NOWADAYS,
WE WANT the truth. Suddenly, it seems,
we are no longer content to be sceptical
and laconic and sophisticated, or to
take the line that there are many kinds
of truth and that it all depends on
how you look at it, and on who is doing
the looking. Politicians and journalists,
for example, long assumed by a knowing
public to belong to professions that
not only display but positively require
a flexible approach to the facts, now
find themselves being scrutinised and
investigated to establish whether or
not they have been telling lies. The
Blairs - Jayson of The New York Times
and Tony of Her Majesty's government
- cannot, in their recent tribulations,
have missed the irony of this dramatic
shift. Where once we tolerated, even
celebrated, shading and nuance and the
need, sometimes, to elaborate and select
and even invent in order to arrive at
a truth of a kind that told us far more
than the mere facts ever would, now
we just want to get down to those plain
unelaborated facts and to establish
what really did happen, or is currently
happening, or is about to happen.
Quite recently, that would have seemed
an impossibly naïve ambition. Truth
was a destination we were unlikely to
reach - the journey was all, and along
the way we would be confronted by many
versions of what happened, each with
its own validity, its own unique perspective.
But things have taken a turn. In one
of the more interesting and rapid social
changes to have occurred in the new
century, there is a growing impatience
with the sophisticated and politically
savvy approach to the world. There is
a new post-pomo mood in the air, a kind
of willed confidence that the facts
are indeed out there somewhere, waiting
to be told. The easy sophistication
that assumes that nothing is what it
seems - truth is a delusion, everybody
more or less lies, 'he would say that,
wouldn't he' - is being rejected as
itself naïve. The explanation,
the real truth, must be out there somewhere;
it is merely a question, or so it seems,
of locating among all the chatter the
voice that is telling us how things
really are.
It is easier said that done. Whom can
we trust? It seems that everywhere we
are being betrayed: by journalists who
file stories from places they have never
been; by politicians and public figures
who say merely what it is expedient
to say and who always manage to avoid
answering the question; by historians
and political commentators who fiddle
with their sources or get them jumbled
so that they can't remember whether
the words on the screen are theirs or
someone else's; by memoirists who make
things up. We feel particularly let
down by the last, because the memoirist
comes to us as the pure voice of memory.
In reality, the memoirist is probably
as dependent on external sources as
any writer who is attempting to recover
the past, but we do not see it that
way. The recollections of the memoirist
or the autobiographer rely for their
authority not on a wealth of research
and attributions, but on our confidence
that he or she was there and this is
what they saw. If the memoirist can't
tell us what happened when they were
there and we weren't, then who can?
The memoir is, if you like, the individual's
truth, although we are prepared to accept
- in fact we assume - that others (the
mother, the brother, the lover) may
well have seen things differently. Within
those constraints, we take the memoirist
on trust, yet repeatedly we find that
our trust is misplaced.
The memoir is one of the fastest growing
genres of the times. The subject matter
is the self, which means that everyone,
potentially, has something to write
about. (Write what you know, runs the
adage, and more and more people are
following up on it.) But there is a
trap. Readers read the lives of other
people because they really happened.
If they find out that they didn't happen,
all hell can break loose. We may be
moved by a story of suffering, or of
the triumph of the human spirit over
adversity, but if we find that it never
really happened, or not in the way that
the writer says it did, we feel duped.
Such scandals abound, in which memories
are exposed as invention and memoirists
as fabricators rather than recorders.
Once it is revealed that they are not
what they purport to be, autobiographies
are pulped or die on the shelves. When
Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love
(2003) - in which she told of events
that took place when she was growing
up, in a country she had in fact left
when she was three - was identified
(by a persistent investigative journalist)
as fiction rather than fact, you could
feel the anger and resentment in the
air. Nobody, interestingly, pleaded
the standard defence: the one that would
have run along the lines of 'it may
not have been true, but it was nevertheless
a kind of truth'. This was not simply
because Khouri's subject matter, the
position of women in Muslim countries,
was one in which invention was seen
as particularly inflammatory and particularly
opportunist, but because she had negated
the very reason why people had bought
her book in the first place. They bought
the authentic voice, and found out too
late that they had been sold defective
goods.
