Twitter is having much more fuss about the governance issue (typical participatory), Youtube and Facebook much more with censorship charges (typical broadcast).
The point is that a participatory medium operates on the basis of norms, but otherwise on individual controls the content. With a broadcast medium, there is a definite owner who can control the content. (The comment credits this distinction to Clay Shirky.)
participatory discourse is really what online technology created. Online forums have moderators, but aren’t “owned” in the same way. The owner can’t control what is published and have only a binary control over who can participate.
So something like the old Usenet news groups were not under an individual’s control. But when I put something on YouTube or on a blog, it is under my control.
This is a valid distinction, but only up to a point. If you look at the blogosphere as a whole, it is participatory. I can censor my blog, but I can’t censor yours. Especially in its heyday, blogging meant participating in a conversation. The trackback feature contributed to that, until it was spammed to death. I still think of blogging as more closely resembling newsgroups, not cable TV.
“If you look at the blogosphere as a whole, it is participatory.”
I’d have to disagree with that, primarily because there is no “blogosphere”. Your blog and my blog are no more part of one thing than CBS and NBC are. One can’t censor the other, but they are still broadcast.
I know that in the early days of blogging, when there were relatively few of them around, it seemed like completely ordinary people were able to become famous. But in fact, even in the earliest days of blogging, analysts had observed that popularity followed the power curve law, meaning that there were tons of blogs that had no attention, and so there was no way of directly and publicly engaging in conversation or drawing attention of a powerful blogger. No one can participate as equals with the blog owner *on his own blog*. But on Twitter, we can participate as equals. Followers matter, of course, but I am *both* a publisher to my followers and directly able to participate as equals in conversations with others–who may or may not respond or even read, of course, but the process is the same. That’s why Twitter gets the complaints of a sort that Facebook never does.
So yeah, blogs are very much like those do it yourself cable channels. That doesn’t make them bad.
For most of my online life, I’ve been a big fan of participatory communication. But as a writer, I very much appreciate the control of a blog.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit blog (more of a link-blog) has an column in _USA Today_ about deleting his Twitter account and why he has concluded that Twitter is poisonous. Worth a read. h/t Instapundit, which is his blog.