Ten Years Ago at Ed Driscoll.com…
Ten years ago at Ed Driscoll.com, A blog was born — after first stumbling across something called Instapundit.blogspot.com in early September of 2001, a story I’ve told before, and can be found here. But since my first post consisted of this, allow me instead to reprint an article I wrote in February of 2002, which went online in March of 2002 at the libertarian Spintech Website, which is now sadly offline. It was titled “The New, New Journalism,” and began by channeling the ghost of a 1960s-era critic of new technology, last seen being plucked out of a Manhattan movie line in 1977 by Alvy Singer…
Marshall McLuhan, the nerdy but influential pop prophet of the 1960s, who coined those hip aphorisms “the global village” and “the medium is the message”, would probably love today’s phenomenon of Web logs. In fact, I checked with him, at my last séance. Here’s what he had to say:
Web logs make the reader both author and publisher in tendency. The highly centralized activity of publishing naturally breaks down into extreme decentralism when anybody can, by means of Web logging, assemble printed, or written, or photographic materials which can be supplied with sound tracks.
But Web logging is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere, or this old technology.
OK, to be honest, I wasn’t rapping with McLuhan at some 1960s cultural icon séance. But this is a direct quote, although it was actually about Xerography, or photocopying, as we like to call these days. I just changed “Xerography” to “Web log.”
And like Xerography, err photocopying, Web logging is a revolution, albeit, at the moment, a minor one.
In the past, essayists and critics became figures of some importance, largely because the print medium was so expensive to operate. The end product (newspapers, magazines and books) didn’t cost the consumer much, but the production of it, via the printing press, wasn’t cheap. So anybody who was in print, expressing his views (as opposed to simply slogging it out in the trenches as a reporter), had to be, and therefore became a very serious and important figure.
Today, the cost of putting a Web site up ranges from free to a hundred bucks or so a month (that’s simply the monthly fee for a server such as Verio, Hosting.com or Exodus. I’m not talking about graphic design, content, etc.) Compare that to the late 1980s. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show in 1988, Ed McLaughlin, his producer, had to go from station to station, to get them to buy his show. In comparison, ten years or so later, when Limbaugh put up a Web site, he was able to reach a national audience (heck, a planetary audience, although I don’t know how well El Rushbo translates in other countries) simultaneously, for the cost of his Web server.
So all of a sudden, a whole lot of folks are running around, kicking up a storm on the ‘Net, expressing views that are not necessarily anywhere near being “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Ground Zero for the Bloggers
Ground Zero for all of these textual shenanigans is Blogger.com, the most well known of several providers of free software that allows even the technically and artistically incompetent to present their ideas in a pleasing and easy to follow format. It also provides instructions, encouragement and its own awards. It’s like a film school, a camera store and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science all rolled up in one place…for bloggers.
When the Web log concept first debuted, it was largely used for on-line personal diaries. Lots of “day in the life” stuff; lots of updates of family information; lots of photographs of nature and birthday parties; lots of nice pretty, stopping and smelling the flowers commentary by assorted emotional exhibitionists. And this is still a common use for Web logs.
Then September 11th happened.
One interesting byproduct of that awful day was that the servers on most major news sites (CNN, The New York Times, etc.) were blown out from over capacity. Since a big chunk of America either didn’t go into work, or left early that day, they went home, turned the TV on, fired up the computer, and wanted to know just…what…the…hell…was…going…on.
But with the Web sites of news biggies jammed to capacity, some people started going to alternative sites. Little funky one man or one woman sites. And some of those men and women, such as Virginia Postrel on her page, The Scene, and Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com, spent the day keeping the nation, hell, the world, just as informed as the traditional news sites people couldn’t get into.
I read a book called “the Cluetrain Manefesto“, which stated something that is obvious now, but was most important at the time- “without a link (to somewhere else), a website is a dead end”. We all know the importance of how hyperlinks serve as backup of what the blogger says about what a newspaper periodical says in a “reported” story or editorial (no place does hyperlinks like this one, Ed Driscoll.com, btw).
All this is still true. Go to a(ny) “news”s source, and from only yesterday, early in the (Michigan) primary voting, news outlets were saying that “voter turnout” [was] “is low for today’s Michigan republican primary election“. A complete lie. By the next day, we found out that voter turnout was the second highest in republican primary history in Michigan. (When was it any higher? 1980, of course, what one would expect to find out was the fact of the matter.)
The big industrial news outlets got the clue about hyperlinks, and they have a sidebar filled with inane links to celebrity stories to distract you, or nature photos, Hubble telescope, Oscar pics, tits, etc. to get you to click over to it before you even read much of the content of the banal one-party line that is the Leftist media. They don’t want you to think much about the lies they spew, they just want you to absorb them, and spit them out if the subject comes up in (a) live conversation.
I was around when the blogging thing took off, and what a time it has been. First at Lucianne.com (Monica-era) and on to individual bloggers. I find it curious that such a phenomenon took place either before, or somewhat simultaneously with the rise in cell phone use in the previous decade. The vast majority of people I know and see spend all their time on cell phones, (and previously blackberrys) and couldn’t be bothered to sit down and read anything of value findable on the internet. They still defer to the tv to get their news. All the cell phone gadgets (apps) are designed to keep them brimming with bylines and of course. lots of photos.
Absorbing the content of what’s available on the web is a highly individualized task, so of course the rugged individualist, the dynamist has been involved all along. but the herd mentality is still out there, in the majority, and the media still uses that least common denominator to manipulate public opinion from their end. Just like the good old days of 60′s mass media. The results of blogging are, to my mind, mixed or I had higher hopes as to what would result from it. Anyway, the necessity remains, as always, to blog against the machine, so to speak.
Congratulations on ten years. Hope I can be around as long.
Sad news about Andrew Breitbart, a great Conservative.
Congrats, Ed. Me too. I don’t remember the exact date, and my old blog is long gone, but it was 10 years ago this month. How time flies…
Congratulations on your decade long run, Ed.
Tough day for it with Andrew’s passing. Still, your work is much appreciated and I, for one, have learned a great deal about topics that few others blogging even touch upon.
Congrats Ed!
“Unfortunately, at the moment, most are labors of love, not cash cows.”
Tell me about it. I don’t make a dime off of my blog, but I’m getting to the point where I couldn’t live without it. I always wanted to have a blog on Naval Warfare and Naval History and, one day, I just woke up and did it. I’ve been doing it now for over four years and don’t regret a moment of it. In fact, with all of the kind e-mails I’ve received from people all over the world, I guess I must be doing something right.
But the bigger picture is that I’m trying to educate the general public that the United States has a grand naval heritage, something that it being forgotten today. Tough ships with equally tough men in them built this nation and their sacrifices should not be forgotten on some dusty shelf in the back room of a library. No, we need to pause and take note of these individuals and not only admire what they did, but let them serve as a model of what we can be. THAT is why I do it, why I do it for no money and for a lot of work. I do it so that everybody will, at least for a little while, take note at the contributions these individuals and ships made to our history and hope that others will want to find out more about them.
It really is a labor of love but, with almost 200,000 hits on a blog dealing with Naval Warfare and Naval History, somebody out there must be reading it. And that’s enough for me, really.