Blogging - by Jill Walker Rettberg

During the 2003–2004 U.S. presidential election the professional press discovered blogs. While they were around for some time, given the role they were playing in the election, especially around the candidacy of Democrat Howard Dean, journalists marveled at these new amateur voices while, more darkly, fearing that they undermined both the authority and resource base of professionals. For example, the cover of The New York Times Magazine during the election featured veteran political journalists R.W. Apple and Jack Germond looking quizzically at the computer screen of a mischievous Ana Marie Cox of the blog Wonkette. As the arresting image made clear, a new generation had emerged, one that looked significantly different than the staid, rumpled dress-shirt professionals of journalism’s past. The implication was that with their laptops bloggers were seemingly upending the old print-bound, static way of delivering the news in the droll tones of objective authority. While the attendant article’s subtitle asks what the ‘‘guiltless gossips, splenetic spewers, sleepless geeks and all the rest of the laptop-toting, news-tip-happy Web loggers’’ (Klam, 2004) were actually changing, there was the widespread sense that something significant was afoot. What was novel during the 2003– 2004 electoral cycle had by 2007 become so much a part of the media landscape in the United States that journalists quoted blogs in front page stories and a conference of progressive bloggers hosted a primary debate among Democratic candidates. Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging goes a long way towards explaining both the widespread appeal and rapid adoption over the last decade of this new technical platform and an attendant set of communication practices. As Rettberg makes clear, blogs are much more than phenomena of electoral politics and journalism. Indeed, the political blogosphere is only a minor accompaniment to her main argument, which centers on how blogs are recasting the relationship between producers and consumers, expanding the range of voices in the public sphere, and facilitating the creation of on-line social networks. As such, blogs are part of a significant technical shift: ‘‘we have moved from a culture dominated by mass media, using one-to-many communication, to one where participatory media, using many-to-many communication, is becoming the norm’’ (p. 31). Through detailed analysis and the provision of Web-based resources that constitute a compelling how-to manual for would-be and even established bloggers, Rettberg considers both the history and implications of these changes with regard to how we communicate, socialize, and otherwise conduct our lives online.