This happens to me, but since all the blogs I read are about ethnic music and puffy kittens, I'll be totally sick hearing about a recently discovered site that offers rips of 6 different tapes of '80s berber music / a photo of a cat wearing a dollar sign necklace. WITHIN MINUTES.

I didn't have anything to add, intellectually, I mostly just wanted to brag that I enjoy my Bloglines more than you due to my superior interests.

Just as a matter of public record, at least some of the people running the SDs have already left "legitimate" paying jobs. And dare I accuse one Gawker editor of leaving his 20-something years behind either recently or imminently. They're in it for the love of snark, and, as one told me, "to be part of something exciting."

Do you think there's any chance the market might lose interest in the SDs as the transitive nature of their finds is exposed? Can we leave Gawker Media's lackeys at the water cooler and deal with our music and other art in other ways?

It frustrates me almost every day how the art promoted by the bigger sites is this kind of brief nyuck-inducing ironic burning man type stuff. But on the other hand, there are now literally millions of people showcasing their private work they couldn't afford to distribute (or noone would pay them for) before the internet. If you have any interest in drawing, for example, check out drawn.ca for quality-based links every damn day of the week.

But it's a double-edged sword: more people see your work in a flash, but that reduces your actual chance of cultural importance.

Ah, but I think this very phenomenon is self-defeating. The same information overload that you're predicting will trivialise and "fad-ise" new culture, to coin a phrase, will lead people to eventually turn off the source of the overload - the blogs themselves.

As the blogging fad has taken off, I also considered it a kind of duty to stay on top of things - find all the "cool" and intelligent blogs and try and keep up with what they said. But after a while, what seemed like part of the necessary information diet for any member of the "digirati" stopped seeming scintillating and stimulating and edifying, and started seeming more like a collosal waste of time. Now I've removed almost all of my automated feeds - which carried with them a kind of subtle compulsion to read everything they said - and things seem much more manageable.

I think that most people will eventually do the same, pick just a few "trusted" blogs/sources, and rely on them.

Another point is that despite the appearance, that the whole world is following along with all these blogs you mention, the fact is that less than one percent of the world's population is involved with blogging, so even if every blogger on earth becomes jaded with your culture product, you've still got over 99% of the people to reach out to. The diverse and splintered nature of the "blogosphere" should also be a comfort - I've been on the net since 1993, derive most of my income from internet-related business, and yet I've never heard of any of those supposedly popular sites you mentioned.

A quick check of alexa confirms that gawker is less popular than even fark.com. In other words, who cares?

Your essay would hold more water if weblogs (I hate the word blog) were the only way information is disseminated in a society.

It does not prevent the creative people from being creative (after all, shouldn't a band perform the music because they want to, not because they have a buzz on a bunch of websites)?

Nor does it unify how people disseminate information. Believe it or not, people still like to talk about things and maintain unique interests. Often, these conversations overlap into discussions of "Oh hey did you hear/see this?". If they have, you can discuss its merits, if they haven't, you can introduce them and discuss their merits.

Double edged sword, no way man - it's not a choice between cultural importance and a niche blog, it's a choice between no recognition at all and a niche blog. The annointed still get theirs, but the rest of us get to get their stuff out there on our own terms.

In terms of the market for a niche blog, the Wired article about the long tail seems to say niches are as valuable as the over-hyped big initial debut sales of the Strokes, etc. The obscure/niche item is more valuable to the people that will enjoy it, they will pay more to get it because of its scarcity. I think connoisseurship will out. And I would add that bloglines feeds that get over 50 entries a day are low quality indeed. I started with Engadget and Digg, and dumped both. I had Crooks and Liars (a political Schadenfreude Daily) and dumped it too. However I have kept Marxy and Momus as the volume is much less than 55 entries a day ;-} kiss, kiss!

I've got to say that I too find the tail chasing of the weblog "elite" to be rather self defeating in the long run. Actually I look forward to folks like Cory & Xeni et. al. becoming irrelivant outside an ever shrinking echo chamber. If the SD/Boingboing types choke on their own bile, thats fine with me.

I have found some regularly updated websites that cater to my niche interests, but fortunately for me my niches are still niche enough and focused on relatively "uncool" old things that I dont have much worry that they will die of overexposure. Also I read websites the old fashioned way, in a browser.

the fact is that less than one percent of the world's population is involved with blogging

Right, but tradtionally WAY LESS than 1% of the world has been involved in deciding what can become a candidate to enter the "common culture." And for a long time, "pop culture" was primarily an Anglo conception. Blogs have a proportional power greater than 1% - their readers are sometimes influential and have a greater sway down the food chain.

Your essay would hold more water if weblogs (I hate the word blog) were the only way information is disseminated in a society.

