Blogging the live fantastic

Along with the preponderance of 'ubiquitous' wireless technology, we've witnessed a shift in the way that information can be shuttled around the planet. Predictably, a shift in methodology is resulting in a metamorphosis of the products of reportage.

Liveblogging is the new, hot phenomenon - in much the same way that everyone had to rush out and sign up for a YouTube account last year if they didn't already have one. Post-"broadcast yourself" we've moved into the next phase: "broadcast everything." For the past several years I've, sadly, sat up late at night and followed some tech conferences as lines of text would drip listlessly over my modem. For me, liveblogging was the opportunity to be somewhere "live." Alas, I wasn't really a part of these conferences. Moreover, I knew I could wait until the next morning, when I'd be able to just watch a video of the said event.

This year, however, conferences like Macworld supposedly 'crashed the blogosphere' because so many people decided that they would now be the liveblogger du jour. One has to wonder whether a thousand voices are really necessary when they're pretty much saying the same thing? In the past we had radio commentary for political and sports events, because we weren't able to see or hear them live. The art of commentary evolved into television, as words to accompany wordless actions, like a ball flying toward the crowd, or a wedding procession, or an inarticulate F1 vehicle hurtling towards a hairpin bend. But liveblogging is not limited to discussion of wordless actions - it can actually be commentary superimposed on commentary. Even time-honored institutions like The New York Times are now experimenting with the form for events such as the Democratic Debate.

With the mass activation of legions of citizen journalists, is the face of reading and writing changing? Although liveblogging may appeal to the desire for narrative and immediacy, could it also be a less efficient, less articulate method of acquiring information, when so much infobloat already exists? Any middle school student should be able to tell you how to take narrative or sequence, and fold it back up into summary and synthesis. But liveblogging isn't about synthesising - it's all about capturing the moment.

Obviously there's a place for liveblogging in 2008, but I have to wonder whether having it as a discrete stream of information, divorced from what it's commentating on, is really where liveblogging is heading. If I actually had a live video feed of a political debate with a liveblog superimposed with additional information it might be more compelling - or more relevant.

However, maybe this is where I've missed the relevance of liveblogging, because its current potential might be measured more accurately by what's accessible, rather than what's possible. Several years ago I chatted with the Kelly brothers, creators of the Internet TESL Journal, in Nagoya, Japan. Their website looks like something from the dawn of the Internet, but they explained this to me in very simple terms - no unnecessary graphics, no unnecessary bloat, because their prime concern was ensuring that the content was accessible to as many people around the world as possible - regardless of bandwidth.

It's so easy to forget that not so many years ago our laptops were tethered to physical wires, and that our access to the Internet could be mind-numbingly sluggish. As usual, the information rich have forgotten that the information poor are not playing by the same rules. So despite your cable TV and your broadband Internet, liveblogging is still the closest thing that someone, somewhere can get to some very real experiences.

Image by Sue Richards. Some Rights Reserved.