It is hard to write anything about actual
events without fibbing or getting things
slightly wrong, even if inadvertently.
Most readers continue to accept as a
given the elusiveness of unimpeachable
accuracy. But what is new is the sense
of outrage, rather than mere eyebrow-raising,
in the face of evidence presented to
readers that they have been deliberately
deceived. With that outrage goes a determination
to expose such duplicity wherever it
occurs, and to characterise it as just
that - not licence or oversight or legitimate
reworking in order to make a point or
the natural consequence of impossible
deadlines, but downright, unforgivable
duplicity. And so Jayson Blair - who,
according to Seth Mnookin, in his Hard
News: The Scandals at the New York Times
and Their Meaning for American Media
(2004), 'fabricated or plagiarised'
three dozen stories in one six-month
period alone - is seen as simply the
most spectacular example of an epidemic
of deliberate misinformation and misinterpretation
against which we must be increasingly
vigilant. Blair - who appears to have
stayed at home typing, surrounded by
fast-food cartons, when he was supposed
to have been on the road, discovering
things from source - committed a double
sin of deception. He invented, and he
copied, and we see both as equally reprehensible.
In an absorbing piece in last December's
London Review of Books called 'Love
and Theft', Mark Ford speaks of the
relationship between plagiarism and
poetry, and the difficulty of making
sharp distinctions between what can
be confidently defined as theft, and
what might be better called borrowing
or 'bricolage', terms that reflect the
underlying 'truism that all writing
depends on other writing'. Some of the
tolerance and even celebration of borrowing
that we have increasingly come to see
as integral to cultural production and
cultural commentary - is there an art
historian, for example, who could stand
up to the challenge of deleting the
word 'appropriation' from their professional
lexicon? - has also had a profound influence
on our reading of purported truth. It
helped to make us tolerant of lapses
in historical accuracy or attribution
in all forms of writing, not just poetry
and fiction (or, for that matter, paintings
or films) but also in the kind that
claimed to document real events, in
real places, affecting real people.
We also understood, or thought we did,
that the word 'real' was itself a problem,
meaning different things to different
people. And yet, with amazing speed,
we have begun to withdraw that tolerance
in favour of a sterner line altogether.
We want the real truth, and we don't
believe we are getting it. Distrusting
those who claim to tell things as they
are, we now seek out the authentic voice,
the one that is unencumbered by the
structures and conventions of our institutions,
or by the unstated rules and the secret
handshakes of the media and the academy.
It is a turn of events that has given
a nasty shock to many who have been
caught, in the middle or the twilight
of their careers, by this trick played
on them by the Zeitgeist. Plagiarism,
which we had grown fairly relaxed about,
seeing it as merely one end of a continuum
that included borrowing and appropriation
and nodding vaguely in the direction
of, is back, and the vengeance is ours.
There are those who say that it is too
late, that we are all plagiarists now
and the battle - for the survival of
the individual voice - has been well
and truly lost in the welter of information
and sources and precedents and sheer,
unending product that overwhelms us,
making it impossible to keep track no
matter how vigilant we are. Yet most
of us, rather than giving up and just
going with the flow, are standing firm,
demanding the truth and identified authorship,
with all sources, and all voices not
the author's own, duly noted. In his
book on 'facts, fictions, fraud' in
the practice of history in America,
Past Imperfect (2004), Peter
Charles Hoffer quotes the popular historian
Stephen Ambrose attempting to explain
why he may have inadvertently exposed
himself to charges of plagiarism: '"I
do my writing at a computer, surrounded
by my research … documents of all
kinds, books. I mix them to describe
an incident. Usually I have five or
more transcripts, plus copies of documents
and books on the table. I take material
from them all."' It is a poignant
image, not simply of a writer who has
lost control of his material, but of
the material taking over the writer,
muffling his own voice. In the case
of Ambrose, intention is difficult to
establish, but for the plagiarism police,
ignorance is no defence.
The new intolerance of such lapses brings
with it a sharpening of the critical
functions, an unwillingness to be snowed.
