Blogs as a sign and a symptom
Posted: Friday, May 11, 2007 2:55 PM by Will Femia
I attended the second annual Brooklyn Blogfest last night. That's a little too local for you to care about, but I did hear a few points worth sharing. It happens that Brooklyn has some issues like toxic spills and greedy land developers that for some reason aren't covered well in the newspapers here, so there was a lot of bashing of mainstream media at the Blogfest. Robert of the Gowanus Lounge expressed his frustration most strikingly, accusing local papers of "abdicating their responsibility." But through it all what was apparent to me was that the room was full of people who have taken responsibility themselves for paying attention to their own neighborhoods - and what's more, they are doing a good job of it. Even if newspapers were capable of the kind of coverage blogs collectively provide, why would we want to turn the clock back on local citizen reporting? Isn't there an argument to be made that it's often citizens who are abdicating their responsibility to actually participate in their own community? The flourishing of local blogs isn't a sign that something is broken, it's a sign of something working.
The first speaker last night was Steven Berlin Johnson, whose hyperlocal hub Outside.in is definitely not too local for you to care about (in fact its local-ness is what should make you care about it).
He offered the interesting observation that the neighborhoods with the greatest number of blogs also are the ones experiencing the most intense gentrification. It seems like a pretty logical conclusion that neighborhoods with the most amount of change are likely to have a greater number of blogs discussing that change. It makes me think of the spike in the number of new blogs following 9/11. To what degree can we credit a general cultural shift with inspiring those new bloggers? It also puts the framing of blogging as an agent of change in a different light. Do blogs really make things happen or are they a response to something already happening?
I deliberately waited until my free margarita wore off before writing this to make sure it still seemed like a good idea. Blogs as symptom of change: discuss.
