I Blog Therefore I Am Not Real

February 1, 2007 at 7:00 pm · Filed under Commentary

Somehow it seems fitting that I’ve chosen to write the first entry on this new blog about Micheal Kerens and his book “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena
“. I will state at the outset I have not read the book, nor am I likely to. I did locate and read this piece of drek published in the Canadian Journal of Communication in 2004. I suspect that this ‘essay’ formed the basis of his approach to the book.

The book projects the message that bloggers are:

“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills…” — Globe & Mail, Jan. 31, 2007

The problem with general statements like that is they come up to bite some. Not all bloggers consider themselves to be rebels against anything. Many consider themselves to be pursuing an outlet for their thoughts and willingness to share them. Not unlike academics who spew forth what they consider to be intellectual wisdom.

In the essay reference above the author shows himself to have an ill-formed approach to ‘understanding’ blogging. He acknowledges that the very nature of the beast makes it difficult to attempt to analyze blogging based on traditional criteria:

During the 2003 annual meeting of the Association of Internet Studies (when some of the first fruits of communication research on blogging were presented), it became immediately apparent how careful one has to be in applying traditional research methods to this new medium. Standard attempts to generalize about blogs on the basis of random sampling turned out to be quite inappropriate in the absence of a clear, stable, finite universe of blogs to be sampled.

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