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The revolution, if it ever comes, might not be televised. But I can guarantee you that, at this rate, people are going to live-blog the living daylights out of it.
It seems like every news organization that has something to prove (and there are none that don't) has spontaneously taken up the practice of live-blogging. It might have something to do with election season, which has spread live blogs the way the fall weather gives everyone the same cold at once.
"Live-blogging" — a goofy word as only the Web can cough up — is simply the act of blogging about an event in real time. Sometimes the writer is actually reporting from the event in person, but "actually being someplace" is an idea that's lost traction as the century's worn on. More often than not, live-bloggers are planted in front of a television, watching from afar and hammering away at laptops as they go.
The better live blogs are simply examples of up-to-the-minute reporting, giving readers a complete picture of what's going on. But more and more live blogs are in the peanut-gallery business, opening a forum for writers and guests to dash off zingers as the event unfolds. It's like a virtual viewing party.
So it is that, on both sides of the border, every election debate this year has been live-blogged on scads of websites. Debates make great targets for live-bloggers, since almost everyone watches them. It's a perfect opportunity for writers to hop online and write about an event that people are already watching so they can read about it as they watch.
There are a lot of good things to be said about live blogs: They're fun, they're social, and on a good day, they might even be edifying. But this is what I find unnerving about them: I can't help but wonder how much commentary is too much commentary. If we start looking at events through the lens of other people's chatter, will be lose the habit of watching things for ourselves?
Anyone who caught the American debates on CNN this month got a case in point. The graphics looked as if they belonged on a radar display at NORAD. Both sides of the screen were covered in scoreboards, on which pundits were scoring the debate as it went. The main attraction, though, was the infamous squiggly line. The network put together focus groups in battleground states, giving each participant a "perception analyzer," a little box with a knob to twist if he liked what he saw. These reactions showed up as a squiggly line at the bottom of the CNN screen, giving instant feedback on how the debaters were doing.
Those who were not appalled were captivated. Many were both. The broad consensus, from what I read, is twofold: First, that the squiggly line is reprehensible. Second, that it's great television. I, for one, couldn't take my eyes off that graph. It was fascinating.
When the debate ended, CNN cut to its small mob of "analysts" to tell us who had won. By that point, I was so used to the squiggly line that I wanted it to keep going, telling us which analyst the focus group liked best. (The one with the hair? The one with the teeth? The one with the hair and teeth?) I wanted it to crawl over the commercialsbreak, telling me what people thought of the toilet paper ad.
Why stop there? Next time, let's wire the candidates up to heart-rate monitors so we can see when they start to sweat. Let's give them small electric shocks when the focus group ratings get too low. Better still, take the American Idol approach. "To surprise Obama, text JOLT to 1-900 …"
If only these instant-feedback mechanisms weren't as spurious as they are entertaining. With only a few dozen participants, the focus groups behind the squiggly line were too small to be statistically meaningful. All the more appalling is the disproportionate impact that that tiny focus group had on the millions of viewers. The potential to be swayed by the squiggly line when making up one's own mind was enormous. Why assay the debate for yourself when you can outsource the job to a handful of knob-twiddlers in Ohio?
This is what troubles me about so much of the live-blogging. Watching a few people chatting about the debate isn't so different from watching those poor knob-twiddlers in the CNN focus group. Live-blogging panders to the desire to have instant feedback from the crowd before making up your own mind. It caters to the pleasant feeling of having events prechewed for you. Did that candidate just say a good thing or a bad thing? Don't think too hard, just watch the squiggly line and read the comments scrolling by.
It's like being in a crowd. In a crowd, people take their cues from each other, whether it's cheering, booing or grabbing the torches and pitchforks. That's why it's called "crowd mentality." I think these kinds of feedback devices are going to become the norm, online and offline. Commentary won't just accumulate on everything that's happened in the past, but on everything that's happening in the present too. Live blogs and chat rooms and scorecards and squiggly lines — the tools of quick-fix interpretation — are engaging toys. People are going to want more of them.
There's no giddier enabler for this kind of thing than the Web, with its unflappable belief in the goodness of connecting people in every conceivable way. It's getting harder and harder to find moments of thinking for myself, without the collective roaring into my ear. I love the company, but I'm already starting to miss the quiet.
