Let's Not Go to the Blogosphere, It Is a Silly Place

Twelve percent of Americans get their news using blogs. That’s not a number to be either afraid or excited about.

            Twenty percent of Americans explicitly state that they use social networking for their news, but that number shoots low. It doesn’t matter whether or not you say you use your social networking for news, it will happen anyway. The Kony 2012 virus was transmitted via social networking, and it didn’t care if you thought you were using Facebook to get your news, it still made you do it. With eighty-six percent of Americans “online,” and seventy-two percent of all online users using social networking, we get sixty-two percent of Americans who may or may not be in denial about using social media as their news source.

            Ferguson missed the point, but he was on the right track. A blog is a person who may or may not have an audience. On the other hand, any forum setting on the internet is comprised of a million people who have each other for their audience. It’s nothing special that blogs are self-perpetuating and parasitic. These are qualities shared by every single space for discussion on the internet—blog begets blog, forum begets subforum, all the while feeding on the carcass of mainstream media. But what Ferguson didn’t emphasize, and what Jobs touched upon, is the lack of editorial control. Mainstream media is ideological? At the very least, any news source is one voice at one time, instead of a million voices shouting, in unison, the most fringe political beliefs on the spectrum. Did mainstream media fail the public because it was too ideological, or because it wasn’t enough?

            The fact that twenty percent of Americans use social networking to get their news kind of annoys me. It’s like watching someone stick their head into an irradiated nuclear reactor. Trying to wring intelligence and objectivity out of the internet will fry your stupid brain into a steaming pulp.

            Somewhere along the line, the internet let us confuse the distinction between content and commentary. In some cases, this can be a good thing. But in the case of journalism, it is the very definition of parasitism. What’s worse, it gives the illusion of legitimacy to illegitimate arguments—and if somebody who leans only slightly one way is fooled by this illusion, then they will become radicalized. And they will radicalize others in turn. And they will gather in one corner of the internet, lock themselves in a room to listen to each other, and occasionally peek out to start stuff with that other corner over there.

            The blogosphere, social media, internet forums—the newspaper of the people—they’re all bad, bad ideas. Echo chambers are hardly the best places for education. I would rather they went away. 

Multimedia References

"In Changing News Landscape, Even Television Is Vulnerable." Pew Research Center for the People and the Press RSS. Pew Research Center, 27 Sept. 2012. Web. 13 Sept. 2013.

Munroe, Randall. "Xkcd." Comic strip. Xkcd.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Sept. 2013.

           

Ortutay, Barbara. "Long-running Study on Internet Use Finds 86 Percent of Americans Are Online." StarTribune.com. StarTribune, 13 June 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2013.

Page, Andrew. "Kony 2012." Know Your Meme News. Cheezburger, 2012. Web. 13 Sept. 2013.