Social Media Killed the Blog Star?
To get straight to the point, I believe email and blogs are not dead, and I’m tired of the countless articles that say they are.
Oh sure, it’s easy to jump on the email/blogging-is-dead bandwagon, but declaring these modes of communication as dead doesn’t accomplish much. Those who are ready to pronounce the death of email and blogging often justify their arguments in one of two ways: (1) with anecdotal speculation, or with (2) a bogus game of semantics.
Both of these arguments aren’t particularly helpful, and here’s why:
The Speculative Argument
Take for example this post on PC Mag by the respected tech brain John C Dvorak which claims, “E-mail, once the most effective way to communicate with your tech-savvy associates, has become useless.” Dvorak lists nine reasons that email is dead—among those listed are are issues of spam, the inability to see if a message was actually delivered, and competition from closed systems like IM.
Sure email may be a pain in derriere when there are more efficient means of communication at our fingertips, but it doesn’t follow that email is useless. Data backs me up here. A recent study by the Participatory Marketing Network showed that Gen Y would rather give up talking on the phone and using social networks than the use of email. (via Mashable). In addition, Nielson recently found that social media use actually increases email use.
Data clearly shows that the generation entering the workplace values email more than phone or social network communication. With that in mind, it’s tough to pronounce email as dead. With solid data, I argue that we can see the question isn’t “is email dead or alive?” but instead, “how is email use evolving?”
The Semantic Argument
In response to yesterday’s annual “State of the Blogosphere” (via Technorati), Fast Company’s Kit Eaton wrote that “blogging” as we know it is “dead” and that we need to “rethink the definition of blogging.” Eaton writes:
Let’s redefine what blogging means. If you’re writing self-absorbed or inexpert opinions about the minutiae of daily life, without hyperlinks, fact checks or any pretence at engaging with the news, you’re a blogger. [...] But if you’re a writer for an online publication, one that takes real-time stories, updates them as events unfold, reference your quoted facts, break stories and produce original writing then shall we just say you’re a journalist? An online one, but a journalist all the same.
Whether he means to or not, Eaton establishes two black-and-white categories: blogger and journalist, assigning strict definitions to each. It doesn’t allow for the flexibility for (semantic) overlap that might cause us to erase the traditional boundaries of “blogging” and “jounalism.” Instead, it only entrenches the dichotomy between the elite “journalist” and the common “blogger.”
Really, his argument deconstructs to a game of names. And when you’re playing the that game, it’s easy to pronounce something as dead simply because you’ve defined it out of existence.
So what do you think? Let’s talk about it. Please leave your comments.
-Andrew
photo credit: TexasTiger on stock.xchng (pre-edited image)
