Wed. Oct 29 Barlow Ch. 2

A lot about the world of blogging, and bloggers themselves, is expressed in Barlow’s chapter 2 of blogging America. The many themes in this chapter include a bloggers struggle for acceptance in the growing cyber world, and the different views that bloggers take on the theory of what they do. He also discusses woman bloggers, issues of anonymity and plagiarism, and possible dangers and threats that a bloggers faces. Right off the bat in this chapter Barlow quotes Andrew Keen, and the opinion he shares with many netizens that blogs are “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture…… undermining our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary.”(Pg 35)

Faced with the struggle that it is easy and anybody can do it, leading more often than not to biased, uneducated opinionated editorials from non-relevant sources, bloggers regularly find it difficult to be taken seriously by a population of cyber people who either share opposite perspective, or just lack knowledge about them.

However it is not always unjust when blogging is looked down upon. After all, the very idea of blogging is to opinionate on a topic of discussion geared towards 2 audiences, those who agree and those who disagree. So the fact that some bloggers such as Kathy Sierra have had critics go as far as to threaten her life often she wrote on controversial issues isn’t overwhelmingly surprising. However, this very incident that Barlow discusses is a prime example of why the way a blogger shapes his argument could be looked down upon. There’s little talk about the words and content that Kathy Sierra or Chris Clark spoke out about, which very well could have been colorful or aggressive enough to be lashed back it with not death threats, but at least cognitive defense.

Then again, a threat, no matter how dangerous, is in a sense one of the benefits of blogging, in that response and communication among readers and authors is encouraged. Even the differing views from Clark and Moulitsas, whether or not blogging itself is a real world or cyber world practice, doesn’t change the fact that they are still part of the same community of free thinkers and intellectuals. Overall, bloggers should encourage response, criticism, backlash, and all other form of exposure like you would in any other practice. And with over 75 million tracked on the net, there’s no end in sight for this new news medium.