In a recent post to his blog, Steven Streight, aka Vaspers the Grate, takes on Lev Grossman, who in the December 31, 2004 issue of Time compared blogging to amateur radio. In that issue, Grossman said, “Before this year [2004], blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting.”
Grossman’s impression seems to be that hams do nothing more than talk about ham radio (which is, of course, ridiculous) while bloggers spend an inordinate amount of time blogging just to blog. They’re filling many Mbytes of disk space with nothing more than jabbering.
Steven, who’s not an amateur radio operator, went some pains to set the record straight (pun intended). He actually did a littlle research–unlike our friend Grossman–and came away with a much more favorable view of amateur radio. He writes:
My opinion is that blogging, ham radio operating, and stamp collecting involve some degree of thinking and human communication, and in the case of stamp collecting, artistic sensibility and foreign culture appreciation.
I’d also add that amateur radio operators also come to appreciate foreign culture, perhaps even more so than stamp collectors. Ham radio is, after all, an international brotherhood (and sisterhood), and many of us form friendships with hams in countries outside our own.
So is blogging the new ham radio? In some respects, it is. They’re both communications media for one, and to be honest, both have idle jabberers. But beyond the jabbering, both serve a useful purpose. The amateur radio service helps supply the need for technically competent individuals who stand ready to serve in emergencies. Blogging also helps us to communicate by allowing us to get around the mainstream media, which is increasingly under the control of fewer and fewer corporations. But just as you need a receiver capable of filtering out the signal from the noise to successfully use amateur radio, so too must you be able to filter out the noise in the blogosphere to receive the useful signals.
Streight concludes by saying some nice things about this blog. I won’t quote them here–I’ll let you read them for yourself. He also plans to include my blog in his next book, Secrets of the Blogging Pros.
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