First, by way of preemptive apology, I should note that I feel more muddle-headed than usual because of a lousy cold. It started to kick in over the weekend as I sat amidst the august surroundings of Harvard Law School, where I was attending BloggerCon, a conference hosted by the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
I must say I was impressed by the Harvard Law School campus. Actually, by the fact that it has a campus (most law schools, including the one I attended, have a single building on a university campus). Someone speculated that because Harvard has so many rich benefactors possessing outsize egos, it needed more buildings on which to plaster their names. Anyway, I was a bit disappointed by the contemporary sterility of the classrooms. I had been hoping for some wood-panelled walls with portaits of Harvard law giants like Roscoe Pound (or John Houseman) staring down disapprovingly as we discussed blogging, the most current and cool of topics.
In fact, BloggerCon did have one foot in the past, albeit a recent one. I felt a sense of deja vu as I heard people proclaim that blogs were “hugely transformative” and that since “the nation-state isn’t working, we need a new way to aggregate wisdom.” I was transported back to the early Internet conferences I attended and to Wired, where I once consulted and where heard mantras like “geography will become irrelevant.” To be sure, utopian visions were not uniformly shared by the attendees. There was a schism (since we’re talking about nearly religious convictions) between the born-again bloggers and those for whom blogging is an important evolutionary change in the media landscape. Falling into the latter category were astute bloggers like Oliver Willis, who, as the only black participant at the conference’s first day, wrote, “I’m not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world.” Ed Cone, who was funny and on point much of the time (well, I agreed with almost everything he said), gets to the point on his blog: “Free Elizabeth Spiers. Too much mic time for the audience to talk about blogtopia, I never found out who is sleeping with whom in New York.”
Utopian visions aside, there was an enormous amount of useful, and yes, exciting, discussion. There was a considerable amount of talk about how blogging is and will affect journalism and mainstream media. There is no question that blogs have already had an impact, certainly in terms of stories that swirl around the blogosphere before percolating “up” to the mainstream news organizations. And that’s coming from a tiny percentage of the general population. When blogs become a form of mainstream media, their power will be manifest. I thought Doc Searls put it well when he said, “What Web logs have done is equip the demand side of journalism. We’ve had enough equipment on the supply side.” Jay Rosen of the NYU Department of Journalism said he views it as “… the opening scene in the Martin Scorsese movie about gangs [Gangs of New York]. One gang - the press - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - are inching toward the other gang - the bloggers - who are inching toward the journalists. If I were the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal - and I would never presume to be [said with more than a hint of irony] - I would take from both ‘gangs’… I would assign some bloggers on the campaign trail to blog only at night or about a particular issue.”
In his blog about the conference, Rosen explores the appropriate relationship between blogger and editor, which he says might be termed ” a right contract” between the two. The role of editing in blogging was the subject of some discussion on BloggerCon’s first day. There were participants, roughly overlapping with the utopians, who regard blogs as the purest form of free, unfettered expression. Yes, blogs can be liberating and something more personal than a newspaper column. But having an editor shouldn’t necessarily violate the tenets of the blogging religion. During a break, I stood outside Langdell Hall chatting about this notion with Ed Cone, Oliver Willis and Len Apcar, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times on the Web. I said that I thought many in the room had a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of an editor - they didn’t understand that a good editor holds your feet to the fire and forces you to clarify your thoughts and words. It’s not just about slicing and dicing. A little later, when Apcar was on a panel, he addressed this issue, saying that contrary to the impression of some at the conference, editors weren’t “thought police.” He talked about Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog and how writers often want and need editors, a point that was reinforced by Ed Cone, who writes for Ziff Davis’s Baseline.
By the way, the conference was a disaster for me in one respect. I spilled coffee on my Mac Powerbook. I sopped up the coffee quickly and the computer seemed to be working fine. Thank goodness - aren’t Macs great? Then I got an incomprehensible but scary error message and the screen went black. I leaned over to the guy who said he was a computer scientist at MIT and asked for help. He said he didn’t know anything about Macs. Then someone pointed me to a programmer at Apple, who was extremely nice and told me I was probably screwed. I’ll have to take it to an Apple service center and hope for the best. BloggerCon cost me more than I thought it would.