Michael Keren, who has written “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena,” suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world. The Globe and Mail reports.
Professor Michael Keren has written a book on bloggers. He says most bloggers fail to get the attention they need and are often lonely.
“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” the author says.
Keren praises the Internet as a great place for self-expression, but he also suggests that blogs often have the opposite effect by creating feelings of loneliness for those who aren’t lucky enough to reach “celebrity” status.
“Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear,” he suggests. “Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness.”
Comments
@ 05:39
If Michael Keren thinks that bloggers are motivated by a desire to be “embraced by the mainstream media” then he really doesn’t have a clue what blogging is about. I wonder if he’s ever heard of The Long Tail.
@ 10:11
I will have to look at the book to see if it is really such a massive generalization. “Bloggers” is a pretty broad brush for tens of millions of individuals. It would be a frightening world indeed if everyone who blogs is some geeky, lonely, socially isolated soul. I’ve been dealing with this canard for so many years. Barry Wellman et al have done some excellent research about whether or not people who have active lives online are actually the disconnected, antisocial souls that the glib generalizations paint us to be.
@ 10:35
Some of us wish to “change the world” by blogging, only because our voices aren’t heard or permitted through other channels.
Perhaps as the author suggests, many bloggers will still go unheard even online. This has certainly been my experience with blogging.
@ 11:31
Jeepers. What rock was this guy hiding under? Or is he projecting?
I am now running a small consulting business instead of being unemployed — because I blogged.
I am now an elected official in a political part and an officer or task force member for several political organizations — because I blogged.
I’ve been invited to an elected official’s residence to chat with other bloggers and said official, collapsing six degrees of separation to one — because I blogged.
I’ve made hundreds of new friends, many of them now close friends — because I blogged.
I can point to entire communities of bloggers who’ve met at a convention and are going to hold another one, like BlogHer and YearlyKos — because I blog, because they blog.
I don’t know what kind of hard research Keren did; strikes me as the complete opposite of my personal experience. Where I once only had a small and tight network, I now have several intersecting loosely joined networks on which I can rely for help — because I blog. And I have to believe that the other nodes in these same networks have the same experiences. We may not find each other through civic organizations in our own backyard like the Kiwanis or Junior League, but we do find each other and actually meet.
The more I think about it, the more hooey I think this is. My stepson met a girl through YASNS, someone who lives in a Nordic country that he’d otherwise never have met. I’ll be thinking of Keren’s weird conclusion when this girl comes to visit my stepson a second time this year.