disconnect

Rifling through the long to-do list I’m trying to whittle away at, some major questions won’t go away. It sometimes seems like the Internet is split between tool-monkeys and content-monkeys. They don’t talk much, and when they do it is disastrous. The disconnect seems to me to hinge on the question of whether people use the tools they create, or if they just like to talk about them—pretty much the same issue that Richard blogged about a while ago, only perhaps oddly inverted. It is odd to participate on a listserv about blogging where participants can’t be bothered to read each other’s blogs.

Actually, I understand this. To be “committed” to blogging as a form, or as a tool, a person has to actually use it. Most academics in my discipline are actually practicing “fence-sitting,” where they adopt the technology in a limited way to do traditional things (see Richard’s post). They are also nervous about yet one more thing they are “supposed” to read. Few people actually read blogs; mostly they skim them. It is that aspect that is not talked about much, though a few papers recently (exactly which ones escapes me for the moment) do talk about this issue. They “graze”— to use the same sort of metaphor put forward by Ton and the latest Pew Internet report (no time to link the citations just now).

However, the attention-inundated content-monkey cannot immediately stop producing content in order to pick-up the latest tool-monkey’s tools. A good example (and what brought on this silly outburst) is discovering that John Logie has posted his notes to his presentation at the C’s IP caucus (on April 1, no less). He has a regular blogger based site. No RSS, no pinging, no way to move this paper to the top of the stack for a moment. Progressive ideas; retrograde technologies. The speed at which the web landscape is transformed is astounding, and yet, people who actually want to produce content don’t have the time to constantly change their tools. I am more sympathetic to this issue, than people who claim to be “into blogging” who don’t bother to actually read blogs, or write in them. They just want to theorize about the latest tools.

It seems to me that there are two types of intimidation involved in becoming an active blogger—one is the question of audience (Who would want to read me? How can I find people that I want to read?). The other is the question of technology—I want to write, not be a techno-geek who cultivates a specific “feed” for every category of uncategorical thought that I have.

I think that the comparison of blogs as “flows” compared to the wiki model of “stocks” seems pretty apt. A wiki is an investment; a blog is a thoughtspace. I wish people didn’t have so much difficulty going with the flow.