Readers are on the lookout. They are
no longer happy to see reading as a
way of joining in the fun of the creative
process, participating as a good sport
does in generating the meaning of the
text, playing their assigned part. These
new refuseniks are seriously critical,
and they are not participating in the
text, or not at least in the texts that
are presented to them under the imprimatur
of publishing houses or the 'mainstream
media'. They are not content to make
allowances, to see things in context
or keep them in perspective. They are
not, moreover, happy to take their place
as readers in the space that the text
creates, or indeed to do any of the
other things that modern, street-smart
readers are supposed to do. They are
rejecting the texts that are being offered
to them, in favour of producing their
own. Readers are becoming writers, adding
their own voices to the mix. In short,
they are blogging.
According to the Pew Internet and American
Life project, 'by the end of 2004 …
7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who
use the internet … have created
a blog or web-based diary'. These figures
are no doubt rubbery, but they are indicative
of a huge increase in the numbers of
people adding their individual voices
to the web, not only in the US and not
only in English, either. Blogging is
big from China to Iran, where according
to Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell
in Foreign Policy (November/December
2004) 'Farsi is the fourth most widely
used language amongst blogs worldwide'.
The growth continues, with more and
more writers committing themselves to
publication, and, if they are lucky,
to readers.
It has always been a pretty safe bet
that, however many writers there might
be practising their craft at any one
time, as long as they could clear the
publishing hurdle and get their words
into a book, newspaper or newsletter,
then more people than their best friends
were going to read what they wrote.
The total number of readers, in other
words, was always going to be greater
than the number of writers. Now, for
the first time, it is possible to envisage
a world in which that comforting ratio
may not apply, and in which you can
count yourself fortunate if your best
friend reads what you write. Notwithstanding
the extraordinarily high readership
enjoyed by a very few of these millions
of blogs, the majority speaks to what
the Perseus Blog Survey describes as
'nanoaudiences'. Under the system of
unmediated and unauthenticated publication
that the web provides, and with things
going the way they are, we could soon
have more published writers than there
are readers to read them. For some sites,
this means that there will be no readers
at all, and you can't get more nano
than none.
This may not be a bad thing, if it means
more people will take the trouble to
formulate their own thoughts in writing,
rather than accept unquestioningly the
supposedly authoritative voice of someone
else. But just as the early days of
the mobile phone had untold numbers
of people calling home to say 'I'm on
the train', the online diary - the blog
- is an opportunity to say, 'I'm here
and I'm writing', and not a great deal
else. That is at least a step forward
from the personal home page, which allowed
people to say the 'I'm here' part but
otherwise gave little sense of progress
or movement. There was always the feeling
with a personal home page that notwithstanding
all the stuff about cats (a favourite
topic that survives and prospers in
the world of blogging, to the extent
that the term 'kitty blog' is now applied
to the practice of writing about nothing)
and the kinds of personal details that
were meant to give an impression of
a lived life, no one was actually at
home when you called. The owner had
moved, or was out for the day. Either
way, there was a static quality to the
home page that spoke, like a photograph,
of the past rather than the present.
The site was invariably 'under construction',
which held out the promise of more to
follow, but visitors could not be confident
that work would resume. So why return
when nothing much was going to change?
The blog, by contrast, is of the here
and now, endlessly supplemented by new
thoughts and new observations. The fact
that it is under construction is not
a defect, but lies at the core of its
appeal. It holds out the promise of
eternal life, a never-ending text, a
voice that will never be silenced. It
is amazing how many blogs continue to
be updated, on an hourly, daily or,
at the most, weekly basis; long after
you would have expected the blogger
to grow tired of it. It is also true
that this impression of endless updating
is far from being the whole story; blogs,
like home pages before them, are abandoned
by their creators at a rate of knots,
but not yet fast enough to outweigh
the numbers of new entrants eager to
have their say. No doubt the day will
come when the total number of postings
will start to decline, and just as the
vast majority of people who begin diaries
and stamp collections never follow through,
so perhaps the balance will shift, with
blogs disappearing at a faster rate
than they are being replaced. But that
day is not here yet.
We are definitely in a growth phase,
even if there is much talk in cyberspace
about the impending end of the personal
blogger, as the big boys and girls in
industry, advertising and politics,
not to mention the media, continue to
cotton on to its (largely unspecified)
commercial and organisational potential.
