Journalists, imperceptibility and the threat of blogging

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I disagree with the view that blogging is not a threat to journalists. They should be getting very worried about blogging.

The majority of journalists currently work by hiding behind a screen of anonymity created through the collective publication (newspaper, radio, TV channel). Not the formal anonymity of the un-attributable, but rather an imperceptibility in the process of mass consumption. How often do you notice the identity of the journalist when you read an article in a newspaper? Worse still, on paper you cannot easily aggregate all of the articles by that journalist. The journalist becomes imperceptible.

There is an avoidance of responsibility in journalism. But that avoidance is essential to its operation, to its movement or communication. In a way it is a freeing-up, allowing movement for the journalist, making the communication or movement happen more easily and more rapidly, without the possibility of awkward and personal questions being asked. The imperceptibility makes the traces redundant, removes their effect, and thus allows the movement to be executed more smoothely and efficiently.

The technology of blogs is tending to eliminate this imperceptibility, and that is why journalits should be worried about it. In the world of blogs you don't need to do any work at all to track down other articles by the same author. This allows you to build a larger and more personal profile of them, their opinions and viewpoints. You can track quirks in their writing that uncover the forces and subtle tendencies that influence the bias in their writing. With a newspaper you can do that critical analysis at the level of the publication, but the traces of bias are less concentrated, more dissipated into many different quirks, more difficult to pin down. In a blog, that dissipation is reversed and the traits of the personality of the blogger are brought back into concentration. The technology makes the author perceptible again, but takes away that freedom of movement. That is why writing a blog can feel so awkward. You feel yourself, your perspective and traits being concentrated and reconnected, losing their redundancy and slowing you down.

Is this erosion of anonymity a good thing? On the one hand it could be argued that it is playing into the hands of totalitarian forces, allowing them to instantly hold an individual responsible. But that is no different to the position of the journalist, whose byline tracks them down. I argue that it in fact counters a key tool of totalitarianism: the unattributable release of information, views and rumour – lightning fast communications that exploit the imperceptibility of the journalist. Blogging, on the otherhand, makes the blogger perceptible. It always raises the question of the blogger – who? why? with what authority? for what reason? what traits could lead them into being mistaken? By emphasising the personal, perspectival and conjectural nature of the information it forces us always into a critical stance. Of course that also removes the possibility of that lightning fast communication without the chance of critical analysis. And we may regret that just as much.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2004 22:16 |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem