I have not read Hugh Hewitt’s blog book. It is one of many blog books available and it is marketed to the US religious and churched audience.
Stand to Reason takes a look at Hewitt’s premise.
Hugh makes the case in his book that the information revolution taking place via the web is akin to the information revolution that allowed the Reformation to change the world. The original Reformation was fueled by the public’s access to published material; the new information reformation allows the public to be publishers, information-producers. Blogs are becoming the new public square, a way to engage others and share ideas and information. Christianity has always adjusted and made use of new forms of communication to proclaim the Gospel message. Since Stand to Reason’s mission is to train Christian ambassadors to be winsome attractive ambassadors for Christ, we finally began to see the value of blogging to be ambassadors and to model good ambassador habits. Blogging equals influence. An individual blogger’s sphere of influence may be small or global, but it’s influence.
Everyone has a reason to blog because the information is being produced whether or not you follow it. Ministries, business, schools should be aware of what’s being said of them on the web. Recent examples (Rathergate and Easongate) have demonstrated the power of the blogs to report and disseminate information, so it’s best to get ahead of the curve, control your own message, and develop a defensive strategy for negative stories that may pop up on the web.
via Dialogue: Breaking the Bubble
Blogging is going to keep evolving. The difficulty I have is in over-enthusiasm (I have been guilty of it myself). It’s a fun meduim and it takes awhile to adjust, find others and get a feel for what is going on. Overkill and over-hyping is going on all the time.
The Slate article looks at over-kill. Jack Shafer starts out with the excitement and dazzle of video cameras 33 years ago, and how they would change main stream media. Then came the internet and use-threads.
Now it’s blogs.
Blog movers and shakers were at a conference Shafer attended and were discussing how major media was/wasn’t adapting to the power of the blog.
Despite all the blogger preening, none of the attending representatives of the “dinosaur” media—Jim Kennedy of the Associated Press, Jill Abramson of the New York Times, and Rick Kaplan of MSNBC TV—seemed hostile to or threatened by blogs. Kaplan (rightly) boasted about the proliferation of MSNBC blogs, including Hardblogger and Keith Olbermann’s Bloggermann. (See also Dan Abrams’ Sidebar and Joe Scarborough’s Congressman Joe.) His network ran something like 19,000 video clips by citizens from the tsunami front and invites viewers to contribute to its Citizen Journalist Report page.
When the Times’ Abramson asked rhetorically if the conference bloggers had any idea how much it cost to maintain a news bureau in Baghdad, the supreme confidence of a couple of bloggers fractured into petty defensiveness.
“That’s a silly question!” snapped Winer. “Asking bloggers what this costs is silly. If you want to tell us what it costs, that’s fine. … But there are bloggers in Baghdad! That’s your competition; that’s what you have to deal with.”
I’m seeing that in the blogs that follow Hewitt’s premise, power and influence is in the hands of the blogger, both politically and evangelically, and in many ways, ‘against’ other forms of media. I’ve seen it in some aggregators pushing numbers forward as ‘success.’
I’m also seeing that influence and power mean different things to different people.
Hmm, ignoring the question of whether it’s accurate to say that it was it the ability of the public to get their hands on published materials that fueled the Reformation, I would just like to be the first to point out that blogs, no matter how well done, are not the word of God. And so to compare the ready availablity of God’s own revelation to man with occasionally-insightful-yet-more-often-than-not-overblown opinion-pieces that we can blogs to be a touch off base. And by “a touch off base,” I mean, “that just sounds nutty.”
There is a fine line between genuine enthusiasm and over kill.
Over-hype usually has a touch of nuttiness to it, don’t you think?
Yep. I mean I like blogs as much as the next guy (more or less depending on the guy), but I’m not labouring under any delusions that it’s world-shaking stuff we’ve got going on here. It’s fun and sometimes pretty darned worthwhile, but simultaneously, you allow everyone to publish? Without editors? Man, it’s no wonder so many blogs are as poorly written and ull as they are. Regarding over-hype, this reminds me of the guy who declared The Passion of the Christ to be “the best tool for evangelism in the last hundred years.”