a certain authority that people doing things for money don't.

Writing a book for money is always suspect. (Disclosure to all: I have written books for money and for free.) Writing it for free is very different - and might still be suspect, but for other reasons.

What made the early Internet so very threatening to the mainstream media was not just the new opinions being expressed, but the fact that people were spending hours of their lives doing something that didn't involve production or consumption in the traditional market sense. Families with Internet connections were watching an average of nine hours less commercial programming each week.

I try to keep the ‘blogging about blogging’ to a minimum, as I usually find it about as obnoxiously useless as someone phoning up someone else to talk about telephones. (My definition of what a geek is.) But the idea that there are these tens of thousands of people who spend time writing stuff, and going around reading what others wrote, largely for free, means they can't be reached by advertizers. And thus they aren't part of the traditional mold of consumer culture. There are exceptions, of course, but the idea of the Internet as a peer-based communication medium instead of yet another media-delivery mechanism is one that was slowly dying as Yahoo! and Microsoft rose to prominence in the online world and tried, via their 'portal strategy', to keep people corralled within their environments. Environments where, as Jeff Bezos says, "every page must sell".

I haven't had a TV for about two years now, so when I do watch TV I'm no longer conditioned to advertizing, and am finding the idea of someone yelling at me to buy something I don't need quite intrusive. If you really want to lose a little bit of respect for your fellow man what you should do is go talk to someone who's job is to create advertizements geared towards children. If they're good at their job, it will entail tapping into a child's lack of ability to think critically, and will plant an irrational desire in their mind. This happens to much to kids these days that we grow up thinking it's ok for someone to shout lies at you from a little box while you sit and listen.

But the fact that people are engaged in the simple act of communicating with each other, instead of consuming media, is that little sliver of light shining through the clouds that shows people the potential of what thought and communication can look like when not done through a medium who's message is simply ‘buy buy buy.’