January 15th, 2004, 1:42 am

An interview with Douglas Kellner

Following is a transcript of an interview conducted yesterday with UCLA professor and media guru Douglas Kellner, who is on the forefront of the blogging revolution. After some preliminaries… LF: How would you describe the culture of blogging to someone who is internet-savvy, but unfamilar with the trend?

DK: It’s a combination of presenting links to stories that people think are important, with commentary. It grew out of listservs. People would construct a listserv, and then just send articles to friends, etc. So half of it would be the listerv. The other half would be websites and personal diaries, where people just starting putting their diaries on the web, and blogs combine the two. It combines a commentary - some people put a lot of personal stuff on their blogs - with links that would connect a reader to information that people think the reader should have. So it’s basically aggregating a lot of information and commentary. Generally on specific themes. Different blogs have different focuses - politics, or ecology, or movies, or restaurants … so whatever the topic that’s being blogged is - it has now expanded to just about everything.

LF: I don’t know know if you’d be able to answer this question, but would you be able to guesstimate how many blogs are out there?

DK: You know, I really don’t know. I would say over a million. In the last two years, they’ve been doubling just about every few months. You know, going from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to probably over a million now. And there are so many, I just don’t know. You might be able to get an answer from the Blogger Pro people.

LF: Yeah, I also found BlogCount… but it’s hard to get an authentic…

DK: Right, right. I’ve read from time to time, and I’m just astounded, how they’ve grown.

LF: “They” meaning …

DK: The number of blogs, the number of hits on blogs.

LF: I noticed from your blog, BlogLeft, that you’ve been blogging for about two years. So, you’ve been doing this for a while. When do you think that blogging is going to hit its stride, and become sort of a mainstream, respected source of news?

DK: It tends to correlate with social crises. So after 9/11, there was a magnum jump in blogs. They were mainly sort of patriotic blogs, and war blogs. And then, when Iraq emerged, it sort of divided into pro- and anti-war. So you’ve actually had a proliferation of anti-Bush blogs. So I think in the next election, there’s going to be a major proliferation in the role of blogs. Now, most of the candidates are using blogs. But there’s now thousands of anti-Bush blogs. I got, the other day, a list of anti-Bush blogs, and it took five minutes to download, there were so many. It was fairly astonishing how much energy [chuckling] people put in. Which is making me wonder … Now when we started to do it, we were one of the few (BlogLeft) anti-Bush sources. So there was obviously a purpose, and now that there are thousands of them, it raises some questions … just how many … But we do get thousands of hits a day, and we get email all the time from people thanking us, and contributing. For myself, it helps me with my research. I’ve been writing books on media and politics, so it provides a research database, you know, with links and commentary.

LF: That’s what I use mine for too.

DK: So yeah,

LF: I noticed that your “Post [a Comment link] says “Support Democracy! Comment!” So of course I have to ask, What is the function of blogging in a democracy?

DK: Well, it’s to provide information, but also discussion and debate. One of the key conditions of having a democracy is having informed citizens. So if the mainstream media is not giving the information that people need to know, you know, about Bush or Cheney, the Iraq policy, economics, or any topic, globalization - then you have to inform people so they can become good citizens. That’s one of the things that blogs do - they have an information function that helps promote democracy. But democracy is also a discussion, debate, dialogue. So the blog site has room for discussion and dissenting views, it’s also promoting democracy. That would be another dimension of this.

LF: You’ve written in, and this is a paper with Richard Kahn, Internet Subcultures and Political Activism, that one was really on topic for what I’m writing, and you mention in there the demise of the online ‘zine. And I was wondering, what makes blogging more likely to succeed.

DK: Well, I think it is the intensity of politics. Again, it’s things like 9-11, like Iraq, like an election, that people have strong feelings about. That really gets people involved, that’s issues politically. And some people, I guess, Richard Kahn is really into vegan. And he has a vegan blog. Others are into animal rights, or gay and lesbian, or whatever. So the things that people are into, you know, they just devote a lot of intention to building community, circulating information, you know, positioning themselves within a community.

LF: Going back to the intensity of politics, do you think that the blogging phenomenon wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have things that were intense like 9-11 and Anti-Bush fever that’s been going on?

DK: Well, I think it would happen, but it wouldn’t have the political edge that it now does. One of the sources of blogging was personal diaries, people compiling movie commentaries, restaurant commentaries, so I think that would have happened without any politics, this kind of blog. But the amount and the intensity of the political blog is clearly related to the issues - Yeah, there’s big issues out there: 9-11, and terrorism, and Iraq, and war and peace, and the election.

LF: Moving to news aggregators, if you could speak to the importance of this technology? How do I - cause I’m a huge fan, it’s completely changed the way I think - how do I tell my readers that?

DK: It’s also democratic in that it provides a tremendous variety and diversity of sources and opinions, that democracy involves many sides of the dialogue. And with the corporate media, at best you get the Democrats and the Republicans. You know, this and that side. So you usually get two sides that are within a pretty narrow range of views. And so blogs - and the Internet in general - give you everything. There’s a tremendous variety and diversity. And also, a tremendous amount of information sources; like BlogLeft gives you the top British papers as well as U.S., news magazines, and commentary from all over the world. Things that you just wouldn’t get from Time Magazine, or the New York Times.

