Suddenly, there’s a raft of blog posts pointing out changes in the blogosphere caused by its dumb lovechild, social networking. Some bloggers are even heading for the exit. Here’s a quick roundup :

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void make this interesting point about thought leadership, one of the traditional drivers of the tertiary blogosphere : “Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the ‘A-Listers’ having to act like ‘Hubs’ [or 'Human Social Objects', if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate ‘Who the Cool Kids are’ [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.!”

Robert Scoble has a go too : “One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.”

So traffic is moving from relatively coherent writerly patterns to the kind of bullet point messages we used to send in telegrams.

Rex Hammock highlights the dumb-down effect of social networking : “When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog.”

Goddam those writers, publishers and pundits! What do they know? Let’s all babble together!

David Jaffe, a games designer and blogger sighs : “I’m going to go dark. … For me, it’s always been silly, stupid fun…you know, giving what I get, talking like alot of folks on geeky message boards do, trash talking, etc.”

Is this a trend? Well, I’ve been writing this stuff for ages here on Syntagma — which ceased being a blog yonks since.

The catalyst for all this angst, of course, is the unstoppable rush to social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and now Pownce. Geeks genuinely feel they have to keep up with this trend or they’ll be left stranded behind the curve. Kids just have to do it or get confined to social outer darkness. All this crosses over the endless debates about “new media” (I prefer “popular media”) and the mainstream media, the future of newsprint … etcetera.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the medium matters less than we suppose, assuming it doesn’t carry some self-limiting factor, like 140-character max output range, in which case it’s unfit for most purposes.

For example, some newspapers incorporate an occasional poetry spot, where decent poets can publish their verses. Does that make the poet a journalist? If writers use blog platforms to publish the kind of article that could easily appear in a broadsheet paper or specialist magazine, does that make them bloggers?

The medium isn’t the message, the quality and form of the writing, or broadcasting is. Good reportage is just that, wherever it appears. So is commentary. So is any other form of expression. We’ve been confusing the medium with the message for too long — since Marshall Mcluhan in fact.

Nowadays, shopping lists, quick notes, annotations, reminders, and so on are rapidly becoming the discourse of choice in the online world. Even A-Listers are getting dragged into it. Coherence is losing out to the babble of Babel. Quality to quantity.

Rex Hammock talks of “the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit …” Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The idea that everyone has a novel in them, or could be a published author, was never a runner. In any originative profession, only 5 percent of aspiring entrants ever truly succeed. Some bloggers use their blogs as their identity, promoting consultancy work or their offline writing.

What particularly interests me is online content production. We shouldn’t confuse this with instant messaging, which is what the social networks are doing. You don’t IM an op-ed on world economic prospects.

Content production is done for two reasons :

1. As hobby, amateur production, fun.
2. As a professional activity aimed at financial returns.

People often start out as #1 practitioners then, if they think they’re good enough, they might move on to #2.

That’s where most of the people engaged in this debate are. They are pros in an increasingly amateurish media space. That’s why there are now dozens of books getting into print, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Andrew Keen’s tirade against the negative effects of popular media, The Cult of the Amateur.

The way to survive all this hype and arm-twisting is The Low Information Diet, severely limiting your consumption of news and gibberish, and concentrating ferociously on what matters to you. If it’s income you’re after, productivity and targeting are the keynotes of performance.

It’s true, though, that most of us like to sound off about this and that — join the “conversation”, as it’s called. But the conversation is largely spurious unless you’re doing it for genuine economic or social reasons, in which latter case you’d be better off in the real world.

If you’re an originative intellectual worker on the internet, discipline and focus are the watchwords. Anything else is professional suicide.