Some cures for a GodBlogCon Hangover

Pastor Mark over at Runalong with Pastor Mark has a hangover from the GodBlogCon.   He's asking some hard questions about the GodBlogCon which are very good.  If this little God blogging movement we are participating in is to have anything more than temporary influence we need some good hearted cynics and skeptics from within to sharpen us.  Not that Pastor Mark is a cynic or a skeptic, but I'm glad he is one person thinking critically about all of this.  I thought I'd take a stab at a few of his questions so I'll start with his first:

1.  Is blogging really going to be "the next big thing"?  Are comparisons to Guttenberg or television valid? Or is it a temporary blip that will be surpassed by new technologies before it ever really takes off?  You can guess what the party line at GBC was, and they may well be right.  But someone needs to at least ask these questions.

Blogging is already the "big thing," at least in this particular moment, which may soon be past.  Just look at all of the examples that Hugh gives of blogging's influence in the political realm over the last several years. 

But blogging is just one piece of a much larger pie involving new technologies.  John Mark Reynolds hinted at this in his opening address when he said that, in speaking of blogging, he was speaking of a whole range of new technologies.  In that respect, blogging is already being augmented and/or replaced with new technologies.

I haven't seen it written out this way, but I see many of the new technologies as counterparts to older technologies.  For instance, many of the old standard web pages mimicked the traditional paper marketing materials of brochures and catalogs and the like.  Blogs mimick newspapers and letters of yesteryear.  Podcasts mimick radio.  And video blogging mimicks film.  Of course there are subtle contours in all of this and the categories aren't hard and fast, but I don't think I'm too far off in this.

In that respect we are already seeing podcasting becoming easier to do and more accessible and this will most likely continue to a point where it overtakes blogging in notoriety.  In fact, it may already have.

Similarly, as video recording equipment becomes cheaper and more accessible we'll see video blogging become the next big thing.

And while these things are different, they all share something in common in that they are a part of the new media, which is more interactive and more personal.  Blogging, podcasting and video blogging allow for feedback in ways that newspapers, radio and tv didn't.   But more importantly, what is new about the new media is that it is more personal, allowing the user to choose his or her outlets of information.   The new media means that we can choose what we read, hear and watch and are not dependent on a few major players to be our sources.

This what I mean by blogging being a piece of a much larger pie.  To continue the pie analogy it may be that blogging may have been the first ingredient added to the pie, but new audio and video ingredients are being added and the pie is being filled out and is beginning to take on more of the shape it will have in the future.

So in that respect, blogging is one ingredient in this interactive and personalized pie of the new media and we should expect it to lose some of the pre-eminence it now holds.

At the same time I don't think this necessarily means that blogging will go away.  People didn't quit reading newspapers when the radio and tv were invented.  I loved Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death, but I am not sure he got everything right.  He suggested that our graphic driven world would render books and reading obsolete.  Yet to my untrained mind it has seemed curious that over the last two decades, as we have become more and more graphic driven, booksellers are selling more and more books.  When I was a kid watching three network channels and playing cutting edge video games like pong, bookstores were tucked away in tiny little parcels at the far end of the mall.  Today, with thousands of channels and bazillions of video games, every major city is littered with Barnes and Noble's, Borders' and Books-A-Million's. 

It is also curious to me that one of the icons of our graphically driven culture, the internet, has the world's biggest bookstore as one of it's greatest success stories. 

This is my way of saying that, though I think we are seeing and will continue to see sexier technologies than blogging, the sexier technologies will not necessarily quash the desire to read.  Postman was afraid that, in a graphically driven age, people would lose their ability to think.  In some ways this is true, I am quite certain that thousands, maybe millions of minds have been turned to mush by technologies like film and the internet.  Yet, the same technologies that have turned many minds to mush have revealed brilliance in the minds of others. 

This is what we are currently seeing in blogging.  Yes, there is enough drivel in the blogosphere to fill an ocean, but blogs have revealed many great minds that most of us would never have known had it not been for blogging.

And just as there is still a place for newspapers and books in the age of the television, I think there will still be a place for blogs.  It won't be the same place of pre-eminence it enjoys now, but it will still have a place and an important one at that.  Blogging is a technology of the written word and the written word can convey things that spoken words and graphics can't. 

So, I expect blogging to have a different place in the world in the future, but it will probably still have a place.

Update - so as soon as I finished posting this I cruised over to In the Agora where I found that Josh Claybourn and David Darlington are having a little debate involving Neil Postman and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death.  Josh had suggested that television may actually have some redeeming features, and David countered with a review and summary of Postman's book.  So, if you want some background on my references to Postman that little exchange may be helpful.

Comments

[pgepps]

I think it's a mistake to state that blogging is "the next big thing" in the Gutenberg sense. It is, of course, pretty darn important--it is one highly visible marker of a shift in our discourse habits, which is intimately involved with a convergence of new technologies.

The reason I think it's a mistake is that we generally compare apples and oranges when we do this. Mark asks about Gutenberg, you respond by talking about radio and TV.

