On The Issue of Fairness
Posted on September 25, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Last week a small debate began about the benefits of vlogging opposed to blogging and it fizzled out around issues of access. If you can’t write well,maybe you should vlog or podcast?
It got me thinking in a wider vein what we’re trying to achieve with web logging of any kind.
I know theoretically this is a democratic environment where we can all state a point of view. Artists I’ve talked with, successful ones anyway, argue that a point of view is what distinguishes them from other people practicing their particular form of expression whether than be photography, film, fine-art, whatever.
There’s another perspective on expression too. What distinguishes success from failure is giving up. Once you give up you know you’ve failed, whereas anything before that is trying.
These thoughts filled my head because blogging is a commitment of time with uncertain results. There is nothing else that compares with it - vlog, blog or podcast, you do it with no sense of what the result might be.
You might want to define a good result. For many people it’s numbers, technorati rank, peer recognition. These though are easy targets to hit or miss.
When I began this blog it was out of frustration with the people I write for professionally and the sense that the news/features business is deteriorating.
By that I mean the news media I am aware of have tunnel vision. It’s not just that they stick with traditional means of communication, they stick within narrow views of how the world is made up and works. The result is you can’t actually report a lot of what’s going on, because an editor finds it uninteresting or doubts its relevance.
For that reason too, I suspect, we have more conflict in society than we can manage, because so many voices are excluded, we have a culture that predisposes people towards being idle, fat and ill, and at the same time we celebrate it.
I may be suffering tunnel vision too because these issues don’t appear to be part of the blog conversation. Blogging, as it passes my eyeballs, is about technological innovation and marketing.
Parenting blogs have of course made some impression and so too have those that celebrate food.
In addition blogging is undeniably an English language medium. Yes there are French blogs and German blogs and Chinese blogs but blogs that dominate our eyeballs in a numerical sense are largely written in the English language.
And I think they are dominated by a point of view. How to characterise it? It’s a point of view that says something like: you are the brand. Taken together all our brands add up to a new form of individualism.
I posted elsewhere last week and argued that because we are reluctant to use the language of fairness more extensively the secular lifestyles we’ve enjoyed for the past five decades are being overtaken by religious leaders. They rather than us now manage the language of fairness. We have relinquished it.
One response was: you live in la la land.
I’m tempted to say point proved. We’re constantly drawn into the “you are the brand” form of individualism that I think renders blogging a conversation between people of largely similar points of view, in a society that has refined individualism a stage further than it was meant to go.
We are unwittingly or not, part of the movement towards extremes and our part of it is to underline that technological innovation and an exaggerated return on investment in it matters more than anything else.
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