MIT Technology Review Groks Blogging
MIT Technology Review published an article by Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT that discusses the growing importance of weblogs and attempts to put weblogs in context with other sources of news and opinion. According to the article:
At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation....
In practice, the evolution of most media has been shaped through the interactions between the distributed power of grass-roots participatory media and the concentrated power of corporate/governmental media.... {Now} grass-roots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence.
There have been many similar articles in mainstream publications that have attempted to define weblogging and its place in society. But, Henry Jenkins seems to have done a better job than most writers of capturing the spirit of the weblogging community and explaining the role that some webloggers hope to occupy in society.