[ I think you err in calling the Internet a marker of visual (graphical) culture; it is not. It is a very advanced manifestation of textual culture, albeit the visual culture has made some inroads (but consider that a video file is still an insertion into a "page" and you'll see my point). The visual culture exists within and is parasitic on textual culture: movies and TV and radio are contingent on novels and stories and newspapers, and could not be conceived in their present form without them.) ]

The immediate result of Gutenberg's printing press, however, was not a massive outpouring of books (there were, of course, comparatively many more, but they were still rare and valuable for some time), nor newspaper journalism. It was the furtherance of political and theological debate by the publishing of tracts. (the modern-day Gospel tract is its horribly diminished offspring)

Milton never published a book, but he did have printed several tracts (two on radical reformation, two or three advocating divorce, defenses of the regicide, etc.)--and the great debates of his age were all carried out by tracts. Often, one tract would draw a reply. There is a famous series of tracts and/or open letters between Whitfield and Wesley, very late in this era.

Those tracts were a great deal like blogs. They were (as were also books) often published anonymously, and later claimed by their authors after public reception had been tested. They were conceived of as a public discourse, with rhetoric which sometimes addressed a particular interlocutor but always had as its goal public suasion. They were timely, informal, limited by the author's ability to garner an audience rather than by the approval of elites, and benefitted from a gap in the "gate-keeping" functions of royal and clerical elites--which those elites were eager to close (see the stirring opposition to pre-publication censorship in Milton's Aeropagitica.

Where are these now? Well, for some 200 years, they have been in decline. Mostly, they were absorbed by journalism, which has gradually taken over the elite gate-keeping function as publishers consolidated power.

Blogs are just another pendulum swing within the textual culture; they are one more phase of the Gutenberg explosion which has been so closely intertwined with the emergence (and decline) of modern culture. I think they're great, and I want the pendulum swinging this way, but there's no reason for too much optimism.

Cheers,
PGE

[Mark Swanson]

Thanks for the interaction. Many good points: blogging is primarily textual (for now) but will probably become more visual and aural as technology advances. The interactive aspect is its key strength. The influence of bloggers is so diverse (and will remain so as it is free and easy to blog) that few individual bloggers will ever have much influence. Right now there are only a handful who have more influence than a second-rate radio talk show host in a small city. Delustions of grandeur won't do us any good. And none of us really know where the technology will take us in the next 10-20 years or what will evolve next. Lots of questions remain!

[Mean Dean]

I'll thank you the same way I just thanked Mark, as I appreciate the tough questions and self-examination.

Unfortunately, I think perhaps these questions should have been covered before the GodBlogCon broke for home - as some involved have been less than flattering to some others who disagree on various topics.

[Chris Rhoades]

For a great read on this stuff - check out:
Gregory Reynolds (OPC Minister)
The Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures -
Preaching in an Electronic Age.

It was his doctoral dissertation and provides a great analysis of Postmans thesis among other things offering helpful correctives and applications to pastors.

It's a powerhouse of a book and would merit a great review on this slice of the blogosphere.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579106382/qid=1130260449/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-0560670-6287261?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[Funky Dung]

On a tangentially related note, Amused to Death is a great Roger Waters album. :)

[The Dane]

I think it's very easy for bloggers to imagine themselves as the heroes of a new paradigm, to believe themselves to have this incredibly influential over the world as it reshapes. In reality though, the number of bloggers that will have any kind of far-reaching influence on anything is and will be miniscule. One has a better chance at influencing national perspective by becoming a pastor or unviersity professor. The egalitarianism of blogging is its weakness and the only way that blogging can become influential is to abandon egalitarianism - which it has done naturally (cf. Truth Laid Bear's ecosystem). The true power in blogging's egalitarianism is not in its influence (which will never come about) but in its capability to facilitate of conversation.

[The Dane]

Pay no attention to the bad grammar behind the curtain ;)

[Agent Tim]

PGE is right. But I still have to wonder...I think blogs will stick around to keep the media in line, but I wonder about their future. Is it just a fad?

But how many fads have conferences?

I think blogging will stick around longer, and will have a better impact if we rise to the next level, which is first-hand reporting, and top-of-the-line articles. I think we need to be more trustworthy.

Great questions...

Tim

P.S. Pastor Wayne, I'll have to stop by your church sometime. One of your members may have mentioned me to you (she's the blogger at http://bigred5.blogspot.com/). Anyway, keep up the awesome work here!

[djchuang]

There are largely untapped use of blogging in cultivating relationships and community building.

As a point of comparison and contrast, I took a quick tour around noted GodBlogCon bloggers, and then I took a quick tour around emerging church bloggers. The recent tragic news of pastor Kyle Lake's premature death was noted on many emerging church bloggers: a call to prayer, notes of sympathy, and personal memories and/or intercession and grief. However, I did not find many (any?) mention of this tragedy among GodBlogCon bloggers.

Do pray for the Lake family and UBC Waco, who need much prayer and God's comfort.