No, but again, they introduce a lot of content ideas to those people who provide content for other media sources. I don't think it's so crazy to think that TV news content and magazine content are being affected by the speed of blog info dissemination. It's not like blogs are running at a totally different speed in a alternative parallel world. They all form a network of knowledge.

It does not prevent the creative people from being creative.

No, but it devalues their creative work and makes long-term success very unlikely. Blogs may be good for making personal fulfillment the ONLY incentive for creative activity.

Blogs have a proportional power greater than 1%
Lol .. you keep telling yourself that, and the masses will continue buying their Jessica Simpson CDs, and then everybody's happy.

But that's not unrelated; the masses are less likely to latch on to "under the surface" culture because it all lacks authority coming into the mainstream arena. 120 Minutes had a much better chance of breaking Alternative bands in the 90s than Pitchfork because it was a slower medium, more centralized, and more organized.

Blogs may be good for making personal fulfillment the ONLY incentive for creative activity.

Isn't that one of the few reasons people make art? The art is for the artist as his expression.

Personal websites devoted to specific content have existed for quite sometime among larger content providers on the internet. Blogging has only chabged the ease qat which these sites are updated.

I have more to add but writing this from a cell phone does not allow the same amount of creative control.

^ but on the other hand they are good for making "15 minutes of fame" the other ONLY incentive for pseudo-creative activity... and let's face it, some (if not most) of the stuff you see on boingboing (or any other site alike) can hardly be called a product of 'creative activity' :/ (yeat i'm guilty of continuously re-visiting such sites as boing-boing and flabber :p )

I am curious to see whether the continuance of this phenomena spells the death of new entries to the cultural canon

Of course whats interesting is that you see the failure/inability of the bloggers to canonize cultural items and trends as the death of canonization. when in reality its only a reflection of the limited power of bloggers and the blogging 'class'.

Not only are blogs are a new and limited media (not widely read) they are numerous and polyvocal, cultural canonization requires a certain critical consensual mass, and a certain infrastructure is necessary to bring about that critical mass and canonize trends (school systems, media networks) which blogs are not currently influential enough to do. (a school system does a much better job inculcating a love/hate for moby dick than any number of blogs can do for the arctic monkeys). Equally, the blogs you cite are mostly focused not on mere enjoyment of culture, but foremost on social differention. the hipster 'class' (which dont get me wrong here, has all the demographic elements of a canon creating body in current moment- young, wealthy, white, media savvy, well connected- ie. the ideal target market), maybe so focused on differentiation that they've removed themselves from the canon-making equation. i mean we could get all deluezian on this and read the rapidly connecting/disconnecting constant focus on the new and being ever more 'cutting edge' and 'hip' as the form of capitol par excellance, and i would argue against you that the turn towards the 60's and the past in general as not so much a turn towards 'the more authentic-deeper culture' of that time, but rather that elements from that culture are being reincorporated as a means of differentiation. Hipsters arent turning towards a more 'real' culture for its realness, their turning towards it to declare their difference.

equally, even though blogs may exert more power than one would grant them based on pure readership demographics, i might suggest that a number of these cultural creatives are not in purely creative industries, but rather intermediary ones. The vast majority of these cultural creatives are not simply artists- but are designers, advertisers, magazine writers, etc. while these intermediary institutions are important to the creation of cultural canon, they are really just intermediaries for the real movers and shakers of contempory culture- the advertising/commercial industries.

the cultural canon of the now is certainly not the arctic monkeys, but it certainly still is nike, adidas, the golden arches, the american government, family/cultural networks/the church etc, and these institutions still have a far far greater hold on the construction and creation of cultural canon than any blogs, or even blogs as a whole do.

I gotta call shenanigans. You act as though blogs created the strokes and artic monkeys, and that two contemporary groups failing to become canon implies something about the impact of blogs. By this logic, were Rolling Stone and Spin failed media ideologies in the nineties since no one much remembers Len or Marcy Playground? Did the nineties or eighties really create canonical music, or just a haze of semi-similar bands that we can bunch together and spin for ironic value now?

Blogging, born with techies but raised by LiveJournal writers have indeed created contemporary canon to some degree. Think "emo", DIY in the new millenium sense. But more importantly, think "blogging" and newsfeeds. Continuous semi-live news. Reading sometimes well thought-out essays, and smirking at the next 5 minutes of culture has become the new "sitting at your desk playing solitaire when no one's looking".

While I'm at it, if Pitchfork is a blog, so is cnn.com.

If it makes you happy, take out the word "blog" and replace it with "high-paced information diffusion." The pace of all media has greatly increased in the last decade.

Think about it this way: how many records does Pitchfork review a month in daily updates compared to Rolling Stone's monthly edition? Things move faster now.

I hope I am not antagonizing you by constantly replying, I just find this metacriticism interesting. I am certainly going to pick up this book by Caves on creative industries, since I am skeptical on how an economist weighs in on social phenomena.

