I have made this interview with Douglas Rushkoff in 2005. for the purpose of publishing in one computer magazine. Now, I’m publishing it on Emarketing Blog.
Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He sees “media” as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and “literacy” as the ability to participate consciously in it.
His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He has just finished a book for HarperBusiness, applying renaissance principles to today’s complex economic landscape, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. He’s now writing a monthly comic book for Vertigo called Testament.
You can find more info about Douglas Rushkoff on http://www.rushkoff.com
Dejan Bizinger: From 2002. blogs are hot topic. There was and there is much hype related to blogs. At one side many people still doesn’t know what blog is and on the other side blog was chosen for the best word for the previous year. Why are blogs important and for whom?
Douglas Rushkoff: Blogger, one of the original blogging tools, is really just an interface for making websites. The beauty of the web is that anyone can publish pages. The problem with the web is that many people don’t understand any html. And they don’t understand how sites are hosted, or how to make and maintain one.
Blogger allows anyone to create a web page very easily.
The people at Blogger, very correctly, assumed that most people creating personal web pages would want to be able to update a single page very easily. And that’s what blogs are - pages that are updated on a regular basis. So this tended to favor daily journals by individuals, or what have
become known as web logs.
So a “blog” has come to mean web log. What’s the difference between a web site and a web log? Not very much, except that a web log tends to be an individual’s journal or thoughts, and not, say, an e-commerce site. Blogger would not be a good tool for creating Amazon.com.
DB: Blogs were buzzword, now they are mainstream. It is now similar case with RSS and podcasting, they are still buzzwords. Do you think that RSS and podcasting will also become mainstream?
DR: Blogs are not mainstream, really. They are simply known about in the mainstream. This is because some major news stories were forced open by web logs. Matt Drudge’s page predates “blogs,” but really takes that form: an individual sharing his thoughts and observations, unregulated by a major media company. Because blogs can break stories and challenge major media coverage, they get coverage, themselves.
I think podcasting will become popular and well-known, because it is a very clever use of an existing device. RSS feeds are a more traditional use of the Internet - more like newsgroup readers. I think only the more advanced users - those of us who don’t really like the web so much as interface -
will be into them.
DB: Do you think that bloggers should include ads on their blogs and RSS feeds? Can this make an influence on their independence?
DR: Do I think they should? I think people should be nice to one another and not murder. Aside from things like that, I wouldn’t dictate to people what they should or shouldn’t do. All I would ever ask - and Americans still equate this view with communism - is that bloggers evaluate how posting
advertisements might influence the way they write. They must look at the reasons they write their blog, what they hope to get out of it, and whether turning it into a business will compromise their original goal.
Once a person is being paid for the number of hits his website gets, it can tend to influence the way he writes stories, and kinds of stories he writes. This is not a crime; it’s just a property of the media ecology.
If a blogger comes to depend on the income his blog generates, then this will in turn make the blog less completely independent of commercial influences. Again, I repeat for clarity: I am not making a value judgment on this. I simply want people to accept that turning a blog into a business is
a choice with repercussions.
The same is true for me: some books I write for free, others I write for money. Although I want the ones I write for money to be completely free of commercial influence, I can’t help but write differently when I have a boss to write for.
DB: Some people that became famous bloggers started working for some traditional media like newspapers. Do you think that there will be more and more similar cases?
DR: It may prove to be a kind of “minor league” for writers who want to become professional columnists, sure. In that sense it could make the editorial space more of a meritocracy. On the other hand, it may just lead to the most extreme and sensationalist writers getting into the newspapers. Sometimes, an editorial board is a better judge of columnnists than the public.
DB: Some people say that there is no money in blogs. If that so, how blogs became so commercial?
DR: Things can become very commercial without producing successful revenues. The web became very commercial, even though most businesses lost all their money. The United States is extremely commercial, even though it is now losing money.
DB: More and more CEOs and high-level executives start blogging. Do you think that this way of communication is better than a classic PR?
DR: “Better” is a tricky word. I think it is different than classic PR, and will probably prove the most effective when the CEO actually writes the blog instead of letting his blog-writer do it. George Bush doesn’t write his own blog, so what’s the point? If people don’t believe these are the real blogs
of these important executives, then they will be pretty useless.
DB: Please name several blogs that you read on a daily basis?
DR: None, really. I don’t have time to read blogs on a daily basis. I check in
weekly to a few of my best friends’, maybe, but usually just go to a blog if
I am emailed about a particular post.
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