Hyper-local Blogging
Posted by PaulM on 23 Jul 2009 at 04:31 am | Tagged as: 2009 Election, City Council, History, Lowell, Lowell-2009, Poetry, Technology
I wrote this in response to a post by Mimi at www.leftinlowell.com about the growing influence of blogs in the city. We are witnessing a change in social dynamics in Lowell via new media technology. In my post I said many hundreds of people look for the local blogs every day—that’s probably understated by a lot if the blogs are combined. The low thousands, probably. And that doesn’t count the “forwards” of posts that people like and send to friends in and out of Lowell. Some of the video clips and graphics are too rich to keep to oneself. This blog has a recent post of a poem by Tom Sexton of Alaska, who heard about the blog from me and now tunes in to Lowell from afar. By sending his Micky Ward poem, he contributed to one of the hottest current story lines in the city. Maybe he can tell us if the Anchorage City Council has ever cancelled a primary election in a financial crisis.
Paul Marion Says:
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 pm
A few years ago the University made an–let’s call it–”adventurous” move when they brought Chris Lydon on board to launch a new-fangled public radio show that attempted to combine interview & talk radio with interactivity on the web, particularly blogging. At the time Chris passionately promoted the blogging revolution that was going to turn the media world on its head. He was looking for a way to tap in to the new energy with his short-lived Open Source program. It was costly and controversial on campus. Not every experiment works. That’s R&D. Ask the Pentagon. He spoke about the power of “hyper-local” media. There have been a few more revolutions since then, including Twitter, but he was onto something. I’m deeply impressed by the depth and breadth of the blogs reporting on life in Lowell. I miss the Sunrise radio program, however, the local blogosphere is expanding. It’s a little like those time-lapse photography clips I recall first seeing on the Wide World of Disney TV program. Viewers were amazed to see a flower grow to full size in 15 seconds. Blogging is growing in front of our eyes. It’s all over the place in quality and interest and tone and attitude, but that’s democracy. Many hundreds of people go looking for the local blogs each day. They sort through what interests them. I just wish more of them would make the leap and comment — join the chorus. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and appreciate Jack Kerouac. Imagine if he had this electronic scroll available 60 years ago? Picture him as a blogger. He wrote every day. I think he would have been prolific with this technology. He wrote a zillion letters and kept journals. The whole keyboard was “home row” for him. He was a virtuoso typist and literary composer. I’ve always thought his main artistic lesson or message was “Write your own story.” That’s what the bloggers are doing. At richardhowe.com, we say “History as it happens.” The many-threaded Lowell story is now being simultaneously created by a self-appointed team of writers. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, anthropologists, community psychologists, and others will figure out what it all meant somewhere down the line.
I sometimes give my history students at UML an assignment to do a photo essay of the city. The context is that a historian or two or three is going to arrive here in 2050 to write a history of Lowell that covers the period from 1975 to 2010 and the only sources they will have to write this history are the photo essays they create. I wonder how future historians will discover the chattering that goes on in these blogs, how the pieces will be left in some sort of archive, and how the material will be considered by individuals doing serious historical research? On my own work I rely a lot on reading old newspapers to establish the mood of a community or the larger context around a particular event I am interested in learning about and then writing about. But as newspapers disappear and in those that survive the quality of journalism and the breadth and depth of coverage suffers, what will future historians really have to work with. In ‘olden times’ (for many of my student, 1985!) lots of people kept diaries and wrote letters that, remarkably, were quite often saved. When historians find these letters they rejoice for the windows the letters open on the past. So, how will those interested in writing the Lowell story capture the tenor of the times? The Sun provides a lens, but a narrow one. Back Talk offers a perspective - a unique one at that. And, it seems to me, that the numerous blogs in the city may in the end provide the most useful source of all even when a portion of the pieces are difficult to attribute. As someone posted elsewhere, as events unfolded toward the American Revolution participant opinion shapers attacked the king and his Massachusetts GOBS in scorching terms but did it using a variety of fake names because they feared retaliation from the out-of-control royalists bent on limiting political discourse and electoral democracy. Substitute those mean-spirited members of the current council for the royalists (a stretch I know but AK likely would have supported the crown if it meant more boat towing contracts!) and you have the current blog universe. Of course, for all of us the stakes are nowhere near as high as they were back in colonial Massachusetts. And, this is all the more reason for more and more voices to be heard on the issues of the day - after all the city council can not bring back the stockades, or can they??????