Scienceblogs are being reviewed by Some Guy, and Orac criticizes the critic. My disagreement with the clueless critic comes from a fundamental flaw in his approach: he’s basically coming along and announcing that Blog X should be about Y, and if it isn’t Y-ish enough for his taste, he pans it. He, apparently, is the Content Dictator of the Blogosphere.
One thing everybody needs to understand about blogs is that they aren’t about what you think they’re about. Good blogs are about the author, not your perception of what the subject should be.
Carl also explains some basic facts of blogospheric life to the guy.
Still, there is the public aspect of blogs that takes the personal and makes it into something more… so if someone answers every criticism with “well, blogs are about the author” then that gets to be a pretty weak point.
I’m also generally disturbed by the “shoot first” mentality of a lot of blogs. I don’t see if much at Pharyngula, I’m just letting my cat out of the bag here. It seems to me that while blogs can be great when it comes to reporting something live or quickly, their fact checking isn’t usually up to even the low standards of print media. Hell, look at Boing Boing some time. They print the damndest shit, and feel like its ok to just run a strikethrough on the text when it turns out Canada really ISN’T attacking Mexico, or whatever nonsense they’ve printed. Its really a pain the ass to see big bloggers wanting to be accepted as “real-life” journalists, but also wanting to obey journalism rules when they feel like it.
Well, if “sciency” scienceblogs is what anyone wants, check out evolgen (or coalesced, or whatever RPM is calling it these days). It does seem to be more focussed on science than most, but at the expense of popularity, I suppose.
But maybe the critic would complain that RPMs annoyance at the lack of glove and elevator etiquette of his co-workers is “personal”.
“They print the damndest shit, and feel like its ok to just run a strikethrough on the text when it turns out Canada really ISN’T attacking Mexico, or whatever nonsense they’ve printed. Its really a pain the ass to see big bloggers wanting to be accepted as ‘real-life’ journalists, but also wanting to obey journalism rules when they feel like it.”
While the standards are a little bit higher for what gets printed in newspapers and the like, their method of correction is certainly not any better. Blogs will post shit as soon as they hear it, but if they’re wrong then they can (not all do) immediately delete it or edit it or retract it or strike through it.
A newspaper will print stuff once they get some form of confirmation, but if they’re wrong the next day they put in a little box on page C12 “Due to an error in reporting, it was stated that Canada had declared war on Mexico. Canada really ISN’T attacking Mexico.”
Hmmm. I think the “personal stuff” issue is kind of interesting. Obviously anyone can blog about anything they want. But if I was asked to join scienceblogs and I titled my blog with some sciency name, I am unquestioningly giving my readers an expectation on the type of content they will see. If I proceed to post about my cat and my girlfriend, they will probably become disinterested.
I do think partitioning ones blogging makes sense. I participate in two science blogs (slackerastronomy.org and my own observatory blog), I post to a political blog (newpatriot.org) and I put my own personal rants on my own blog. While it makes it harder for people who adore me personally (both of them) to read everything I write, it means the random visitors see posts about the subject matter they are seeking posts about.
So I think the reviewer is not completely wrong on that point.
Daephex, you are forgetting that Ann Coulter does the same thing in print and she’s considered a real-life journalist. Bill O’Reilly does the same thing on-air. Everything is just screwy nowadays, hopefully once the blogosphere matures things will settle down.
No doubt that a lot of “real” journalists are screw-ups too– and while I can sort of understand bloggers looking for greater acceptance, I’m not so sure I want them chasing traditional journalism either.
But let’s face it, the whole “being objective” thing is really only a work-around– early journalists couldn’t separate their desire to persuade from their use of lies and rhetoric to get there. If you look at journalism in that light, it’s like journalists just threw up their hands and said “we can’t be truthful AND opinionated, so let’s just go for second best and be objective.”
Its quite pathetic, really.
Personally, I’m waiting for Web 3.0– my mental concept is that blogging and social networking will be totally anonymous– free of the lying persuasiveness of yellow journalism, and free of the nagging idea that someone is only mentioning your blog to drive up the hit points on theirs. It sure would be interesting if people were driven to post blogs purely for sharing information (or commenting on it) but with no concrete way to benefit from it. Right now, blogging, networking, advertising– its so mired in publicity and marketing that it may very well sicken itself. I’m half tempted to erase my blogroll right now.