Jack Shafer, Slate's editor at large, has come away from last weekend's Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference with a few thoughts about the future of blogging - he thinks ideas of a citizen journalist revolution are overkill.
First, he argues the blogosphere's more evangelical members are underestimating the ability of newspapers and television networks to adapt. Second, he sees as precedents for such claims those made by the guerrilla television movement of the 1970s, which predicted CBS would collapse as citizens armed wiht Sony video cameras made their own TV programmes. "Their revolution was televised, but nobody watched," he writes. Then there is the Jurassic Park connection.
The likelihood that blogs will vanquish mainstream media recalls the prediction Michael Crichton made in his 1993 essay "Mediasaurus". Crichton wrote that the New York Times and one commercial TV network would vanish within a decade and would be replaced by artificial-intelligence agents, skimming information and the news from news databases and composing front pages or broadcasts tailored to the interests and needs of individuals. Like [Michael] Shamberg's guerrilla revolution, Crichton's infotopia failed to arrive as promised.
There are a couple of points to pick Shafer up on – unlike video cameras, blogs can be published; you could argue Google News is approaching Crichton's vision – but he is right to be alert to blog talk that can verge on fetishisation and hyperbole. There is the potential for revolution, but none of us ever knows what the future holds.
