One in two million
This week’s New York Review of Books has a piece on blogging by Sarah Boxer (”the author of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, an anthology to be published this month.”) It turns out that when I started blogging in September 2003 there were only two million blogs online - now there are 100 million or more.
Boxer’s piece seems surprisingly backward-looking. She’s filling in her audience on what blogs are, and she’s saying that bloggers get to be superheroes when they blog - sticking it to the Man, deflating puffery, telling it like it is, and then retreating to their regular lives. Boxer is “pretty sure that bloggers have fouler mouths, tougher hides, and cooler thesauruses than most of the people [she’s] read in print.” She winds up by saying:
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.
I’m sure Boxer is right in some way, and she’s a fine writer, but she’s taken a pretty limited approach to bloggers and what they do. She’s focused on the edgy, fame-seeking part of blogging. That’s interesting, sure, and funny too - but it doesn’t capture the daily rhythm of having a voice. It doesn’t get to this fundamental change from central broadcasting to cascades of individual commentary.
Look, I can’t claim that Boxer is selling blogs short. She’s flogging a book about blogs, and I’m blogging her flogging. The form does seem so primitive, and the quality of blogs varies so wildly. But we do seem to have changed the way we approach communications media. Surely that will still seem noteworthy for another five years or so.