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Now Harper is head of the global IDU, the right has gotten pointier, and blogging has been replaced by the silos of Faceplant and the relentless context-free scattershot weaponization of data on twitter.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

Bloggers on Blogging: Part 2

This is fun!

Second in the series is by Kev and is also up at his blog Trapped in a Whirlpool. He is also known as @trapdinawrpool on Twitter.

Edited to add:

https://trappedinawhirlpool.blogspot.com/2019/11/twitter-killed-blogging-star.html?showComment=1574008135114#c2057308226075208011

Why won't Blogger let me link to some sites? Grrr. I've forgotten how to do this.

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Twitter Killed the Blogging Star

First off I want to thank the folks at DJ for all the amazing work they have done over the years you are an inspiration to many of us.

I have kept my blog open because I keep telling myself that I will start writing again but the truth is that I get all the detritus roiling around in my head out on Twitter. I also find that my writing has been infected by the shortcuts the old 140 character limit forced on us.

Also lost along the way was the motivation to do the necessary research required to write credibly on any subject. Bloggers have only one currency and that is their credibility, without that you merely end up shouting into the wind.

We were a community there for each other, correcting each other when required or adding to to our knowledge of a topic, often writing on the same issue from different perspectives. Blogging opened up my world and lifelong friendships have been forged in the process and while the same can be said of twitter the depth of the relationships forged through blogging is just not there.

In the end we were able to go from oh you're just a blogger to in many instances having the media steal our work. Many legacy media outlets eventually started calling their own opinion writers bloggers in an attempt to appropriate the culture we had established.

The blogging community broke many stories, changed the narrative on many others and added depth to the debate, in the process opening some eyes to the truth of what this world has become. In the end though change comes, twitter and facebook will wither away as well with something new replacing them but the blogging community will always be closest to my heart.