One blogs for many reasons, some narcissistic, others desperate. But there are also really good reasons for blogging, and there are historically important reasons why blogs have emerged as a major force in our global mediaplex. Put simply, blogs now take up the slack left by the shrinking news media. Done right, blogs form the underpinnings of a rebirth of the fourth estate in spite of the downsizing, syndication and general abdication of the historical role of news media as a pillar of civil society.

News media have lost their capacity for research and extended investigative reporting, both from a resource and a programming perspective. Research resources have been cut for the sake of efficiency and profitability. The content previously produced by local research budget and personel is replaced by syndicated content. This shrinks the pool of information, removes relevant local content, valorizes the opinion of national editors more likely to sympathize with elites, and generalizes our experience of the news.

Programming in general has been changed to reflect the changing structure of attention of today’s disposable income-endowed target audiences. This means more messages of shorter duration at a faster rate. Its now all about the “flow”. This makes for more tabloid-style programming that focusses on sensational content, especially video clips. Local news is increasingly subsumed in national media orgies around the shock du jour.

Being carried along in the flow is a passive state of mind. It is not the same state of mind that seeks answers to questions via in-depth reporting, which was the reason for turning on the news, once upon a time. People who seek those answers now turn to the Internet. Some read alternative news websites. Some read blogs and superblogs. Others actively participate in research, digging out facts on their own using the myriad of research tools available to them and then post their findings in comments, dairies, or their own blogs, which then get linked into the emerging infoscape called Web 2.0. And it is Web 2.0 that spurs on the traditional media when the time is right, such as during the hours and days after Katrina. As Al Gore said in his speech today:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.

In fact there was a time when America’s public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

I believe Web 2.0 has emerged not simply because the technology has structured and enabled its emergence, but because there is an absence that feeds a need for it. It is a Civil Society imperative that mandates the emergence of Web 2.0. This imperative was largely met by traditional news media, prior to the Internet. News delivered via traditional means was an important facet of our collective diagnosis of our democracy. If we felt we were informed about the issues of the day, we left well enough alone or acted accordingly.

It is different today. We are more compartmentalized in our domestic units, kept behind locked doors for fear of the outside world and its many impending disasters or violences. Our information is genericised and localised only to service a commercial imperative.

I am a firm believer in units of consciousness and subjectvity larger than the individual. Robinson Crusoe is an impoverished being, less than human. When Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society, she wished that impoverishment on us all. Web 2.0 is not primarily driven by the technology. The technology is not the élan vital of it. The technology (or previous iterations of it) may be responsible in part for its emergence.

MacLuhan was right to an extent in saying the Medium is the Message. The Web 2.0 platform will structure our expression, communications, knowledge and dissent in the near future. And it will impact on the remaining news media and political parties as well. There is a message there for us as we think about the future of activism.

However, it is that spark of yearning for the truth of our collective existence that lights Web 2.0 like a christmas tree. Another future would find only another expression of it.