Over at Black Belt Dojo, Sue has an interesting post about a big flare up in the comments to a blog on The Guardian travel site. She asks "Is this what we're afraid of?" with respect to unleashing social media in organisations. Mark Mazza made an insightful comment in reply about what the psychology of the "troublemakers" in this case might be.
That got me thinking...
What are the collective frustrations about "big media bloggers" that might lead to the kind of swarming, vitriolic responses that we occasionally see unleashed by the commenting public?
It strikes me that in part, blogging is about self-expression, not just in the sense of "here I am, this is me" but also "this is what I think about important issues in and around my life." When I was younger, there were no blogs and many thoughts I might have had about politics, economics etc. really had nowhere much to go. Newspaper letter pages were a tiny and well guarded resource. Yes, there are always deep conversations with good friends, but in a busy life, there's never enough of those.
Enter the blog, all of a sudden, insights can be pushed out. So many people prognosticated about important issues like Iraq and the toxic lending typified by the sub-prime debacle. And yet, as time passes, it becomes ever more apparent that however insightful these people were, very few of them gain much "blogging stardom" from it. And the same goes across all sorts of fields, from celebrity gossip to rugby commentary. The vast majority of ability to shape opinion and make a living writing accrue to those within big media institutions.
Now, that's not exactly news to anyone as such. All the same, the act of blogging and commenting rather lays the power relations out for everyone to see. Thus, I think part of the vitriol is not just "jealousy" in the sense of "they have a fun, easy life and I don't" but an acute awareness that for all the hype about the democratising power of blogs, the keys to the castle remain pretty much where they always have been.
Why might this matter for corporate blogging? I just wonder if in some organisations at least, the surfacing of this distinction between the powerful and the less so might need some extra thought to manage.
It can be said that Internal Communications has always existed in part to manage this kind of tension and it's not really a new problem. IC departments often walk a tightrope between encouraging greater communication from the bottom to the top and dealing with the reality that very often the top isn't listening that hard. However, the veneer of democracy that social media tend to present might heighten the disillusionment when the "democratic deficit" is made raw in a blog exchange.
Is this insurmountable? I don't think so, but it needs some thinking about. It also connects to my next post, on the professionalisation project for Internal Communications.
1 comment:
Hi Indy,
Very interesting point. I've just been trawling through some responses to the Max Gogarty blog on Technorati - see my comment over on the Dojo, but wonder if a couple of points from the blogs I've quoted are relevant to your piece here.
Badger Gravling at The Way of The Web gives the Guardian credit for writing a piece on the value of the debate, and of participation. But in that same piece, they also reinforce their position of power by referring to 'shepherding refinement into this new partnership.' Graveling responds by pointing out that the commenters don't need 'shepherding', thanks very much, they just need to know their comments matter.
Hunting around Adam Tinworth's blog, One Man and His Blog, I found a piece where he talks about journalists who blog. As he puts it,"journalists are being forced into blogging and link-building because, in the age of Google, isolated content might as well not exist. The problem is that, all too often, both the people making the decisions and those implementing it don't really understand what they're doing. They haven't been blogging long, if they have at all, and they certainly haven't been reading blogs. Usually, they've been too busy on the treadmill of publishing magazines. They're used to being big fish. Now they're small fish in a much larger, much more dangerous and, fundamentally, much more interesting pond. And that's hard for them - especially when, somewhere in their heads, they're still big fish."
Interesting perspectives. One seems to be saying "I know you're still the big fish with the power, but don't try and manage this the same as you've traditionally controlled everything else. Just let us have the conversation, respond to us, and show that you take our comments seriously."
The other one (I think!) seems to be saying "You're not such a big fish anymore. You don't have all the power you used to have. The world has moved on, and it won't work for you to try hanging on to your old rules when the game has changed. We're all equals now." (Some mixed metaphors there I think, but you get the picture!)
Reminds me of that quote from Animal Farm, which I'm about to get wrong, but went along the lines of "all animals are equal. But some are more equal than others."
Sue
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