The Longest Now

Certain fads arrive and develop networks in a cluster of media consolidation, where gossip, local pundits, and world news sources collaborate unconsciously to broadcast a unified message of change, improvement, novelty.  Our society expects technology and progress to deliver improvements week to week, so it is easy for a promising fad to draw out a ritual excess of praise and hopeful predictions from all sides (though individual companies can lose out through envious nitpicking).

Air conditioning, radio, telephones, television, trains.  Computers, email, IM, mobile phones, outliners.  Some things truly settle into the fabric of reality; others decay from novelty into underuse — how poorly do we use our radiowaves and outliners today? — as the promise of novel advancement moves to a future target.

Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for someone living in the 1950s, dreaming of the future, to imagine our telephones, radios, televisions, and computers intertwined?  At the very least, one would expect most wealthy technologists to have these combined in a standard elegant way. But life plays funny tricks, and the present isn’t like that at all.

Enter blogging.  There are too many glorious predictions of its use and pending universality to link to the most important ones in a single sentence (I’ll try to update this with a set of links later).  Similar predictions arose when webpage design and free webhosting arose, so a consideration of the web-design fad seems appropriate.  For example, here’s a Harvard Law debate about the novel impact of blogging on elections.

In what ways did web design networks peak when it was a big deal to have a website, and in what ways are they growing stronger now that having one (as a person, as an org) is often taken for granted?  Where are the new metrics?  The analyses of how webpage creation and self-publishing have already achieved what people claim blogging will produce?  In what ways do the persisting fights among web-publishing software inform us about the future of blogging software development? [AOL apparently has hundreds of people working on its upcoming blogging component…]  How will these kinds of expression combine once blogs, too, are a fad of the past? 

How will the cliques of yesteryear’s web migrate to or be parallelled in a web where the default homepage is a blog?  It would be nice to think that the cleverest social scientists and network-builders were thinking about this and using these questions to guide future tool development.  What will happen once blogs, too, are the future dreams of the past? 

As you choose your own blogging software, and your sphere of fellow-bloggers, and begin to develop a fixed collection of {people you like and people like you}, let me know what you think, and how your ideas change and solidify.