LF: Well, that leads me into a bigger question then … do you think that blogging in conjunction with RSS levels the playing field in terms of the media conglomerates?

DK: I would not say … OK, I know exactly where you are coming from. One of the arguments that Michael Powell gives as to why you don’t need to have any regulations, any restrictions on ownership, etc. is because of diversity, etc. BUT the fact of the matter is that the playing field has not been leveled. Actually, I’m surprised that the fulcrum of politics continues to be the mainstream media, and particularly the television networks. This is the case with the 2000 election, 9-11, Iraq: It’s still the mainstream media that are the arbitrators. They are the big players. So it matters very much what goes on television. All the things we’re talking about, you don’t get on television. So this does not level the playing field. It creates new playing fields, or new terrains. But it is absolutely overwhelmed by the intensity and the importance of television. I mean some of us, including myself, thought about ten years ago, that people would just naturally tune out of the networks, and go to the Internet, because there is so much more and more interesting stuff. But this just hasn’t happened.

LF: Why not?

DK: In part, the Internet continues to be a relatively elite technology that people in the higher education and income brackets use it most proficiently. It it may be just easier. Television has affected us: it’s a vegetation medium as well as an information. Longevity; people are just used to it. It’s a habit.

LF: You’ve been studying this for as many years as I’ve probably been alive. So I know you have a lot of perspective … Where do you see the future going with these technologies?

DK: You’re going to have a fusion between computers and television. This is something that some of us thought would have happened by now - it would have happened more than it has. But I think that it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. I mean, you have TiVo, and these video recorders, that to some extent computerize and also expand. I mean, I have about a thousand meta cable channels here in LA. We have this Direct TV satellite, and it’s unbelievable how many channels we have. But still the Internet is the best news source, just because of the print publications you can get. So there is still a division between print and video.

LF: Could you expand on that a little bit?

DK: Well, print being newspapers and blogs, and a lot of the Internet material, websites for instance. There’s a declining number of people in this society that are really print literate. That the majority of people get their news and information lite, from TV. And unfortunately, the Internet has not reversed this. So that would be another explanation of why the playing field is not leveled, and why TV will continue to be big. But I think there will be ever more people, as more people become information- and Internet-literate, and they are just used to getting their information off the Internet from the time that they are little kids, that eventually there’s going to be more people going to the Internet. And there’s also a a production thing. Like blogging, you’re active, as opposed to passive. Even choosing what Internet websites to go to … it’s more choice than choosing what TV channel … there aren’t that many U.S. ones.

LF: But that will change.

DK: Probably. Actually, for many years, I lived in Austin, and I had a public access TV show for 18 years, so I thought access would be very big, and it would go Internet-fast, Internet-television. And that just hasn’t happened as fast and big as some of us thought.

LF: Why not?

DK: You know, I don’t really know. I think it’s just a question of resources and technolog, and people have to become literate in it. This is why, by the way, in terms of education, you see I’m a professor of education at UCLA, the key thing is teaching information, computer, media literacy. From an early age on.

LF: I guess this is a space-cadet question, but the way you see a lot of people in our country using the Internet; they use it through AOL. And they basically just go to the channels that pop up on their homescreen every day. And they really don’t reach out, and go someplace else. And it seems to be, that’s almost the passive way of using the Internet, just like the television thing.

DK: Yeah, I think that’s correct. There’s a mass media dimension of the Internet, and it is called AOL. You just described exactly what is very equivalent to television. Where you go up to a menu, and you click on this or that. And that is relatively passive.

LF: How do you make people view the Internet in a different way?

DK: Education. Once people are educated, trained … it’s a matter of practice. A lot of kids are much more creative and ambitious.

LF: What do you mean by that?

DK: You know, in terms of what they are doing on the Internet is more active and less passive. They’re creating their own sites, and their own stuff.

LF: Well, the piece I’m writing is kind of an education piece in that I want the reader to walk away armed with the knowlege on how to use the technologies, and get their own sources of information. In terms of the questions I’ve asked you so far, is there anything you would like to add that I didn’t talk about to get to my goal?

DK: You know, I think you hit the main bases. There’s a lot of material out there, and its up to people to - I would say that people have a democratic responsibilty to gain accurate and better information, and a broader range of opinion, and you do that through the blog. And you just have to start blogging. And you have to go to a few blogs. Most blogs list kindred blogs. So my site lists hundreds of blogs. So you may be reading one blog, and you have links to others, and you just check them out.

LF: Speaking of links, you have hundreds … If you could give a Top Five, or a primer, for people who are starting out …

DK: There’s one called American Samizdat, which is a compilation of different people, compiling commentary and links, etc … There’s one called Best of the Blogs, that’s a good one; Danny Schechter has one of the best media commentaries; Eric Alterman also has a very good one. A good jumping off point.