Internet – Crisis in the blogosphere

 

Blogger Wang Jianshuo declared this morning the blogosphere to be in a crisis after his wife Wendy had no clue anymore what direction to take her weblog. According to Wang Jianshuo it is a feeling that is currently widespread among the almost half a million webloggers in China.

“Along the way to today, I often ask myself, am I going away from the initial motivation of blogging? Am I recording the true feeling or recording the feeling I want others to see? There are some direct and frank feelings I shy away from writing, because I know he is reading. I shied away from the private details, because I know they are reading. I don't write the deepest thought in my heart, because I know....,” he quotes one blogger.

I had expected the crisis to emerge a bit earlier, as columnist Frank Yu of China Tech News had a go at the English language teachers that dominated the English part of the blogosphere in living in China. “Lets take the typical China foreign blogger John X as a fictional example,” writes Frank Yu. “John X gets up very early each morning, before he goes out to teach his English language class, to update his blog with his latest thoughts and writings. Unless he has a burning issue on his mind that he needs to opine on, like the deplorable sound of Chinese Pop Music, he will trawl the web for China related news or simply read the links provided by other bloggers.”

Since no one of the blogging English teachers responded and I also had better things to do than get involved in this potential brawl, I decide to ignore this potentially interesting conflict. I generally tend to ignore blogs that bore the hell out of me by displaying baseless clichés and ignorance about China: there are simply too many really interesting things going on. I even do not feel inclined to write a column about such an uninteresting feature, but then, column writers also have to make a living when they are lacking real subjects.

Both articles do reflect elements of a maturing process in the Chinese blogosphere. While I agree with Jianshuo’s view on things, I disagree about his all to simple solution. It makes sense to have a look at the blogosphere in the US and see how things work out there. Most blogs, more than 95%, are not meant for a larger audience, but only friends and family. They have no ambition to reach out to a larger audience and this is fine: why should you? That will be the same for Chinese bloggers.

The internet has taken away the constraints of time and place, creating a new wave of media. But to be interesting for the outside world you might have to restrain yourself a bit, get a focus. Having a life that goes beyond teaching English might help too, it helps when you can support your opinion with those little things called facts. Like most other bloggers in China, I’m lacking that focus. Sometimes I think I should focus on economic developments, then I get taken away by a subject like this and write about the internet media. Wangjianshuo had his own development, first by dumping his potentially very interesting writing about his employer Microsoft as a possible subject, then trying to focus on services for visitors of Shanghai. Like most of us, he is still searching.

China Digital News show a similar lack of focus, sometimes focusing on human rights issues, then on politics and then on media. Maybe only Danwei is doing this well, by having a very strict focus, and to a lesser degree Isaac Mao, doing his bit about education. Muzi Mei was of course the prototype of a very focused weblog, but that caused some other problems.

Focus is going to be an issue in a maturing blogosphere, and a bit of crisis is part of that.