Flog that blog

I read a lot of blogs. I mean a lot. And for the most part the ones I read are informative and give me a perspective on things that I would not necessarily have thought about. 

But there is a lot of crap out there. I mean a lot! 

You don’t need to be an expert to be a blogger; you just have to have an opinion. But the fact is: you need to remember when you’re reading a blog that it’s just that. It’s somebody’s opinion about something that they are not necessarily an expert in, or that they’ve had any experience in or researched it in any way. They’re just observations. And it must be acknowledged as that.  

And many of these people go around claiming: “I’m a food blogger or I’m a fashion blogger” and expect free clothes, meals and goodie bags. And that might also be fine on some level because you’ve got twenty thousand people following your blog, but the question that really needs to be asked is: “What makes you an expert?” or “What makes your opinion relevant that people are listening to it?” For me it’s all about the way that opinion is presented. Is it interesting? Is it novel? 

People are now using blogs as currency. This is also fine to the extent that things can’t always stay the way they were. The Internet and social media has revolutionised our world and so there are people who make their living doing things today that didn’t exist fifty years ago. And not to take anything away from professional photographers out there, but before digital photography, there were people making a pretty good living taking amateur pictures. And there are clearly people making a living by blogging. I don’t think we necessarily need to be too conservative about these things; they have their place. 

So without being too high-brow about it, in the hierarchy of journalism, many of these bloggers are probably like the bottom feeders. For the most part, they scrounge off the detritus of the main news stories. For the most part. There are of-course many good bloggers out there. 

Let me give you an example. A man recently posted something on a local on-line news board to say that he was relocating and his domestic worker as a result would no longer have employment. So he posted a very lovely resume of hers saying she was an amazing domestic worker and all the rest of it, and he was hoping, through this platform, to find her work. 

And some young girl, I assume she’s a journalism student, wrote on the Mail and Guardian’s Thought Leader, a diatribe about the commoditisation of domestic work and how you can’t buy, swap and sell these domestic workers, which actually isn’t what the man was doing. But this blogger was claiming that he was treating his domestic worker as a commodity that could be sold. The man was quite reactionary and slammed back with the fact that if it wasn’t for B.E.E he and his domestic worker would still have employment and so on. And so began the heated exchange of comments on this blog. 

The Thought Leader allows pretty much anybody to post material on there. So you can post your thought piece on that platform and I don’t know whether there’s an editorial process where they look at it for acceptability and publish it, but this was quite a “chip-on-the-shoulder” kind of blogger trying to be pseudo-intellectual. 

The thing is: she posted the man’s original post and mentioned him by name as an example of the point she was trying to make, which is a prime example of being a bottom feeder. These are the kinds of people who scour social media looking for things to write about. I mean, what is she doing to make the lives of domestic workers better? She’s just sitting there in her ivory tower throwing out all this intellectual mumbo-jumbo about an issue she knew little about. 

I’m not naive; these conversations need to be had. But for example Code for South Africa, a non-profit organisation that visualises data, did a fantastic website The Living Wage Calculator, and what it does is it takes the individual stories of domestic workers in Cape Town and surrounds and looks at them against the aggregate demographic of their community. So they will say something like: Princess is a domestic worker who works in Camps Bay and she lives in Kyelitsha. The average household income for people who live in Kyelitsha is X amount of money. They then go through a whole process of how much you pay  your domestic worker, put it on a sliding scale per day and documents the average cost of living for a person living in her area and calculates whether you’re over-paying or under-paying your worker. 

So if you want to pontificate on a blog about, say, unfair labour practices for domestic workers for example, there are more constructive ways to do it. And picking up a thread, like I did, from an organisation like Code for South Africa that took real data from real people, would endear a writer to a reader a lot more than some random opinion not based in fact, and attacking somebody without having all the facts. 

I think as a society, we need to be a lot more conscious of the kinds of things that we do and what the meaning is in the bigger picture of our history and where we’ve come from. And we need to be a lot more constructive. 

The thing about bloggers is that it’s all about personal opinion and personal experience. So in terms of journalistic integrity, the best practices of journalism like the right to reply and so on are not necessarily imposed. There’s no editorial process here like there is in the mainstream media. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but at least there’s an accountability; there’s an ombudsman, a complaints commission and other structures in place that allow somebody to deal with that kind of libel or slander. Whether it’s legally libellous and slanderous remains a question for a lawyer, but with bloggers, where is the structure? It’s just some person with a platform. 

They may be very successful and have a hundred thousand readers, which means whatever they say is taken as gospel without any recourse and this alarms me. And everyone and their dog now seems to have a blog; all you need is a computer and a Google account and off you go. Sometimes, of-course, you might be screaming into the abyss because there’s nobody listening, but other times you could be very successful. Famous bloggers like Perez Hilton started off in a coffee shop slagging off Hollywood celebrities and he’s now probably one of the most well-known bloggers in the world.  

Personally, I take things that I read on a blog with a huge dose of salt. People want to control public opinion, which is something you can’t do. But you can manage it. You can respond to things; and how you respond will be what determines the outcome. You can be a reactionary and get all incensed with your nose out of joint about things and invariably these things just disappear into the ether. Or you can actually ground your opinions in fact not fiction.

Are you a consumer of blogs? You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and interact with him there.