Finding a Public Sphere in the Blogosphere

I’ve mused for some time about the ways in which the public sphere has been transformed by blogging. I didn’t make an etymological connection between public sphere and blogosphere, though, until I listened to Rebooting the News #56. Jay Rosen spoke several times in that podcast about how the “sphere” of media is changing, and I got the connection, finally. Duh. “Sphere” is the root of both phrases, linguistically, and I would argue that public sphere is conceptually central to the vast hyperlinked network called the blogosphere.

The Wikipedia entry on blogosphere doesn’t say anything like this in its account of the word’s origin:

The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.^[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,^[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the term’s humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio‘s programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena,^[3] and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers^[4] and “familiar strangers” in the blogosphere.^[5][6]

Rebooting the News #56 is a lively discussion of the rhetorical question, “Is blogging dead?” The interlocutors are Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and guest Brendan Greeley, who now writes for The Economist about technology and culture. I first knew his work when he was blogger-in-chief for Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon.

The liveliest part of the discussion wasn’t the future of blogging but its history, as experienced by three early practitioners. I listened to the podcast a second time so I could write these notes:

Brendan Greeley is now technology and policy correspondent at The Economist. Similar beats:

Jose Antonio Vargas | Huffington Post | Technology as Anthropology

Evgeny Morozov | Net Effect | FOREIGN POLICY

BG asks “Is blogging dead?”

Attention has moved to FB, that’s where people are.

Cross-blog links are decreasing, Technoratti  traffic has dropped while FB traffic has skyrocketed.

Dave: FB is blogging, why attachment to the word blogging, or to particular software, or form of presentation

Dave never did a Google Blog Search

BG: Could we define blogging as a set of habits?

Dave: natural-born bloggers,

Dave never liked word “blogging” – which he considers a trademark for Blogger software

Dave’s description: “unedited voice of a person”
Which Jay translated as “a person talking with you” – A medium for individuals

Jay’s first look at a blog – InstaPundit.com – didn’t know what he was looking at; appears at first glance to be  like a page from a book, magazine or newspaper, but it’s real power comes from linking to the blogosphere. Blogging is blog + blogosphere.

Concentration of “sphere” into several huge sites, not as decentralized as blogging was originally.

Dave sees this as cyclical ebb and flow of technology.

BG: holy grail of radio: finding voices of real people. Blogs provided a database of what real people thought.

Dave on Twitter search: 140 characters not worth searching for.

Next level of innovation: someone breaks 140-character barrier, and we’re back to blogging!

“Facebook is training wheels for whatever will come next”

Dave: Twitter is a river of news aggregator; notification system and blogging tool, an integrated aggregator and blogging tool. Can you imagine FB or Twitter without RSS?

Blogging was this in 2002, Twitter is now”:
DW: “an integrated aggregator and blogging tool”

Jay: Life cycle: new tools emerge, learning curve, adaptations evolve that shape tools to life rhythms

Dave: Twitter isn’t just an outgrowth of blogging, but also SMS, texting. Esther Dyson predicted this in 1990s when web went so graphic.

All these things are iterations of RSS, river of news systems

Jay: media industries grew up around fixed ideas about how media works, understood attributes as assumptions, as givens – ideas about media thought to be unchanging

Brendan: what we used to call blogging has turned into publishing. Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan

Jay: when journalism was professionalized, it came with “de-voicing” of individual journalists. Now a new age of personal journalism – “re-voicing” of American journalism

Dave’s epiphany: writing tool should not be in WP dashboard; something lost with transition from RadioUserland and Manila to WP. He’s working on new blogging software.

Dave: When everyone thinks it’s all locked up, it’s about to blow wide open.

Dave: “Once the users take control, they won’t give it back.”