Oh No! Everything Is Dead Let’s Microblog About It
The other day I wrote post here about how Paul Boutin declared that blogging was oh so 2004 and was dying an ignoble death. Now we are being told that the Grey Lady herself might just be on life support and may not see the end of the recession (or is depression the cool word now?).
In and amongst this terrible news about the death and destruction of newspapers along with its heir apparent blogging being handed its own tombstone we have a rumor being circulated by the king of Silicon Valley rumors – Valleywag. According to them TechCrunch and its illustrious leader Michael Arrington, they are very quickly becoming a has-been – a nice way to say that the TechCrunch empire is riding the same boat as the Grey Lady.
All though this despair and dysfunction though we are being offered a glimmering of hope that not all is lost in the ego lifestreaming world because we are all going to be rescued from individuality and obscurity by microblogging. Yes folks things like Twitter, FriendFeed and any of the other sundry copycats are coming to our rescue. Instead of being crushed by the obligation of of writing intelligent and interesting posts we are all going to be able to inflict our own brand of 140 character verbal diarrhea upon millions of people as they stand on street corners and soup kitchen lineups holding their last vestige of cool technology in their hand – the mobile phone – you know – that thing that killed off the desktop computer.
Oh wait.. it didn’t kill it off after all and those soup kitchen lineups – well the chances are that anyone in the tech world; especially the VCs funding this hot air balloon called Web 2.0, won’t even see the inside of a food bank let alone stand in a soup kitchen lineup. Those that do probably couldn’t careless about 140 characters flying through the air as they are just hoping that the Grey Lady survives the winter because all that paper makes for great blankets against the cold.
As for microblogging becoming the newest snitz I hope it does. I hope that microblogging becomes so hot that everyone who thinks they are going to make their fortune as a hot shot blogger with a pageful of ads becomes disillusioned and heads off to new territories. This way those of us who believe that the new media can be a valued and trusted heir to heritage media; or at least to be able to work together on an equal footing, can get on with the quiet revolution of journalism.
Just as vinyl never really went away neither will print. Just as television was going to destroy radio they say the same about microblogging destroying blogging which is suppose to kill off what is now being called heritage media. Well television and radio are still here – side by side. Sure they may have changed in some fashion or another, that is to be expected. The same will happen with this thing we are calling new media. It to will find a way to blend with the old and make something new and better.
But it won’t be microblogging.