The Vice-Chairman of General Motors,
for example, hosts Fastlane,
where you can learn more than you may
need to know about the new Pontiac Solstice;
and Margot Wallström, the European
Union's Commissioner for Institutional
Relations and Communication, posts regularly,
displaying a nervous resilience in the
face of some of the comments she receives:
'Thanks to all of you who have read
and reacted to my blog! And I guess
it's in the human nature to react more
emotionally to the negative comments.
The one I liked the most was the guy
who wanted my recycled paper bag to
throw up in! Funny!'
Blogs abound, and so do commentaries
on the blogging phenomenon. Some of
these commentaries confine themselves
to exhortation - blog or die, in effect
- but most take one of two lines. The
enthusiasts identify a social revolution
of overwhelming significance that will
change for the better the way we do
just about everything. For the sceptics,
on the other hand, the barbarians are
at the gate, although like all barbarians,
they will be repelled eventually, if
we just learn to take the long view.
Hugh Hewitt, the conservative US columnist
and hyperactive blogger, takes the former
line in Blog: Understanding the Information
Reformation That's Changing Your World
(2005). Hewitt sees it as imperative
(there are lots of imperatives in Blog)
that everyone, from pastors to potentates,
screws their courage to the sticking
place and enters the blogosphere. For
pastors, he suggests a number of must-read
blogs they will need to be familiar
with if they are to identify the issues
being raised by the voices out there
(a limbering-up process that may also
prepare them to become one of those
voices themselves). But once the issue
has been identified, what then? Get
the congregants together, suggests Hewitt,
and 'convene a study session and round-table
on the issue', a strategy which, on
the face of it, does not seem likely
to achieve a great deal. Like many enthusiasts
for the blogging revolution, Hewitt
is much clearer on the journey than
he is on the destination.
Others see the journey ending in tears.
George Packer, writing in the May/June
2004 edition of Mother Jones,
sees blog postings as 'atomised, fragmentary
and of the instant'. He characterises
them as 'little spasms of assertion',
capturing in that unkind phrase the
sense that even a small amount of time
spent trawling the sites quickly conveys
that everyone is speaking at once, anxious
to have their turn, whether or not anyone
is really listening. But the old media
can be much harsher than this. 'The
whistle-blowers, e-babies, inside-outers,
wonkettes, quacks and cranks have globalised
Speakers' Corner,' says Simon Jenkins
in Times Online (11 March 2004).
'They have rebuilt the Tower of Babel
and put microphones on top of it.' Whether
they are for or against, and whether
or not they are bloggers themselves,
the commentators tend to focus as much
on the act of reading blogs as on writing
them, because it is by reading them
that we find out what is going on. To
enter the blogosphere is to get in touch
with the authentic voice. It may or
may not be a voice that says anything
one really wants or needs to hear, but
that, in a sense, is a second order
question.
For some, the voices contain gems that
link us to what people really think
and help us to understand the world
as it is, unmediated by spin. For others,
it is babble; impossible to ignore,
but babble all the same. Hewitt asks
a potentate, in this case the Chairman
of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, whether
he reads the military blogs, the online
journals kept by members of the armed
forces. 'He said he didn't but he knew
he had to find time to do so.' The Chairman
is under pressure. There is a world
out there, and he has to find the time
to monitor it, or at least to read the
reports of somebody who is charged with
monitoring it for him, all the while
continuing to hold down his day job.
Something of the same tension, between
the old and the new way of understanding
what is going on, is contained in an
exchange recorded by Michael Totten
at michaeltotten.com between
himself and Christopher Hitchens. Totten
asks Hitchens if he reads blogs. '"Not
really,"' says Hitchens, '"I
could spend all day reading blogs and
not get anything done."' Totten
puts him straight. '"You can't
afford not to read blogs,"' he
says. '"Because of who you are
and what you do for a living, you'll
be hopelessly behind if you don't."'
It is a genuine fear that is being expressed
here, one with a long pedigree; not
of terrorism or global warming or of
any of the other dangers that we have
created and now cannot control, but
the fear of being left behind, of missing
the train.
