Call Yourself A Blogger?

Like most mornings, I start my day off by reading various different newsletters. There’s an article in the Globe today about being a blogger, and it attempts to answer the standard five ‘good reporting’ questions about the topic. One thing caught my attention though, as it’s an article that’s pretty much for the people who have been, well, living in a virtual cave the last couple years, and that’s the idea that blogging isn’t so much the thing as it is the thing that allows you to do the thing.

So let’s say you’ve been reading all about blogs and blogging and bloggers, and now you’re interested in trying it yourself — despite how ridiculous you feel when you say the word “blog,” or when you try to imagine introducing yourself by saying: “I’m a blogger.”

Don’t feel bad. It is kind of a ridiculous word, when it gets right down to it. But it’s really just a tool, like a typewriter, or a computer. The word “blog” is just a term for what happens when you use a piece of software to publish your thoughts about a topic (or topics) on the Internet for others to read. Try telling friends “I’m a publisher,” and see how that feels.

For some reason, I had never thought of it as a tool, but as the end product, and this point of view sort of changes the philosophy of blogging in a way: it’s no longer about what you publish but about how you publish (ie, it’s the software you use, not what you’re writing about that defines you).

I had always been under the assumption that by blogging you are therefore a blogger (I blog therefore I am), and regardless of which software you choose to self-publish, it’s the content and the message that’s most important. The above kind of derails all of that, and moves thought about the internet back into pre-web 2.0 (and yes, I am loathe to use that terminology, but it fits dammit, it fits!) in the sense that stripping the content from the blog effectively reduces the software to yet another function of our digital world.

Not everyone who uses a typewriter is a writer, not everyone who uses a computer is a programmer, but everyone who blogs should be (if they are active) by definition a blogger. And why is it a ridiculous word? How is it any more ridiculous than ‘journalist’ other than the fact that the word’s etymology has had a few more hundred years to evolve.

Am I right? Or am I just being too sensitive on the morning after a time change when my brain is perhaps working in blogger overdrive. Or maybe it’s just another example of mainstream media trying to derail the whole concept of self-publishing by negating its very real ability to, ahem, make a point?