Joe Carter wonders about the future of standalone blogs.
A few days ago, I received a press release for GodblogCon, the annual gathering of Christian bloggers. The September 20-21 meeting in Las Vegas (it is scheduled to coincide with the mainstream BlogWorld and the New Media Expo) will feature several prominent Christian bloggers, like Tall Skinny Kiwi's Andrew Jones, La Shawn Barber, and ScrappleFace satirist Scott Ott.
But at the top of the list, the press release mentioned that a key speaker would be "Joe Carter, the Christian blogosphere's very own Bono." Carter, formerly of Family Research Council, World Magazine, The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the Mike Huckabee campaign, The East Texas Tribune, and the U.S. Marine Corps, is perhaps best known as the creator of EvangelicalOutpost.com.
The five-year-old site became one of the most prominent evangelical blogs and was in many ways as influential on its own as several of the organizations on Carter's resume. (Not too many Christian bloggers' views on bioethics have been profiled by The Washington Post.)
But there's a new wrinkle. Carter is no longer speaking at GodBlogCon, and is no longer blogging at EvangelicalOutpost.com.
And according to a farewell post on Evangelical Outpost, Carter wonders about the future of independent sites like his.
"The future of the new media, in my opinion, is moving away from personal sites toward online collectives that are focused on particular interests," he wrote. "The political left has been doing this for years (see: DailyKos) but the other areas of the blogging community have been slow to follow this approach. ? [T]he future of online activity will move to ?planned communities' rather than, for example, the ?ghettos' that Christian bloggers have been trying to break out of for years."
I wonder how that will go over at GodBlogCon, where the emphasis in recent years has been on personal sites rather than corporate blogs. (Carter has some more thoughts in an interview at Justin Taylor's hugely popular independent Christian blog, Between Two Worlds.)
Carter isn't giving up on blogging, though. His new outpost is one of those "planned communities" and "online collectives." Carter is managing editor of Culture11.com, launched by former White House staffers Bill Bennett and David Kuo with David Gelernter. And he's blogging with Kuo. (Though the title of the new blog, "Kuo & Joe, may be a massive misnomer: Carter's posts significantly outnumber those from Kuo, who says he's keeping his Beliefnet blog alive.)
Evangelical Outpost will stick around, too. Carter handed the keys off to Biola University's Torrey Honors Institute, which is the main sponsor of GodBlogCon.
share thisPosted by Ted Olsen on September 11, 2008 12:47PM
Comments
I really regret that Joe made this decision. Evangelical Outpost was one of the few individual bloggers I found worth reading. I often thought the organizations that hired him wanted access to his voice on that blog as much as anything else. It will be great if Culture 11 succeeds, but I'll be sorry to see the old EO give way to something new.
Posted by: Hunter Baker at September 11, 2008
I used to look at the Evangelical Outpost blog. I am glad to see that Joe Carter has left the Family Research Council-this only increases my respect for him.
Posted by: John at September 13, 2008
I know many of the new bloggers at EO personally (I just graduated from Biola University this past May), and I can say with confidence that they will do Joe proud (after all, he wouldn't have handed off his blog to just anyone).
Who better to keep the EO alive than the people responsible for GodBlogCon?
Posted by: David N. at September 14, 2008
I do think that there will be plenty of good bloggers swept into the issue-oriented sites, or aggregation sites. But when old media profit motives and ideas of scale take over, there will still be room for strong, clear, unique voices.
Unfortunately, I don't see the difference between "planned communities" and "Christian ghettos."
Posted by: mark at September 16, 2008
Joe is confusing political community with ecclesial community. Good politics is built on a consensus of the masses, hence the rise of centralized virtual collectives (e.g., Huffington Post). Such collectives are more about promoting ideological uniformity than spiritual community.
Alas, centralized/group ecclesial blogs are often a reflection of the religious-institutional thinking from which we are trying to break free.
Individual blogs are not sustained in isolation. "Stand-alone bloggers" are in fact the earliest participants in a new kind of emerging global community. Joe and others are trying to squeeze the old models of religious community into a profoundly new model of social networking.
Individual blogs are a new expression of ecclesia. They present an alternative to inherited religious hierarchy and organically connect individuals to one another without institutional mediation.
Over the next few generations, I think we’ll see the "professional religious class" being largely displaced by the collective intelligence of a new “virtual ecclesia” - every individual sharing freely their dreams and faith without structural mediation.
Individual bloggers may not appear to be influencing much of anything. But such thinking misses the essence of emergence theory. There is a participative community emerging - and it's not limited to blogs. New communication tools will continue to accelerate this shift in social networking (e.g., Twitter, etc.). This grand ecclesial reformation has just begun, and will continue to change our understanding of leadership, spirituality, and church.
Posted by: john L at September 17, 2008
Ummmm.... why in the world would this conference be held in Las Vegas? Take a bunch of (mostly) guys who work with their computers all day, and throw them into Vegas - and a third of them will be in porn addiction recovery groups by Christmas.
How about Des Moines?
Posted by: Rick H at September 19, 2008
Joe is back at EO as co-senior editor with a team of bloggers:
http://evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/2009/05/the-new-evangelical-outpost.html
Posted by: Myrrh C. at June 13, 2009
Post a comment