Blogging seems to offer a channel for
the direct authorial voice, reasserting
qualities like authenticity and originality
that have long since been presumed lost
in a cloud of qualification and allusion.
The tone is often impatient (those 'little
spasms of assertion'), concerned not
so much to persuade as to convey the
depth of authorial feeling and of the
personal point of view. The blog posting
catches the moment, but, like the moment,
it does not last. Reading through the
archives of even the most lively and
engaging blog can be an enervating experience.
The blog is of the here and now and
does not translate well into historical
narrative in the way that, say, a diary
or an exchange of correspondence from
an earlier time can stand as a story
on its own. Simon Garfield, writing
about the blogging phenomenon in the
Sunday Observer (4 April 2004),
picks up on the connection between archived
blogs and the Mass Observation movement
in Britain in the 1930s, in which records
were kept by armies of volunteers of
their own and other people's daily lives
and opinions, thus contributing, or
such was the plan, to an anthropology
of the times. Reading the fruits of
Mass Observation now is a bit like trawling
backwards into a blog, inducing as it
does the same kind of initial fascination
that is quickly - in some cases almost
instantaneously - overtaken by fatigue.
Tony Pierce, who posts at tonypierce.com
and who won the 2005 Bloggie award for
the year's best piece about blogging,
tries to warn neophyte bloggers about
the fatigue factor and how not to induce
it in anyone who might otherwise be
prepared to listen to what you have
to say. 'Nobody gives a shit,' he warns,
'what the weather is like in your town,
nobody wants to change their cursor
into a butterfly (and) nobody gives
a rat ass what song you're listening
to. Write something Real for you, about
you, every day.' This excellent advice
has, by and large, fallen (if it has
fallen at all) on deaf ears. Blogs,
like home pages before them, are choc-a-bloc
with favourite songs and favourite films,
as though taste were the key to the
self. Indeed, the authentic voice that
so many commentators detect in the blogosphere
- the one that speaks from Brisbane
or Baghdad and tells us what is happening
on the ground - is remarkably coy when
it comes to actual biographical detail.
The standard biographical templates
favour brevity: age, gender and not
much else. The voices, by and large,
are left to speak for themselves. And
in the absence of any reliable form
of authentication, we invest our trust
in the voices, forgoing the caution
and the scepticism that we increasingly
and ever more unforgivingly apply to
information that comes to us from other,
traditional sources.
The motivation, like the biography,
of the individual blogger is hard to
ascertain. Various questionnaires circulate
- some with greater prestige than others
given the stratified nature of the world
of blogging - in which the attempt is
made to get people to define what it
is that keeps them at the keyboard,
sometimes for hours in the day, posting,
linking, commenting and generally having
their say. Norman Geras, an academic
who has crossed over to the blogosphere,
offers at normblog.com an occasional
series of profiles of online diarists
who have caught his attention. Inevitably
they are ones who gravitate to his world
view (an energetic combination of old
left and neocon), whom he has discovered
or who have discovered him in the way
that bloggers of like mind do. But even
allowing for this degree of similarity
in outlook, there is still a remarkable
consistency in the responses to the
question Geras asks them all: 'why do
you blog?' It 'stops me shouting at
the radio', says one. It's 'an alternative
to shouting at the TV', says another,
or 'it's better than shouting at a newspaper',
says a third, thus ensuring that the
traditional media are pretty well covered.
It isn't all about transferred aggression,
though. Blogging is 'a form of self-talk',
'a unique opportunity to exercise one's
right of free expression', 'a way of
making your voice heard'. For Chris
Young, who posts at Explananda.com,
blogging serves 'to remedy nagging esprit
d'escalier', a phrase that captures
the nature of blogging as both a rejection
of authority and a response to it, a
way of talking back while talking to
yourself.
The unmediated nature of the blogosphere
- the millions of voices all speaking
at once - attracts and disappoints us
at the same time. We are attracted to
these authentic, untrained voices because
we have grown to distrust those who
speak to us under some kind of professional
imprimatur: journalists, academics,
writers, experts. We distrust narrative
and explanation because we distrust
the narrators and the explicators; we
have been caught out too many times.
