21 Dec Person of the Year
I must say I was a bit taken aback by Time’s selection of “You” for Person of the Year Award. Here is how they put it in their cover story.
“… [L]ook at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes…. Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, … I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has the time and that energy and that passion?”
And then a few pages later in a story on blogging, there is this:
If you read through the arguments and Op-Eds over the past few years about the impact of Web amateurism, you’ll find that the debate keeps cycling back to two refrains: the impact of blogging on traditional journalism and the impact of Wikipedia on traditional scholarship. In both cases, a trained, institutionally accredited elite has been challenged by what the blogger Glenn Reynolds called an “army of Davids,” with much triumphalism, derision and defensiveness on both sides.
This is a perfectly legitimate debate to have, since bloggers and Wikipedians are likely to do some things better than their professional equivalents and some things much worse, and we may as well figure out which is which. The problem with spending so much time hashing out these issues is that it overstates the importance of amateur journalism and encyclopedia authoring in the vast marketplace of ideas that the Web has opened up. The fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It’s working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts.
Those two snippets I think say it all about successful blogging, at least successful law blogging. Passion and expertise. Law blogging at its best is a collection of individuals with a fair degree of expertise discussing a subject they are passionate about and filling a gaping hole left by mainstream information outlets. We are not competing with maintstream media. We complement them. We are reaching a niche market that has long been ignored by them. If the academic life is about selling your wares in the marketplace of ideas, then law bloggers may be seen as particularly successful intellectual entrepreneurs in a new corner of the market.
If you look at the great law blogs like SCOTUSBlog or How Appealing or Concurring Opinions, or consider any number of specialty law blogs like Opinio Juris or Sentencing Law and Policy, they all display the common feature of passionate and expert communicators reaching a specialty niche market ignored by mainstream media.
Having said all that, I don’t think that law blogs are really that important. They are not genuinely creating community are they? One dinner in San Diego with colleagues creates more community and good will for me than a month of law blogging. Sure law blogs are filling gaps, reaching out to defined groups, and providing an opportunity to share new and interesting stories. Sure, sometimes law blogs can be quite substantive, and we try fairly hard here at Opinio Juris to tilt in that direction. But often law blogs offer no more than the latest news clip for people who care about a particular subject. Something short and quick with your morning coffee. But not much more than that.
Blogging may be a “massive social experiment” in a “new digital democracy” in which we work for nothing and beat the pros at their own game. But then again, maybe not. I think we should have no illusions about beating mainstream media at their own game. We’re not an army of Davids trying to slay Goliath. Sounds inspiring, but I rather doubt it. More like a gardener sowing a neglected patch of ground who, after a season, discovers to his delight that he has a nice little garden.
Interestingly I was speaking about this with some past students recently and they felt that law blogging created a community between professors and students, where more informal and non-judgmental discussion could be engaged in (incl. criticising a professor’s conclusion on something). So perhaps it’s a different kind of community building?