HW 14: Denton

In “Take the Obsession, Then Feed It!”, Denton recognizes the power and influence blogging can have on the business world. However, he says it is more of an evolution, than a revolution; that blogging did not “spring up suddenly in the last couple of years… in fact [there have been] some extremely successful independent media sites that have a lot of attributes of weblogs”. (Kline and Burstein 154)

Despite the fact that blogs have the potential to reach millions of people in an efficient, non-costly manner, the task of selecting out of the billions and billions of websites and blogs, both independent and main stream, that targets their particular customers, is an arduous task most large companies are not willing to take on. After all, there are other ways to advertise, that are tried and true.

Indeed blogging is taking communication to another level, but the idea of it completely taking out other forms of media is naïve: Denton has a passive look at the influence the Internet has on the Internet, and I completely agree with him. Although it is true that the main stream media tends to report events at an angle that best serves their investors, they are still the ones on the scene, and reporting first person accounts. So, blogging is just an interpretation of these accounts, and shouldn’t be depended on solely for getting information. To put bluntly, blogging is really an extension of main stream media, rather than a combative, opposing force.

However, something blogging has to offer that main stream media cannot is an opportunity for talented writers to get their word out, since it seems that “mediocre people end up getting jobs” due to “who [they] know and how well [they] can schmooze at parties”. (Kline and Burstein 152) So, blogging offers people a chance to exercise their creative energy and put it out there, and others to benefit; something they couldn’t do before.

To summarize, Denton expressed a lot of the same feelings have towards blogging and the Internet in general: It is simply a tool, not the end-all to human interaction and communication.