Online diaries, by contrast, are immediate,
visceral and unpolished, the qualities
that strike us as true. They appear
to link us to the source, creating a
direct line, via the medium of the blogger,
from experience to reader. The underlying
irony represented by the vast number
of blogs with 'pundit' in the title
is that bloggers see themselves by their
nature as anti-punditry, or rather that
they have as much claim to punditry
as anyone else and possibly more. It
is this quality of assertion, rather
than the anger that many have identified
as characteristic of blogs but which
in fact applies to only a relatively
small number of them, that links all
the different kinds of blogger together
- the pundit bloggers, journal bloggers
and even kitty bloggers. They are asserting
their own voices because they have something
to say that is as real, in fact more
real, than the voices that are transmitted
by means of old technology.
This faith in the authenticity of the
blog survives abundant evidence to the
contrary; indeed, it can scarcely come
as a surprise, when the web is so conducive
to impersonation, that bloggers will
often turn out to be not who they claim
to be. What is surprising is the laconic
reaction to these kinds of revelations.
When it was found that the author of
bizgirl, one of the Bloggie finalists
for 2005 in the category for Australia
and New Zealand, was not a girl at all,
the revelation caused hardly a ripple
among its readers, or indeed anyone
else who happened to notice. This relaxed
attitude to fabrication, contrasting
as it does so sharply with the reaction
to historians or mainstream journalists
who are similarly exposed, suggests
that bloggers are judged by different
rules, in which the impression
of directness and authenticity is what
actually counts. Any dissatisfaction
or uneasiness that we feel with what
the blogosphere has to offer lies not,
as we might expect, in the fact that
we are hard pressed to tell the difference
between truth and fable. It lies in
the sheer, unmediated unmanageability
of it all.
There is too much stuff out there, offering
opinion, observation, irony and sometimes
anger, with none of it tying together.
Attempts to map the patterns of the
blogosphere - whether through sites
such as Technocrati which give
us the subjects du jour, or Slate or
the Columbia Journalism Review
(via CJRDaily) and others like
them that regularly dip into the topics
that are doing the rounds and sum up
what people are saying - are deeply
unsatisfying. Like the blogs themselves,
they provide observation without structure,
dialogue without plot. Blogs are not
really conducive to analysis and reflection.
By their nature, they discourage us
from looking back. The pattern of movement
is always forward; fast forward in fact.
A typical blog will include its archives
in a column on one side of the screen
and its links to other blogs on the
other. One roll for the past, one for
the future. Faced with this choice,
the click is almost invariably forward
to another site, another view, another
voice, rather than back to something
as old as yesterday. The sites have
names to conjure with: guns and butter
and little green footballs and
shelley on the telly; and so
these titles run onwards by the thousand,
combinations of whimsy and laboured
eccentricity that belie, often, the
seriousness of the postings. So attuned
are we already to this ironical convention
that it is something of a shock to find,
for example, that blogs called Life
Insurance and Used Cars are
actually about life insurance and used
cars.
No blog is an island. Links abound,
connecting us not only to other blogs
but to sources (by means of 'hat tips')
and references, to comments and after
that to comments on the comments. Amid
this cacophony, the voice of the individual
blog retains its distinctiveness, but
only just. It seems forever in danger
of merging into the larger voice disappearing
into a sea of links and references,
not waving but drowning. Writers such
as William Burroughs, who hyped his
cut-up method in the good old days when
it was not very difficult to challenge
our staid notions of what it meant to
read, cannot have anticipated just how
cut-up things would get. The metaphorical
truism - that nobody reads exactly the
same text - has become a literal one.
Nobody reads the same blog, because
every individual reader flies off in
a different direction, pursuing links
or selecting a title at random from
the blogroll, enjoying being caught
up in the rush, until he or she gets
tired of it and breaks for a cup of
coffee or a breath of fresh air.
In the end, blogs are no more authentic
or true than the other kinds of writing
against which we are taking such a hard
line. But what they do have is a quality
of naturalness, immediacy and brashness
that seems to speak to us directly,
telling us that perhaps we have become
too clever for our own good and too
remote from the things that really matter.
Blogs, whether we write them or read
them or both, are a way of telling us
that we're part of the action. We're
going somewhere. We're on the train.
