I find it fascinating at times at the sense of self importance that permeates this little tech world we live in as bloggers. With words like co-presence, new media, self regulating environment. With self-important concepts like Cluetrain Manifesto, blogger code of conduct and the inevitable A-List. It is with these things that we build ourselves a world within a world.

The reality is though that outside of our little insular world of blogs and co-presence what we do has no importance. To your average neighbor Justin is just some weird guy walking around with a camera attached to his body, blogs are just another confusing computer term and the cluetrain might just as well be the mid-afternoon commuter train in any major metropolitan city.

Things like citizen journalism might be shaking up the business world of media but to Mr. or Mrs Average Citizen it’s just another method that the media provides them with the news. They don’t care about the how or the why. They don’t care about the technology or the raging battle going on in the boxing ring between old style journalists and those frisky new kids on the block sporting fancy websites with constantly updated streams of news and rumours. No .. for the average person on the street the news is still what they see on the television and read in the paper - how it gets there doesn’t matter one iota.

Even within this little world of blogging we see divisions of ideals and concepts. Where in the tech bubble we see high browed discussions of old guard vs new kids and squabble about the existence of something called an A-List we also have other circles of interest that couldn’t care less about our delusions of self-importance.

Where we toss around the ethics of conduct and the reality of ranks there are sections of the blogosphere like the poli-sphere where they snicker at terms like A-List and prefer to keep count of the bodies left bloodied in the comment sections of their battlefields. Where the tech-sphere might be looked upon as the gentile uncle the poli-sphere would closer resemble the hard drinking brawling cousin that no-one likes to admit is a member of the family. All the while the rest of the family looks at both of them as mild curiosities to be put up with.

We; bloggers in general and tech bloggers specifically, like to think that what we are doing will have a profound effect on the way our society moves forward. We like to think that things like a guy with a camera strapped to his body or being able to watch Robert Scoble ramble on while his wife drives their car down some highway is the forebearer of great things to come. 

The truth of the matter is that for the person worrying about making next month’s rent or being able to pay their child’s doctor bill without bankrupting themselves none of this has or ever will matter. If anything the poli-sphere for all it’s partisanship and bloodied knuckles is far more relevant to our daily lives than any post of thoughtful consideration from the tech-sphere.

As Rob Hyndman eloquently put it in a post recently

Last point. Unless I completely missed my aim in this post, it ought to be obvious that I’ve been mightily unimpressed with the geek-’sphere lately. Call it a growing feeling that it’s largely irrelevant. I’m not saying that I think that the existence of the ’sphere itself doesn’t matter - it’s obviously a profoundly important development - a sea-change - in media. That’s at the heart of why I’m involved in mesh. I just think that most of the discussions on the tech side of it are trivial. And, not really true conversations, but mostly efforts by folks to brand themselves as experts, for their own purposes. PR, really. And I’m getting tired of reading through my tech feeds and feeling like I just ate a boatload of empty calories.

Sure it is nice to be able to write about things we are passionate about but there is a very fine line between being relevant and being the boring old uncle puffing on a pipe in an wingback chair by the fireplace. The tech-sphere walks this line on a daily basis but fails to see that in its puffery of self-importance that people have stop listening - if they were even listening in the first place.

Conversation Tags: blogs, blogging, bloggers, technology, self-importance