Garblogging

Garbloggers

Garbloggers, like all environmental bloggers, are comprised of a range of people; stay-at-home parents, organic farmers, activists, scholars, historians, and artists all keep environmental blogs that include posts on garbage. Many of these blogs have hybrid content—bloggers repost conventional environmental journalism and photographs, as well as their own observations and photos.

Although the blogs differ in focus (some bloggers are interested in simplifying their lives for personal reasons, some are interested in critiquing the wasteful economy of planned obsolescence, many are interested in how one repurposes items to keep them out to the waste stream), almost all share an emphasis on linking the problem of garbage and waste to excessive consumption in the material world. They are also especially interested in discussing the impact of household choices on global issues, linking the personal form of the blog genre to the global effects of garbage.

Environmental Role

Garblogging's role in the environmental movement as well as in environmental coverage in the media is still evolving. Media theorists and historians date the advent of blogging sometime in the mid-1990s, and according to http://techorati.com (an online site devoted to tracking the impact of user-generated blogs on the Web), since then, the number of blogs that are added daily has increased dramatically. As of 2010, there are well over 2 million blogs on the Internet, many of which are geared toward specialized audiences. Although critics like Andrew Keen have argued that blogging has created a culture in which poorly researched information is disseminated to and by amateurs who do not have the tools to evaluate its content, other critics like Scott Rosenberg and Clay Shirkey have argued that the Internet is self-correcting and that flawed information will be addressed and amended by users as it is disseminated more widely.

Rosenberg and Shirkey also praise the way that the Internet has spurred activism by creating virtual communities of like-minded people who share information. Certainly, blogs have formal features that allow bloggers to reach out to like-minded people; even if bloggers choose not to use these features, all blog templates allow bloggers to create a list or “blogroll” of other blogs and all allow comments on posts. More conventional online periodicals devoted to environmental issues (for example, http://treehugger.com and http://grist.com, two of the most widely read) are blends of blogs and periodicals, and they often rely on reader questions, reader-submitted posts, and “citizen journalist” responses, all of which owe as much to a blogging culture as they do to older forms of environmental media such as Mother Earth News.

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