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Dick Pountain/21 July 2008 11:35/Idealog 168

You may have noticed that I'm not among the PC Pro contributors who runs a blog on the magazine's website, and may wonder (or not) why that is. I was offered a blog but churlishly turned it down, largely because this column completely satisfies my urge to run off at the mouth each month, and finding 900 words to fill it is about all I'm up to nowadays. Does this mean that I'm a luddite, an anti-democrat, a grouch, or an elitist? Very possibly a touch of all four.

That doesn't mean that I hate blogs and bloggers, nor would I wish to see blogging disappear. It's more that I'm temperamentally unsuited to being a blogger because I no longer care to argue as a blood-sport. In my youth I was a fiery demagogue and acid-spitting ironist who feared a quarrel with no-one, but the charm of that stance has steadily worn off. It's not, I hope, that I've turned into a preacher who's only interested in peddling my own views, but it is true that I only like to argue with people who share sufficient background to make discussion productive. In my experience that's not what you get in most blogs and forums, where discussion invariably gets hijacked by trolls and flamers and turned into the verbal equivalent of one of those bar-room brawls in an old John Wayne movie. I'll also confess that, like Doctor Johnson, I like to get paid for what I write, both as a sort of validation and to defend writing as a profession rather than a hobby.

Had I not already reached this conclusion, reading the Guardian Online's "Comment is Free" section over the last couple of years would have kicked it into me pretty quickly. The constant spectacle of thoughtful and researched articles by the likes of Tim Garton Ash and Polly Toynbee having a long tail of drivel and personal abuse appended to them, like those yucky strings of poo sometimes seen dangling from a goldfish, is so demeaning that I wonder anyone continues to write for the paper (masochism, saintly detachment, to pay the mortgage?)  Not all blogs are of this sort of course, and many news blogs, particularly in the USA, have become serious information sources.

The basic problem is one of unequal distribution - of knowledge, information and writing ability. This unequal distribution has been with us for centuries and is partly inherent in the human condition. Parents know more about the world than little children and have to transfer some of that knowledge, that is teach then stuff. Some people devote huge parts of their life to learning one special skill, like a musical instrument, or are born better equipped for, say, the high jump. They can teach these skills to other people. Significantly, in sport nobody ever gripes about elitism: if Lewis Hamilton really is a better driver than everyone else, people want him to flaunt it and to win. In the sphere of writing alone has the internet induced this faux-egalitarian mass hallucination that everyone is a writer and what they all have to say is equally interesting, relevant and true. You might say the net is doing the same thing to video, but three-minute YouTube clips are just savoury snacks that no-one really prefers to Hollywood blockbusters in quite the same way they will accept an ill-informed blog rant over the words of some internationally-respected commentator. 

Writing skill is as unevenly distributed as any other and can be taught like any other if you go to school and listen to teacher. Now the vast majority of blogs are wholly private affairs, expressions of their authors own opinions and feelings, like diaries but with the advantage of sharing with other people. They can indeed be a good way to learn to write, have your efforts appraised and criticised, even perhaps to go on and become a professional. What most of them do not do is spend any time or money researching or validating their contents, and there's where the sinister part comes in. Publishers, being straightforward capitalists, have a duty to maximise their profits, and one way is to pay writers less or pay fewer writers. To them the blogosphere is starting to look like a huge open-cast mine of free copy, and the fact that it's neither researched nor necessarily true is rather beside the point: that just means they can fire the research department too.

The ultra-democratic blogging ideal merely feeds this populist, penny-pinching tendency of publishers to give readers what they want, essentially by having them talk to themselves. Telling people what they don't want to hear is just too expensive. Populist bloggers are very often shameless bullies who retaliate to any criticism with personal jibes and accusations of elitism, claiming that being a "paid hack" automatically corrupts and invalidates the opinion of a critic. Lacking any quality control mechanism blogs easily sink into a Hobbesian state of nature, rule by the loudest and the nastiest. They are ultimately parasitical on the (mostly paid-for) research and skills of professional "elitists" for their content, and my fear is that we'll only learn this after the real stuff has dried up and the drivel is overflowing. But I have nothing against blogs.