Power to the people

It could be a new world or just a massive attack of insomnia: KS peers into the blogoverse as seen from Kansai.

The trouble began long before the whole male prostitution thing even came up.

After asking a rather loaded question — “How are you going to work with [Democratic Party leaders] who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” — to US President George Bush during a January White House press conference, Talon News reporter and White House press room mainstay Jeff Gannon suddenly found his journalism bona fides challenged by a group of intrepid reporters.

Among the revelations to follow were: Jeff Gannon not actually having any journalism bona fides to speak of; Jeff Gannon not being part of any press outfit before beginning work in the White House press room; and Jeff Gannon's former employer, Talon News, specializing less in “news” than in — here, literally — cutting and pasting administration press releases. And then a bit about Jeff Gannon's name not actually being “Jeff Gannon,” but James Daniel Guckert.

And then, finally, stories about Guckert advertising his services on the Internet as a $200-an-hour gay male escort. (Nude sample photos included.)

So here's the weird part: the aforementi-oned “intrepid reporters” on the case didn't come from CNN or the BBC or any traditional news outlet — but from Media Matters for America, a fairly low-profile news blog “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” (The story kicked off when Media Matters offered side-by-side comparisons of White House press releases and Guckert's obviously-plagiarized stories for Talon News.)

And though the ever twisting-and-turning Gannon/Guckert saga is fairly anomalous as far as blog-uncovered scandals go, it is perhaps indicative of the raw, awesome outreach abilities that blogs now have.

From fringe obsession to worldwide phenomenon in less than a decade, blogs represent the laissez-faire, all-are-equal vision of a global Internet perhaps better than anything else. It's been estimated that the daily number of people reading other peoples' online musings on politics, recipes, travel guides etc. is scratching into the hundreds of millions, and that a new blog is created somewhere in the world every 5.76 seconds. Happily, many of these are created right here in Osaka.

“Officially, it's a way for my friends and family to keep up with what I'm doing in Japan,” said Jerry Leung from jvision.ca.

“I can post anecdotes and adventures about Japan and then have responses and queries through comments. I like putting up pictures taken from my keitai to show how fascinating and weird Japan can be.”

That aura of fascinating weirdness has, perhaps, done more than anything else to compel writers and artists to talk about Japan, with local bloggers only picking up where writer Lafcadio Hearn (long ago) and film-maker Sofia Coppola (more recently) left off.

“[Aspects of daily life] is where people blogging their lives abroad, and most defini-tely in Japan, have an advantage,” said Simon from Undercover in Japan.

“Every single day presents a new challenge or experience for me and therefore a potentially interesting topic for me to blog about which will interest any number of readers. Living in a large and vibrant city in the Kansai region gives me — in my opinion — more of these opportunities: I've blogged about everything from dangerous danjiri riders and my all-day jaunt to the recent sumo tournament in Osaka to shark fin soup and takoyaki I've eaten.

“You publish your innermost thoughts to be read by as many people as are interested,” Simon continues. “Without a computer you would hide those thoughts away in a drawer under lock and key in a diary. It is also highly addictive.”

Here now is the question often raised about bloggers: just who are these people writing for? Where some see community and communication and a valuable tool for getting info to the folks back home, others may also see self-centered, purely reflexive solipsism — a venue for “showing off,” as Gregg from Japan-based blog Greggman.com puts it.

“I know people don't like to admit it, but basically bloggers all want attention. If they didn't, there would be no reason to make their blog public; they could just write in a personal journal.”

Even so, says Gregg, “I would say the biggest reasons I still blog include sharing stuff I think other people might not have seen yet, and putting my ideas and thoughts about various topics out. I believe that lots of people haven't really thought a good many topics through, and that maybe with a few more examples or ideas presented, they'll come to a better understanding.

“Of course, it's probably usually me that needs to better understand, but my Comments [section] helps with that.”

This perhaps sums up the viewpoint of major news blogs like the aforementioned Media Matters, Daily Kos or Instapundit, pre-senting their own thoughts and ideas to a huge daily audience perhaps feeling as though traditional media has devolved into an endless, nattering whirlwind of celebrity-stroking, wildly inaccurate sensationalism — the novelty being that people sick of hearing about Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo on CNN actually do have somewhere else to go now.

“Albert Camus once suggested the idea of a “control newspaper” that would appear every evening to correct the errors and biases of the morning papers,” said Joe Conason, writer for the online magazine Salon.

“That is what the best news bloggers try to do on a 24-hour basis. They provide an outsider critique — often with a strong ideological slant, an idiosyncratic personal voice, or both — that is by definition unavailable in the traditional media. In a society where corporate media have grown to dominate democratic institutions and processes, that is becoming an essential function.”

“I think people get a human perspective on situations from blogs,” said Baghdad-based blogger Riverbend, whose often-harrow-ing online missives received massive attention in the run-up to (and ongoing conflagration in) Gulf War II.

“It's easy to read about a certain situation — a battle, explosion, war, blockade on the news and swiftly put it in the back of your mind. But when you read a real account from a blog, you sort of live through the situation and it stays in your head a little bit longer. It gives you a closer view of reality than a mere article by a foreigner can give.”

Which, of course, brings us back to blogging in Japan, and the views of reality that the foreigners here do give. For whatever reasons people take up blogging — fame (imfany?), boredom, arrogance etc. —- the end result is the spreading of information. And that, in itself, is never a bad thing.

“I blog about four-character compounds and the 24-section Sino-Japanese calendar because I think they're cool,” said No-Sword blogger Matt. “I blog about Japanese books and CDs because I want my favorite authors and musicians to be Google-able in English, and also because I want to recommend them to fellow resident foreigners who might otherwise not even know they exist.

“Apparently, I originally started blogging because I wanted to embarrass the future me by littering the web with foolish juvenilia,” Matt continues. “But nowadays, I blog because I love Japan and I want to share its many wonders with the world, especially the cool stuff that would otherwise remain hidden behind language barriers — real or imagined.”

Links:
• Mediamatters.org
• Jvision.ca
• Undercover in Japan: quaisi.blogspot.com
• Greggman.com
• Salon.com
• Riverbendblog.blogspot.com
• No-sword.jp/blog
• And, of course, jeffgannon.com.

Text: Jeff Lo