Center for Citizen Media

It's too soon to tell for sure, but I don't like the idea of Academia getting involved in blogging. Like all these conferences where prominent bloggers get together in L.A. New York, Washington, Boston or San Francisco and present papers to each other, I wonder what they hope to accomplish other than establish themselves as authorities on the phenomenon. I don't trust the idea that I need to go to Berkeley for guidance on blogging.

I have nothing against Dan Gillmor. I don't know him personally, but he seems like a perfectly good guy. Nevertheless, I worry that projects that start up "to study, encourage and help enable" a new thing in the world will end up co-opting it. The rest of the media goes to the new Institute to get information, and bloggers like me who aren't connected to the coastal Establishments and the academic networks will be ignored or marginalized. I might be wrong, but if blogging is truly "emergent" it doesn't need any guidance, encouragement or enabling. It will find its own course. I would hate it if blogging were to become the new MSM.

Another concern I have is that I and other rural bloggers not directly in contact with primary news sources, who only comment on news, will be seen as quaint, odd or irrelevant. I'm not a self-promoter. Whenever I try, I find it intimidates me. I don't want to be an authority, just a voice. I'm very aware of my limitations. Sometimes I post things, and then learn that I didn't understand what was going on completely. I did that once about a post by Jay Rosen. By the time he contacted me about my initial post, I had caught it and corrected it, fortunately. I was actually quite amazed to learn that he had read my comments. Ah, the power of Technorati, Memeorandum and Google.

If they want to help bloggers, they could encourage better searching tools. I'm somewhere on the level of a liver fluke in N. Z. Bear's ecosystem, but I don't plan on making a living by blogging. I'd like to see something along the lines of Memeorandum with a little broader reach to highlight bloggers who have something interesting to say, but don't get 20,000 hits a day.

I just hope that "Citizen Media" doesn't end up sounding like The Democratic People's Republic.