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This is embarrasing. Just as I was making waves with my exceptional storytelling skills, I had to be stung by the old bug. Blogging about blogging. But I will console myself by reminding myself that everyone does this once in a while. Also, my modest observations here are fuelled by a certain amount of frustration with the need to define my medium, my blog, my pajama. Also as a response to Vinu’s post. Even though it is not a straight answer, here goes…

If you are a blogger, you have been asked this every time you told someone you are one. If you are not a blogger, you have asked this question everytime someone told you he/she was a blogger. — What is it?

Recent years saw blogs doing a lot. They exposed scams, they broke news, they enabled the coming of a truly participative age on the web, one that was always promised but never quite delivered. The news media, one of whose pet obsessions is itself, took up the issue with gusto. Many set to prove that most of what came on to the web in form of millions of blog posts every day was indistinguishable from noise and hence under no circumstances comparable with proper journalism. The fight worked up quite a storm so to speak. When the storm subsided the media and blogs were in such a tangle the world is still trying to make one out from the other.

Here’s a point of reference to help you make the differentiation. Someone recently said tome, “Khushwant Singh blogging. Now that would be something. I would want to read that. Why would I want to visit your blog to read about what your day was like?” She had a point. I don’t know a lot. Khushwant Singh (by the looks of it) does. Besides, he is paid to write in columns in newspapers and magazines what his day was like. Show me a way to beat that. We can’t. Plain and simple.

We ramble, gloat, shout, mutter, blame, praise all the time. But none of it will find place in a proper (esteemed) publication. Because there is no one watching over us. We can lie, and we can spread lies. More often than not, bloggers do that. The regular excuse would be, “So what? It’s my blog!” Can’t argue with that.

But seriously… does the public space that one is blogging in, render one’s choice of subject inconsequential? Does the fact that one is writing for himself or herself allow the blogger to surpass the entire line-up of traditional editorial hurdles that the more mainstream publishers are ‘trained’ to get used to?

All in all, it would seem that the sheer force and potential of this medium are enough to grant it a set of standards of its own. Standards that would defy definition by those used to the kind of control that makes the regular publishing world tick.

So does a blogger get to shrug off questions on propriety of content and stuff like that? Journalists never get to do that. Besides, the blogging vs. journalism has been overdone to such an extent that it tastes stale.

My favourite definition/ argument on the debate comes from Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com.

There is no need to define ‘blog.’ I doubt there ever was such a call to define ‘newspaper’ or ‘television’ or ‘radio’ or ‘book’ — or, for that matter, ‘telephone’ or ‘instant messenger.’ A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content … so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘blog’ is a fool’s errand. (Source)

There it is! The answer! And thanks to the last line, I won’t define my medium. I am merely venting steam after I saw Sabeer Bhatia on CNN IBN talking about blogs. The panel and the guests there seemed to believe bloggers as a whole share some kind of a collective conscious. A responsible one at that too. One that wouldn’t let them fall below a certain level of conducting themselves.

I do not doubt such a conviction, but a quick check will confirm that bloggers get into trouble for blogs as often as journalists get into trouble for journalese. What do we need then? A code of conduct. Perhaps. Cyberjournalist.net has one. But it caters to bloggers who do the journalist thing with their blogs. What about those who the diary thing? Or the linking thing?

The code is common sense people. Be sane. In the end it boils down to how we see ourselves. While my friend’s universe consists of a massive gathering in front of a stage on which Khushwant Singh occupies the dais and is talking about what he thinks of the world, mine has people of all sizes milling around on a pleasant beach, talking to each other, gossiping, snickering when out of earshot of the blogger six feet to your left. Stuff like that. That’s how blogs will survive. The conversations must go on. They very likely will.

Dear Mr Khushwant Singh. I loved The Company of Women. Take no offence from anything in this post. You are only an image here.

More readables on slightly different angles: The Blogger’s New Clothes, End of blogging?

Posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 12:23 am and filed under blogging, people, news.

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