Personal blogging and modern journalism
Everyone knows that modern journalism is just a medium to diffuse the ideas of the companies' shareholders. Since I've started blogging and reading more blogs, I've come to rethink modern journalism and blogging, and even more after reading 1984.
In this post, I talk about my experience with blogging and my issues with modern journalism.
For me, personal blogs carry the seal of human-made, organic text. I started blogging because I wanted to write something that inspires people to read only when in a comfortable situation, and not something that be read while commuting, watching television, or worse, while seated on the toilet throne. I wanted people to set apart a time slot, sit comfortably with a hot drink, and enjoy reading one of my posts.
Nowadays, many blogs feel like desperate money-grabbing attempts. For instance, open the r/blogging subreddit (side note: use an alternative frontend to Reddit). Last time I did this, around half of the posts were about whether blogging could still generate money or how to maximise traffic. Many blogs I checked from there were bloated with ads, which really is the easy way to generate money even if your posts are crap.
I hate this. I write my blog for my own satisfaction, for my own pleasure of writing, and I read blogs for the pleasure of reading. A few weeks ago, I read a post about how the Internet felt in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the comments which really resonated with me was:
It was like a series of little isolated quirky villages rather than a few massive commercial cities like today.
This threw me back to my own early Internet era, with Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin. In those times, finding a cool website truly felt like a discovery. Today, we're submerged by too much information from too many websites, and I just feel like disconnecting. Except for blogs. Finding a cool personal blog still feels like a discovery. Knowing more about the author, exploring his personality and his activities. Emphatising and linking over similar experiences. It just feels like the old Internet, where people talked to each other.
Generative AI is kind of destroying this, and while I understand using AI to review posts, I just don't bother anymore with blogs that feel 99% AI-generated. After all, why should I bother reading something that nobody bothered to write? On this topic, I refer to Thiery Crouzet's recent posts analysing clanker-generated text with French authors [1] [2].
Modern digital journalism removes all the good sides I cited, and emphasizes further the bad sides: ads, newsletters, paid subscriptions, etc. On this topic, use RSS feeds as much as possible to subscribe to websites [3].
Digital journalism also kills accountability: what people dont realize about physical newspapers is that once it's printed, it can't be changed. The news is out there, and the government can't suppress it. With digital media,it can easily be altered, censored, deleted, and nobody would really know the difference. With my experience in academic research, I think that each blog post should be treated as a scientific article, not in the sense of waiting 2 years before publication, but in the sense that the author should be held accountable, and transparency and sourcing should be a must.
Note: The software Zotero can fix part of those problems: you can use it to read RSS feeds, and you can use it to save snapshots of webpages.
Moreover, and I will stop on this, modern journalism is plagued by right wing propaganda and fake news. A personal blog is the opposite: it serves no greater purpose than displaying a fragment of your personality. I promise this post is only Episode One, and that there will be another one with details and numbers on modern journalism, but for now, I only advise everyone to create his own blog and share it with friends and family.
Thank you for reading. Reach me for further discussion and updates!