Bruce Sterling: Blogs Are A Passing Fad

March 14th, 2007

Hat tip for this one to Robert Scoble via Twitter. Bruce Sterling, a sci-fi writer, gives blogs ten years to… go away. He gave a strangely sarcastic, technology-wary speech at the SXSW tech conference, as summed up by The Register. Here’s a link to the audio.

Some choice quotes:

“It’s like watching you get beaten to death with croutons,” Sterling remarked about the daily diary/moment diary fads of blogs and Twitter.

“You are never going to see a painting by committee that is a great painting,” he said.

“People on the internet like to pretend this stuff is unbelievably great,” he said. “Nobody is going to listen to mashups in another 10 years. They are novelty music.

“Just because it is new and people with laptops can do it and get away with it does not make it an advance.”

He puts blogs in this third world of commons-based-media-production, which is new, and getting more popular and powerful. Sterling astutely notes that it can be strangely anti-business (Craig Newmark is an example). This might explain some of the Communist imagery at Bay Area cafes, peopled by these “laptop gypsies” Sterling takes umbrage at.

Well, I got into this blogging thing late (only last year) and I think it’s awesome. It’s a hobby. It’s cheap. It’s fun. I can do this in my sleep.

Am I taking someone’s job away by doing this for free? Well, I don’t know, does GAP freak out because some grandma knits socks in their spare time? You have all the power and resources behind you — knit a better sock.

These sort of rants about “amateurs” taking down “professionals” remind me of “serious” actors getting all hot under the collar when reality television began taking off — which is still around, ten years later. But guess what — I think broadcast television has improved since then. After the initial scare, it seems they began taking their craft more seriously and now there are tons of movie quality, serial dramas: BSG, Heroes, Weeds, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc. that coexist with reality television.

Still, it’s sometimes hard to tell if something is a fad, and ironically, more so when you’re directly involved. In 1992–3, I remember quite vividly a comp-sci college friend of mine showing me a web page. I distinctly thought: why the heck would anybody want to do that?

At that time, most web pages were just a bio of yourself, a photo, and a link to your email address. I was hanging on Usenet newsgroups and Pine, which just seemed more advanced. We used computers for email, writing papers, games, and laying out the school newspaper. The Internet was some cloud of “huh?”.

And now look: 10 plus years later, I make my living designing these freaking web pages.

And I blog in my spare time. Funny, as wary as I can be about following the crowd, I don’t feel like can afford to let another potential paradigm changer slip by me, as HTML almost did. Otherwise, I’d be looking for a job.