In praise of the parasitic blogger

I found this written amazingly well about blogs and its comparison with Bacteria - a thin line between originality and plagiarism

By Nicholas Carr - roughtype.com

Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, recently decried what he sees as a tendency among journalists to characterize blogs as "a 'parasitic' medium that wouldn't be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers." He calls the charge "a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work."

I confess to having trafficked in this "insult" in the past. A little over a year ago, noting the dominance of New York Times articles on the technology news-headline site Techmeme, I wrote, with a tacit nod to Eric Raymond, "Sometimes I think that if it weren't for the shadow of the cathedral, there'd be no place to set up the bazaar." I suppose my intent at the time was to get a rise out of folks like Niles who are always ready to ride to the defense of the blogosphere's honor - that tattered maidenhead - but since then I've come to believe that being a literary parasite is no bad thing. I'd argue, in fact, that parasitism is blogging's most distinctive quality.

What got me blogging, nearly two years ago, was the attraction of working in a new and still embryonic literary form. Such an opportunity doesn't come around very often - never, basically - so I figured I might as well give it a whirl. Bloggers blog for a whole lot of reasons, of course, but what I think sets blogs apart, as a literary rather than a technical form, is that they offer the opportunity for a writer to document his immediate responses to his day-to-day reading. The continuous flow of text through the eye and mind is a characteristic of many people's lives, but the experience has never been able to be captured in the way it can through blogging. Diaries come closest, but they're private rather than public, and I'd argue that they place more distance between the act of reading and the act of writing about reading.

The reactionary, or parasitical, quality of blogging defined the form from the start. Blogs, after all, began as logs, time-stamped catalogues of usually brief descriptions, and sometimes critiques, of what their writers found in their daily perambulations around the World Wide Web. Many of the most venerable bloggers - the Winers and the Searlses of the world - continue to write in this form. The least interesting blogs, from my perspective, anyhow, are the ones that simply replicate existing journalistic forms such as news articles, company profiles, or product reviews. They can be very useful, and they can certainly be very popular, but they're blogs in a technical sense only.

I've been reading Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about the great London cholera epidemic of 1854. The book opens with a richly scatalogical survey of the city's teeming underclass economy, which was built almost entirely on scavenging. The poor were parasites who sustained themselves by collecting the leavings of other Londoners - rags, bones, bits of coal and wood, feces - and, with remarkable enterprise, transforming them into cash. There was even, Johnson tells us, a booming market in dog shit - lovingly known as "pure" - which tanners purchased to rub on their leathers to neutralize the lime they used to remove hair from hides.

"We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste," writes Johnson. "But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: ... this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people ... Far from being unproductive vagabonds ... these people were actually performing an essential function for their community."

Johnson goes on to draw an analogy between these human waste-recyclers and their microscopic counterparts, bacteria. "Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago," he reminds us. "If the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years."

I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins). Another word for "parasitic," in this context, is "critical." Blogging is at its essence a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every nutritional molecule, whether real or imagined, is fully consumed. To be called a literary parasite is no insult. It's a compliment.

So, yes, Rough Type is a parasite, a bacterium, a scavenger of bones and turds and the occasional piece of pretty cloth. And I, for one, couldn't be happier.