BlogUP!

BlogUP! was going to be the blog of a research project I dreamt up called The Estate Number Five Project, with the aim to investigate how the Australian blogosphere could increase its engagement with the public, and its influence on those institutions that shape the Australian public’s experience. The project aimed to look into the international blogosphere for inspiration, with an aim to bring the knowledge back here.

There was going to be a wiki involved, where a dynamic bloggers’ manifesto would have grown. For now, it’s just BlogUP!, but the above aims remain.

We’ve already had a go with the fourth estate, and that appears to be letting us down. If the blogosphere isn’t effective in its contribution to the fifth estate, we will need to try another estate – estate number six, etc., etc., ad infinitum/nauseum. I don’t think anyone wants this to happen, but it will if we just keep blundering along under the pressure of such rapid technological and political developments.

It’s important to remember that blogs are not alone in the fifth estate. The fifth estate comprises all manner of institutions that are stepping up to replace an ailing fourth estate. My understanding of the fourth estate is based on the writing of Thomas Carlyle, which is best and most often summarised by the below quote, from On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History. As you read, consider replacing ‘printing’ with ‘blogging’. It’s quite long, but I haven’t heard anyone say it better.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,­–very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there. Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.

The title, BlogUP!, is derived from the Simpson episode where the Springfield community tried to rescue Bart after he fell down a well, only to find they were then stuck at the bottom: when someone asked how they were going to get out of there, someone else said, ‘We’ll dig our way out!’ When the community started digging, another person cried, ‘No no! Dig UP!’ I think it was Chief Wigam.

I have plans for this blog to develop into a collaborative, community hub, with guest bloggers, interviews and of course commenting and contributions to the wiki that still exists, but which is not attached the blog, for now. By clarifying and crystallising blogging practises and princples, we can develop the burgeoning online social media scene that is working to pull us out of the hell-shaped media landscape that’s represented by much of Australia’s MSM: we’ll blog our way out!