Blogs: shotgun mouthwash?

COMM 450 blog entry #9

It looks like my first submission of this entry was swallowed up somewhere, so here is a second one.

I find and believe that most blogs that pretend to any sort of content are repositories of semi-digested intellectual pap. This goes double for the popular ones. My impression is that there exist networks of blogs which are highly self-referential. They are not a source of valid scholarship, and most of the time they serve as little more than a timesink for everyone involved. Latour's theory of how scientific papers attain legitimacy has some bearing here: according to a paper of his I read in my freshman year, scientific papers gain legitimacy
by having a large degree of other papers referencing to them. This is the same principle behind Pagerank. A given blog can have a lot of legitimacy within a certain community because everyone else cites it, but it's a horse of a different color to have any kind of legitimacy in the larger world, whether it be another Web community or some community in real life.

As with most blog entries, this one makes vague, grandiose claims without any sort of proper citation except that of the anecdotal sort (which, as any good academic can tell you, is the best kind, as it can't be questioned). Am I lying about Latour? Who knows?! Here's a link to Wikipedia: hooray!

That said, there are some linkages between real life and blog posts which can lend blogs some legitimacy. When you get a large enoughmass of people together, collaborative environments gain some sort of importance of their own: Daily Kos and Free Republic aren't blogs per se, but they have some kind of clout because a lot of vocal people read them and consider themselves part of their blogging communities. Since people like to congregate and think of themselves as members of groups, blogs and blogging communities won't go away. This is why we need to implement painful penalties for writing stupid things in any public media. I'm open to suggestions as to my own penance.