Three Rights Make a Left

THE RISE OF THE BLOG

I have to admit that I didn’t see the full potential of the internet, and I really should have. I didn’t see the rise of “Media Influencers” in society, though all of the signs were there.

By the year 2000, the age of the internet was just coming into stride, and America Online was one of the hottest things going. You couldn’t go to a computer store, a swap meet, or even a state fair without finding stacks of AOL CDs being given away. I had taught computers in Terrell Christian Academy High School in the early 1990s, so I had a pretty good handle on trends in the computer industry.

In the year 2000, I was elected to be a delegate from our Congressional District to the 2000 Republican National Convention. In the weeks leading up to the event, I saw an ad on America Online looking for Delegates to serve as “bloggers” at the convention, giving daily accounts of their experience at the convention. I quickly responded, and I was chosen to be one of the five delegates from different states to write a daily blog about my experience at the Convention. It was an exciting time because the Texas Governor, George W. Bush, was the nominee and all of the attention was on the delegation from Texas with our boots, cowboy hats, and Texas flag shirts. I was blessed to be able to bring my family along and share the experience.

When we got to the convention, I found that AOL had assigned a photographer to me to document everything we did. He was with us on a bus headed for one of the first of many events for the week when a reporter for the Dallas Morning News named Christie Hoppe sat with a DMN photographer across the aisle from us. She asked why an AOL photographer was with us, and I told her that I was writing a blog for AOL about our experiences that week. She said, “Since you already have a photographer in tow, do you mind if we tag along too?” And that is how it happened that we had an entourage of press at every event that week with stories I wrote every day on America Online and stories Christie Hoppe wrote in the Dallas Morning News.

I have to tell you that it was exhausting starting every day early at the Texas Delegation daily breakfast, attending the convention, going to all of the dinners, concerts, and ice cream socials until late in the evening, then sitting down in front of my laptop to write something interesting that would potentially be read by millions of AOL users.

I guess my blog was interesting enough, because when I was elected to be a delegate again in 2004, AOL asked me again to write a daily blog about my experience, only this time they issued a digital camera and asked me to take all of the pictures.

In 2008 I was elected to be a Delegate again and go to Minneapolis/St. Paul but by that time AOL’s daily bloggers had gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The last two conventions I was part of, I tried to take some time to leave my boots, cowboy hat, and credentials behind and walk among the crowd outside of the convention. It was a different world. I found there were just as many members of the press outside the venue as there were inside. Among the people outside it seemed like it was a competition among them to do something outrageous and attract the attention of the press. You would see a guy in a poncho get on his knees and raise his arms, and the press would clamor around him to capture whatever weird thing he was about to do.

I never considered transitioning my blog for AOL into a personal blog, and I’m not sure that would have worked anyway. I later chose to write this column for the Forney Messenger and years later the Lone Oak Newsletter. It occurs to me that I never saw the rise of bloggers and influencers who parlay outrageous behavior and opinions into millions of followers. It is a little scary that they have far more influence on society now. It is even scarier that more traditional journalism seems to be following their lead into a world that is increasingly more outrageous.