Is Blogging Really The Future?

Just as I resign myself to not being a blogger - instead focusing on writing - I read this at : Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool.

Gates is late. Microsoft is late. There's a lot of people who blog all over the world. Is it the fault of Microsoft that, once again, they are late? Not really. Nobody really expected weblogs to become as popular as they are. Some claim that they knew, but this was mainly a belief - not backed by anything tangible. The fact that they were right shows that they recognized a rising star.

Yet every revolution carries with it the seeds of it's own destruction. I am not saying that all is gloom and doom when it comes to weblogs - to the contrary, there are many brilliant and original minds out in the world who have substantial things to write about what they perceive. These people are the people who add to the world, and would add to the world even without this technology. Weblogs simply amplify what they have to say - and allows like minds to work together and develop ideas.

Ideas are intangible. The world is full of explorers; and yet our physical world has been explored as much as physically possible. So many people who are explorers find themselves exploring the abstract, exploring ideas and ways of looking at things, and looking at ideas in much the same way that explorers during the 1400s and 1500s explored the globe in wooden ships with sails. The most famous of these explorers, Christopher Columbus, gained an accidental fame through finding other things when looking for a route to India - going the wrong way.

This was a mistake, and yet look what the mistake was: discovering the Caribbean and the Americas. Though the descendants of Native Americans, slaves and indentured servants may not look back fondly upon these discoveries, everyone does seem to agree that this was progress in some way - and the diseases, be they physical or ideological (slavery) were symptoms of society carried forward into the New World. It's unfortunate that some of these things persist.

But, the discovery was a very important thing for people all over the world. It stretched the perception of the known world. Good things came of it, and bad things came of it. Such is the mark of progress.

"The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race." -- Don Marquis (1878 - 1937)

And I shall add to this quote with one other:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)

An interesting train of thought, which I shall be exploring more in detail in the online book I am working on starting (never underestimate the work of combining ideas!). Weblogs, as they are, have stretched the very fabric of the internet, and the very way in which we look at things - from political campaigns (such as the present Presidential Election in the United States), to simple customer service.

The individual now has a voice which can bypass the traditional media of newspapers - or work in tandem. It's refreshing that many forms of traditional media are embracing weblogs and other such media. Why they are doing this could be said to be along the lines of Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote, yet the bottom line remains the bottom line. We cannot speak about the value of information and opinion - human thought - without dispensing with the traditional media. Traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television have survived changes in technology and more importantly, perception of society. They have done this by adapting. Darwin probably would have a lot of interesting things to say about this were he alive today, and interested in business as he was in nature.

And Weblogs have added to the world; they have allowed a correspondent in Iraq give a ground view of what life was like during the 2003 Iraq War. They have allowed discussion of September 11th, the day when the United States and the rest of the world was dealt a severe blow. They have allowed disseminating valuable information, to speaking of the Changing World.

This progress, this ability to share our ideas and concepts with one another, is marred by one thing - and it's the same thing which has consistently marred everything mankind has done: overall, we are not very good at meaningful communication, though we herald ourselves as the best communicators on the planet. Yet even above the noise of the capricious and extraneous blogs, we find things of worth within the noise. A capricious blog can unlock ideas that have been dormant, and an extraneous blog is something that may suffer it's 15 microseconds of fame on the internet. The advent of copyright licensing which permits easy sharing allows us to spread valuable information more easily and quickly.

So Microsoft is onto something. But they are late, and despite what their marketers may say now or in the future, blogging is not a technology of their own. It is a technology of the international commons, where we assist each other and work together, and sometimes disagree vehemently with each other. It's discussion where there was once monlogue.

It's a chance for us to talk back. For businesses, this is of questionable value - it can be very damaging. Yet for society, it's a boon that many advocates of democracy in the past would have not only endorsed, but probably used. Imagine the Founding Fathers of the United States with weblogs.

I worry that perhaps the use of weblogs for completely business purposes will overwhelm our world, and yet I am invigorated by the fresh ideas which transcend the weblog technology itself. Again, it is up to mankind to make the best use of the technology, and that means we have to communicate.