Back on track though,

First of all, a lot of today's entertainment is not even "creative goods" but bits of novel information and trivia passed around on blogs. That being said, many musicians and artists are introduced through the same blog medium, and their entire existence generally becomes quantified within a similar information packet.

We have a frame of reference here again that even though blogs are not the only means of communication, and they do accelerate the means of other media. However, other users have mentioned the outliers (or rather, the majority) outside this fast-paced information circle jerk.

To these people, the latest thing might become more substantive or fun. These people are away from these fast paced methods of communication for personal or social reasons. They learn about things through traditional means or word of mouth.

How do they do it, how do they not get caught up in the latest thing some music website posts up about some band from some place that no one cares about until now because they are The Next Big Thing Listen to These Guys So You Can Hate Them Before Anyone Else Has Heard of Them(tm)?

They ignore it. The best way to slow down information reception is to ignore it, or rather, selectively filter the things you care to put your interest toward. The more people who ignore "novel information", the slower it disseminates. There are many reasons for ignoring this information which I hope to not have to list, but I don't find it that novel.

An interesting discussion that pinpoints issues that I have been trying to put my finger on for a while now. I am also going to order Caves' book and would like to commend you on another worthwhile post. I read your column on a regular basis (from my office here in France) and find it very rewarding !

I don't necessarily disagree that eras became trends became fads, became microfads. See ytmnd.com for the most instant and disposable culture available.

In fact, if you wanted it anymore instantaneous and ephemeral, you'd have only one choice: talking directly to human beings. Regular human interaction and the spoken word are essentially destroyed in their very expression. If anything, blogging equals the lightness and humanity of conversation plus the permanence of 1s and 0s.
That our publishing regime more and more resembles the default mode of communication can't really be such a bad thing for the culture.

Sure, whatever cultural heat was created by boing boing's endless fascination with homemade katamari damacy paraphernalia disipates about 4 hours after the post, but TV didn't used to have reruns either. I'd presume that not many people were talking about the episode of dragnet that had aired 4 weeks prior, nor reading the newspapers from one week prior.
It's that everything has become permanent that makes it all so interchangeable. Contemporary culture has to compete with reissue after reissue of old tv shows, movies, and albums. Books stay in print longer, there are more magazines than ever, choices abound because they aren't being destroyed instantly... even the metabloggers' linked sites persist after the heat has worn off, meaning that they may well be linked again in 2 years. As much as the new dissemination means that nothing ever comes "in", it also means that things never go out.

Just flick the lightswitch on and off. On and off. Doorknobs are fun too; even if your name appears on one.

nate said It's that everything has become permanent that makes it all so interchangeable

Interesting. That does a bit to explain how I percieve discussion of late 70s/earl 80s reggae 7" records as being just as "current" and some folks would about insert band name here. In the 90s thousands of long tail type CD compilations were issued of back catalog/OOP music and lots of previously unavailable (except to highly specialized collectors) music became available to the masses. Perhaps the longer term side effect of the regularly updated websites will be similar.

There is a fairly constant cross cultural need for the "new". Perhaps the "new" really doesn't really need to be newly created so much as "I didnt know about this before".

In terms of the speed of dissemination, of course things are faster now, but I wonder about the speed of information consumption. I'd venture that there are plenty of information consumers who like myself do not have time to catch up on things every day, but every once in a while, go to a selection of sites to catch up on the "new". If I think about it, my speed of web catch up is not to different from magazine reading, that is if magazines I cared about came out twice a month.

Perhaps there is a pyrimid type distribution of speed of information consumption by numbers of consumers. I really doubt that many people are at the top in terms of high rates of consumption. Note that I'm not talking about a bell curve type distrubution which would include people who dont consume, but specifically about the distribution of the rate of consumption amongst those who regularly consume information on the web/print/etc.

A slight addendum to my last post:

One signifigant difference concering long tail re-issue of old material or keeping books in print longer vs agregator sites linking to small websites is that there is a much higher chance that a linked to site will dissapear than a media item will become completely unavailable.

Thanks to search engines, ebay and specialist used goods shops, I stand a much higher chance of finding a book or recording that is not available mass market than I do of seeing a website linked on boingboing two years ago.

Someone needs to write an article about youtube/googlevideo/et al called "It's Wayne's World; we just live in it."

Have you seen the Harper's article by the guy who invented flash mobs? It seems to be addressing the same questions you raise here:

http://harpers.org/MyCrowd.html

As a PR flack, I take great delight in digesting the Schadenfreude dailies along with the WSJ, NYT, and Chronicle of Higher Education each morning. It helps me gulp down my requisite two cups of coffee...or maybe it's just the snarkiness of Defamer and What Would Tyler Durden Do?

Hmmm.

No trackbacks? Wie schade, I've linked to this here,
http://austlit.typepad.com/cfn/2006/05/pope_steps_down.html