The Future of Blogging

Jay over at 4&20 is concerned about the future of the Internet, and also about proposed rules of conduct for bloggers. I share his concern. I’m not terribly upset that other bloggers think we ought to consult a list before we attack a jackass or be one ourselves. The Internet is free-swinging and open, and the guardians of proper behavior will just have to swallow hard as others take their liberties.

The people who want to tie us all up in rules of proper behavior are probably the same people who go 35 in a 45, who slow down and stop in anticipation of a red light. They are kind of annoying, and hard to ignore when they are in front of you. But on a four lane highway, you can just buzz right by them.

Have you ever been in a line of traffic, and you get to a railroad crossing, and everyone slows down, and zoom! a guy passes everyone on the right? That’s me. That, I think, are most bloggers who have strong opinions and see the medium as a way of sidestepping the conservative guardians of propriety that run the editorial pages. It’s a medium without rules or rulers, as it was meant to be. Screw rules.

Jay is also concerned that this medium is short-lived. I agree. It faces a huge threat, one that has come to dominate every other aspect of our lives – corporate control.

I was reading Marshall McLuhan one morning – I won’t look it up again. It was just a brief tract on modes of communication, and he mentioned that the US Government had subsidized development of the telegraph system in the nineteenth century. That’s the way it works. The private sector is caught up in short-term profit, and investors don’t have the wherewithal to make long term commitments in enterprises that in the end might not be profitable.

So it is that when you get on a plane to Denver, you are riding on a converted bomber. Modern transportation was developed at government expense. Remember that IBM had huge contracts to develop computer technology for the Department of Defense. Modern computer technology was not developed in a garage in Silicon Valley, but rather at the behest of the Pentagon.

Just about every major advance in technology starts with government subsidy. The Internet is no exception, developed by DOD, found useful, and quietly turned over the private sector for exploitation.

So be it. That’s not going to change. The key here is that when the public pays for development of something, the public should have free and unfettered access to it. Jay fears that the corporations will restrict bandwidth, consigning little players to nooks and corners and dealing the general public out of free access to its own invention. I could not agree more. Net neutrality is not an issue in the mainstream media, as the large corporations that own the news outlets have so much at stake. It’s a grassroots issue. At this time it looks like our best hope for preserving it is local activism, and, gulp, Democratic politicians.

Anyway, go here if you want to see the slow-lane set trying to set the rules for the red-light runners. And read Jay’s piece on our future as bloggers, commenters, trollers and assholes that are all part and parcel of our Internet. I love them all equally.