Blogosphere Redux

Follow-up to Warwick Rocks from COOL LINKS

It was good to see a link in the last comment about this topic on the "Warwick Rocks" post to an everyday and respectable use of "blogosphere" in an interesting on-line journal (though I wonder what the anti-blogosphereites think of it!). I have to say I thought the gripes about "blogosphere" had a decidedly proprietorial fogeyishness to them, and as a result didn't feel very authentic. I wonder what was really going on there... Anyhow, some accidental discoveries while surfing around sites looking for stuff about quite other matters lead me to consider reinstating "blogosphere" for affirmative (not just utilitarian) reasons.

It would appear that the first claims to have coined the word came in December 2001 when William Quick wrote in his weblog DailyPundit:

I propose a name for the intellectual cyberspace we bloggers occupy: the Blogosphere. Simple enough; the root word is logos, from the Greek meaning, variously: In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos; Among the Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments themselves. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language)

It was not until 2004 that this elicited any comments. The first (in April) took up the etymology of "blogosphere", unfortunately missing the clever play on words that Quick suggested was at the heart of the neologism:

Congrats on coining the word, but how does blogosphere have Gk logos as a root? Blog is a clipped form of the compound weblog, which OED dates from 1999. That log is the English log - the piece of wood. It's not related etymologically to the log in, well, etymology. Blogosphere looks to me like other literal and metaphoric regions (Magnetosphere, Stratosphere, Biosphere, Anglosphere) all ultimately modelled on atmosphere. A coinage like blogology - the science of blogs - has logiaas a root, but not blogosphere.

A second comment was added in July when the first mainstream media use of blogosphere was recorded: "Hey Bill! The word's finally hit the mainstream - used in a major newspaper without irony, scare quotes, or even bothering to define it! You're famous buddy! Heh" This post linked to a fuller note by Dean Esmay in his blog Dean's World:

Blogosphere Now Officially A Word The term "blogosphere" has now entered the mainstream lexicon. It's here to stay. How can I prove it? Peggy Noonan used it in her latest column in the Wall Street Journal. She used it unironically, without quotes, simply on the way to making a point about people's views of the war. Bill Quick, who coined the term... must be proud.

Esmay linked to the Noonan article, the relevant section of which read:

...one way out of the drama might be to change presidents, and hire Mr. Kerry to, in effect, make things more boring and force history to calm down. This has given rise in the blogosphere (see this Instapundit entry, for example) to a question: Do I, and others who have written on this subject, think that what might be called the new nervousness should compel the Bush administration...

Quick and Esmay are both highly literate and prolific libertarian/conservative bloggers. A third comment on the original 2001 post, from a Mr Al Lewandowski, is dated September 2004:

I'm a teacher in Michigan, just began teaching a computer applications class. I stumbled upon the word Blogosphere in Time magazine, the week of Sept. 27, 2004. I'd never heard the word before; did a Google search on it and found the blog universe. Interestingly enough, it only took me about 3 minutes to stumble on this post about the orgin of the word. A remarkable and powerful environment.

A final anonymous comment dated October 4, 2004 simply reads "Moronic". What extraordinary contraserendipity!

There is another interesting discussion of blogosphere from a few months after its inception (which acknowledges Quick as the word's originator), in a critical overview of blogging and journalism:

Introducing the Blogosphere. Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed the Blogosphere. The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system. Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection and adaptation. I've often thought that anthropologists were best equipped to deconstruct the emerging blogging sub-culture, but now I'm convinced I got it wrong: the greater mysteries of the Blogosphere will be unlocked instead by evolutionary biologists.

Birth of the Blogosphere
Something about the Blogosphere gives it the feel of a living breathing ecosystem. Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere has a life of its own, one that's more than the sum of its weblogs. You can't understand a jungle by studying a single jaguar, and in the same way you can't understand the Blogosphere by studying a single weblog. Surfing the Blogosphere you can see evolutionary forces play out in real time, as weblogs vie for niche status, establish communities of like-minded sites, and jostle for links to their site."

In 2003-04 the word was used in several contexts by the academic staff of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society - the most distinguished academic institution in the world for research and teaching in the socio-legal aspects of web-based technologies. Arguments in a fascinating paper that Carl Shirky gave at the Center were in part summarised on the Berkman site in this way: "As the size of the blogosphere increases, theorizes Shirky, so will the disparity between the most linked-to and least linked-to weblog. Weblogs make up a large, unrestrained system with preferential connectivity; we are accustomed to thinking of media in terms of its restraints."

(It was largely in response to Shirky's ideas that David Sifry created the "Technorati Interesting Newcomers List" on his brilliant site Technorati, that "monitors more than four million blogs in real time so you can discover the conversations happening now." Technorati currently has a section on the 2004 Presidential Election - which provides, among much other fascinating information, results entitled "political conversations in the blogosphere.")

Meanwhile Greplaw is a weblog run by Berkman Center students, staff, and affiliates. They feel that an interview with Larry Lessig (perhaps the world's most authoritative voice on net freedom of speech, copyright and related legal issues, and originator of Creative Commons) is best described like this: "For the famously gloomy prophet Larry Lessig, two blessed events in 2003 have forced a smiling reappraisal: the birth of his child and the growth of the blogosphere." Finally, mention must be made of this 2003 vintage "unique click-able map of the Commonwealth of Blogosphere".

Charles Bourne : 06 Oct 2004 09:19 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem