Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other

I've been attending the Computers and Writing conference this weekend @ UofM. I showed up to the North Quad yesterday morning to check in, score my t-shirt, & grab a bagel. I hadn't been in that building yet... it's fantastic. It's really a beautiful building. After an afternoon @ Nicola's I headed back up there for the evening reception in the University of Michigan Museum of Art> The reception was also fantastic. We had a nice evening of chit-chat, mingling, & small talk (although we never discussed the distinction between chit-chat, mingling, & small talk).

On Saturday morning, I'm participating in a panel discussion chaired by Steve about the future of blogging: "Is Blogging Dead: Yes, No, Other" in which I'll have 3 minutes to respond to that question in a clever/witty/scholarly way. The idea of responding to all 3 criteria has been baffling me this week, but I'll do my best. I was going to talk about the influx of capital into the blog-o-sphere & the rise of corporate blogs, but Steve asked me to focus more on this specific blog because I'm the only panelist who has a other than academic blog. Since I don't spend much time talking about work, but a lot of time talking about other stuff like soccer & music & books & movies & my kids, I've been trying to figure out what could be said about it that is actually worth hearing. Here it goes; I hope it's useful.

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Well, it may not be dead, but it's seemingly on the ropes. The response to blogs in comment boxes looks to have been steadily declining over the last few years. According to a Pew Research Center study, 28% of American between the ages of 12 & 29 blogged in 2006. Of course, this study doesn't touch on average numbers of posts or the number of readers, but 28% definitely supports all of our assumptions about the popularity of blogging five years ago. The survey also suggests that, at the same time, 7% of the population over the age of 30 was blogging. Since then, the number of teen bloggers has dropped to 14% while the young adult blogging numbers has dropped to 15%. Conversely, the bloggers over the age of 30 have actually increased to 11% of the population.

It seems like this could be attributed to the fact that some of those younger bloggers have since gotten older & still maintain their blogs so we have now have more older bloggers. This makes sense, but we need to look a little more closely at the survey of adults over 30. While the younger computer uses in the survey only consisted of a margin of eighteen years, we're lead to believe that the adult demographic included everyone over 30. Had they looked at 30 to 65 year olds, the percentage of bloggers would certainly have been higher. At least it would appear that way if we can assume that senior citizens are less likely to be blogging than 35 year olds. However, without the proper data, we can't be sure.

That might not matter though because many of the over thirty bloggers are actually blogging for corporations now anyway, which suggests that not only has blogging decreased, but it has decreased in tandem with the emergence of the "Blog as Corporate Media Tool." And yes, we'll use all the definitions of the word "tool" here. The rise of the corporate blog over the past five years is what's really spelling doom for the blog-o-sphere. As the idea of blogging has been co-opted by sites like The Huffington Post, The Fox News Blogs (even Fox Chief Meteorologist, Rick Reichmuth, supposedly maintains a blog, yet it's actually being updated by Fox News Channel Meteorologist, Janice Dean who on May 2nd posted the rather non-weather related message, "God Bless the Navy Seals that gave this country news we've all needed to hear for almost 10 years. Finally a little closure for those who lost loved ones September 11, 2001" [agreement issues aside, there can be no denying that she is a media tool]), & The Whole Story (the official blog of Whole Foods Market), it's no wonder that the individual has been somewhat stifled in the world of blogs.

So it's not blogging that might be dead, but the idea of blogging. There are plenty of blogs out there in cyber space. In 2007, Heather Green of Business Week reported that there were 15.5 millions blogs on the Internet. As of May 20, 2011, Blogpulse, a blog indexing site maintained by Neilsen Media Research, claimed there were over 162 million blogs, 76 thousand of which had been updated in the last 24 hours. If these numbers are correct, and they seem to be correct, we need to determine how the very title of this panel is even relevant. A total of 162 million blogs suggests that we should all be blogging. How could there even be an issue?

But it is an issue. Not only are the individual, personal bloggers being squeezed out, the the sheer number of blogs is just overwhelming. Blogging looks to be dead, or at least on the ropes as I suggested a couple minutes ago, because it's too hard for people to find them. In Dexter Palmer's recent debut novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, the young Harold Winslow says he wants to be a story teller when he grows up. In response, he is asked, "Have you thought of what will happen if you want to tell a tale and no one can hear you or has the time to listen? Have you thought about trying to tell a tale in a crowded room where everyone else is shouting to be heard? Storytelling - that's not a future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's made up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive" (101).

These flashes and impulses are not unlike Facebook status updates or tweets. The very things on which the blogs are now so reliant. As people have lost the interest in reading the blogs, commenting on the blogs or even just acknowledging their existence, the rise of the networking sites has worked along with the corporate blogs and the simple overwhelming number of blogs to give the appearance of the death of blogging, but it's still there. It's still strong. Strong like the proverbial tree falling in the woods. In this case though, the tree isn't falling in a woods devoid of people, it's falling in a woods so crowded with people chopping down trees that they simply don't notice one more or less.

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So, this is the draft I've got done right now. I think I'll need to cut it back a little more and possible add something witty/hip about this very blog. We'll see. Of course, we'll also see if anyone actually reads this before tomorrow morning: not likely. If you do, be sure to leave the comments here rather than on Facebook because that way, they will stick w/ the post and won't get lost on the Facebook link.