So social media requires real people. That’s what Fred Wilson says in response to Om about turning GigaOM into a business.
Disclosure: I am a real person. But Fred doesn’t know me. And like many GigaOM readers and commenters, he doesn’t see me as a person. The flip side of trolling commenters who feel deindividuated themselves is that they deindividuate the people they harass and abuse. I’m not saying Fred is a troll. I am saying that it’s a natural tendency to limit exactly who we grant personhood and individuality too.
The practice of journalism encourages the deindividuation of journalists too, because the person behind the reporting is supposed to disappear into objective observation, discussions with experts, and covering all sides of the story. Now, with professionalized blogging, we have to figure out just where the blogger fits in as a person.
I cover the social web because it’s about real people. If you read my posts over time and consider them not as some flow of talk bought by PR and advertising and a pro-blogging gig but rather look underneath for the philosophy — and the person — that holds it all together you’ll see it’s about the human element, looking to express itself authentically, looking to connect. That’s what my book is about too. That’s what I’m about.
Fred isn’t the only blogger who thinks his approach is superior to GigaOM’s. Josh Bernoff says GigaOM suffers from shiny object syndrome and is part of the “frenzied cult of immediacy” while portraying his own intellectual efforts as deep and thoughtful.
While it’s true I do cover the latest techmeme news here and there, that’s not why I cover Web 2.0 for GigaOM. If Om wanted someone to jump on every press release, every techmeme pile-on, every Facebook or Google controversy, he knows he’d have to hire someone else.
Josh praises himself for covering Web 2.0 from the enterprise perspective, but he’s far from the only one looking into that. The reason I covered Oracle’s Web 2.0 efforts was because I thought they were great evidence of the diffusion of web 2.0 thinking into the enterprise at the level we’d expect to see it — driven by individual, real people. One commenter said it wasn’t news. But it’s news on my beat: the social web revolution.
I haven’t totally figured out how to be myself while covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM. It’s far easier to be myself on Web Worker Daily, where the expectations for the site were largely unformed when I arrived. I don’t think, however, that an advertising-supported group blog like GigaOM necessarily means that the people involved disappear under a corporate veneer. And it doesn’t mean that deep thinking disappears either.
Om has been very clear with me that he wants me to be myself and to use my own voice. To the extent that I haven’t been doing that, it’s because I’m trying to fit myself into what I think a journalist should be, and also because I’m still experimenting (and will always be experimenting) with how best to bring information, insight, and interaction to blogging.
5 Comments
Anne - you make some very good points. In my personal blog, I also struggle with how much to let the “real” me out. Granted, I’m slightly paranoid, so I’m always afraid that someone will try to steal my identity!
But you’re probably in a tougher position - being a reporter, who’s a blogger, who’s trying to find the balance of “news” and “opinion”, right?
Tor me, the exciting part about this blogging thing is the experimentation to find my voice. And through that process, my readers get to see me grow, and in way, become more vested in me as a person.
In the end, THAT makes social media about real people.
Anne, for what it is worth, I do like reading your articles, regardless where you blog at. I think that the way the blogging world organises itself it is sorta hard for an individual blogger to be noted. In the end that is what it is about, someone reading your stuff and liking or disliking it (but interacting with you about it). Techmeme leaderboards rule out this possibility because the way it works the “professional” bloggers will remain on top. It creates a sterile, vacuum environment in which each blogger brings same the “exclusive news”. By skipping past the scoops and looking into the blog posts of people that analyse trends or events and interact with their readers we find new ideas and inspiration. There is still hope for us all. Lots of great things to read and write about. Keep up the good work!
Anne, you are definitely a good blogger. There’s no question about that.
But, take a second and look at it from another standpoint. Imagine if someone else started writing 25% of the posts here. All of the people who it took a lot of time to develop a sort of trust with you suddenly get jilted by an intruder who they don’t know at all.
They don’t know the new person.
They don’t know their viewpoints and how those unique views flavor the posts.
They don’t know their credentials.
Suddenly the personal connection becomes less personal. It’s not to say that the new writers are bad. They may be good, but that’s not the point. They just don’t know them and it’s going to take time to develop a certain trust.
The point is that we, the reader, don’t have the personal connection and trust with the new blogger that took time to develop with the original blogger. That’s a problem.
Blogs are not magazines. They are almost like one on one conversations with the author. If you want to run a blog with a newsroom feel to sell the most ads you might as well run a portal instead. Do it NYTimes.com style or something.
That is what happened to Giga-Om IMHO. What was a conversation in my living room with Om, a guy “I know” from years of reading and great conversations, turned into a cold business mixer with people I don’t know in a nightclub that’s unfamiliar.
Jerry: I can see your point and I can see where Fred’s coming from too.
Where I differ is that Fred implied that there was no way of relating to the writers on the blog as real people. I think that’s his decision, not forced by the transformation from a single-person to a group blog.
“A cold business mixer with people I don’t know in a nightclub that’s unfamiliar”:
There are only a few writers on the site other than Om. So it’s more like a cocktail party where you have the chance to converse with some new people — people Om invited specifically, not just a crowd of people that heard of a hot new hangout.
Thanks for your comment.
Hi Anne,
Social media is at an exciting inflection point. Many of the traditional media outlets have lost credibility and the art of insight and reporting that insight has gone by the wayside. Individual blogs have recaptured much of that. But as these new clusters of rich talent come together, new “brands” are created and as some of these other comments indicate, the perception is of GigaOm the media property. That properties quality will replace *some* of that individualism and still be heads above many of the traditional media space. From a software vendor’s perspective, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to meet with newspaper reporters who whip out a slobby blog in lieu of taking the time to be thoughtful.
Scaling anything is hard, but it’s the right fight to have. We’ve gone through much of the same thing as our company has grown from a tight group of interpersonal relationships to a bigger company. That said, we’re dedicated to our vision and value, as it sounds like you and Om are with what you’re building.
Keep up the great work, setting the new stage for media.
Cheers,
Sam
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[...] topics for us, has a very thoughtful follow-up to my post about teams and individual bloggers on on her personal blog. “It’s a natural tendency to limit exactly who we grant personhood and individuality [...]
[...] Anne wrote about their teams ( Om: http://gigaom.com/2007/11/21/the-team-is-people-too and Anne: http://www.annezelenka.com/2007/11/on-covering-web-20-for-gigaom ). [...]