"A blog must really bring something to the party. I want commodity, not just opinion."For a man whose brief on becoming the online Tele's head-honcho in 2001 was "to bring Fleet Street 'upstairs'," Richard Burton (not that one; this one) was surprisingly unwilling to be another itinerant Noah to new media's swelling Ark.
For Burton, of course, executed his task aboard the Telegraph too well: in 2006, everybody came upstairs.
His party a little pooped, Burton jumped ship.
Thus far from being called in two-by-two, we young neophytes were drummed out one by one. Burton rather pulled the rug from under the blogosphere's exponential delirium with the sobering judgement:
"No one is interested in your views."
Less a dotcom crash fiscal forewarning, more a reining-in of freetapping naiveté, Burton's caveat for new media's children was simply this: "Do you have anything worth saying?"
- Short answer: Yes
- Longer answer: Who decides what is 'worthy'?
- Even longer answer: See below
One of my tasks on this very course was – to render it crudely – to blog about blogging. That the words in this very post, then, are a reflection on blogs about blogging does park us somewhere near the multi-voiced purgatory at which Burton bristles.
It does also, though, nudge us toward Baudrillard – being a second-order simulation of sorts. Read more on simulacra here. It’s really rather exciting stuff. The Gulf War never actually took place, you know.
And perhaps the online meander above is precisely the point.
Richard Burton’s concept of ‘commodity’ is different from mine; we float at different points along the infinitely varied digital/economic axes.
While Peter Foster's South Asian revelations are Burton's cultural currency, the notional cityscaping of Martin Clark's dubstep/grime/inner city analyses are another's liberalising treasure trove.
Worth and inspiration come in all shapes and sizes — the blogosphere transcends commodity.
Whatever your view, don't take the C-word lightly. Not in front of Richard, anyhow.
0 comments:
Post a Comment