The Invisible Counterpoint

re: “Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on. Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion. (Scott Rosenberg, "Time to retire the term 'Blogger'," OpenSalon, 18 August 2009) Maybe we could figure out a way so that every screen will read every professional writer/blogger's print as black ...

(From Salon letters ) Scott, you're making quite an effort to redeem blogs in your book (still not so sure about the "they're like phone calls to your mother" sell job, but still . . .), so you shouldn't be surprised that some are sensitive to the possibility that however much you aim to redeem them, to be fair to them, you might by your actions work to reinforce the presumption/assumption that if you're REALLY serious, truly someone to be taken seriously, you're not JUST to be associated with blogs--Being an active blogger while you also write books is fine, perfectly respectable, if not ideal in this interconnected, wired world, but just blogging means never really being assessed by adults as more than just the nerd in the parent's basement. (I could even see GG make a move to write a book at some point, to--in part--make him more comfortable to a crowd wanting to include him as one of them, to imagine himself as reputable beyond contention.) ...