Bloggers on Blogging: Part 5

Yay! One of my faves, Alison at Creekside, has joined the party.

Follow her on Twitter.

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Blogging

I loved it. I loved that we were citizen journalists and pamphleteers. I loved that we were rigorous and funny.

I loved kicking ass and taking names. I loved spending days researching and calling out what our 90+% Con-fluffing media owners lacked in both reporter hours and inclination to report on. And I loved the attention.

I loved Holly Stick or Beijing York or other bloggers rocking up the comments with links to what I had missed or gotten entirely wrong because, as @trapdinawrpool says below, credibility was our only currency and we all defended it fiercely on each other's behalf.

I loved that bloggers knew each other's interests well enough to quietly pass on stories/data to whomever had excelled in that particular niche.

I loved the camaradarie across political lines.  I loved that out here on the Wet Coast we got together in real life in various combinations of political bent and butted heads and made friendships as people.

It was of course the nine year reign of Stephen Harper and the rise of the right that galvanized many of  us into blogging in the first place - that and the realization that money and lots of it had more to do with the inner workings of our neoliberal corporate-captured governments than whatever pap we had been inculcated with about progress and democracy in our youth.

Now Harper is head of the global IDU, the right has gotten pointier, and blogging has been replaced by the silos of Faceplant and the relentless context-free scattershot weaponization of data on twitter.

When blogger/researcher The Sixth Estate quit blogging three years ago, he asked - in a rhetorical analogy to people - why the cape buffalo and hippos in Africa did not rise up together against the lions who killed and ate them. Three years later the lions are unhappily sharing the same slowly sinking life raft with the cape buffalo and the hippos. We're still the lions though, the lions reassure each other quietly, their claws sinking ever deeper into the life raft.

OK, where the hell was I going with this lions business? Oh yeah. The lions are not going to listen to us - not as bloggers or tweeters or Faceplanters. That blogger camaraderie to make common cause wherever and however you find it now -- as in life, that's what counted all along about blogging .