Awards are flawed. (Updated)

Do they reflect quality or popularity, neither or both?

The truth about awards is that they, like all other forms of competition, are expressions of the dynamics of power, of the politics and principles of the environments they inhabit. They are often about a quick buck, profanely biased and resemble nothing more than the average microbial parasite. They usually reward those that need their glory the least.

That said I believe they have their place in our cultural and industrial constructs. They can facilitate a bit of magic that might otherwise be all but consumed by the hum-drum required to produce the stuff they celebrate. On occasion they can do amazing things for new-comers to any field, remarkably sometimes even for deserving newcomers.

But let’s not forget that they are dinosaurs.

They were formed by the dynamics of limited-physical-product oriented market culture. They are the very short-head of the short-head of cultural production and the top-40 of everything doesn’t mean anything close to what it used to mean a short decade ago. The world is changing, the ‘Long Tail’ is growing longer and its curve is flattening.

So although I’m not ready to buy the conspiracy theories from 2Oceans vibe, SA blog awards are a sham, I am a bit disappointed that I didn’t have the time or energy to follow the drama’s around the 2007 ‘SA’ Blog Awards. I do hope Groogle is right about something positive coming out of it all(Groogle, is it ‘ media picks up on’, or just ‘picks on’?), but me suspects the truth is that the South African blogosphere is still very much in a scoolyard piss-puddle contest phase.

That all sounds a bit sour me thinks. How to improve the situation?… I know, let’s start an annual award ceremony to award the best and worst of awards

E.g.
I’ll nominate the Design Indaba’s New Media awards as the most irrelevant but lucrative celebration of coolness with pixels.
The Loeries as the most pretentious self-intoxicated elitist offering on the scene
Myself as the most sour never won an award critic of awards, then again my credibility pro’lly lacks due to how few of the bloody things I’ve ever actually entered ;-)

Update:

I want to set aside my current indulgence in cynicism just long enough to say I don’t envy Mr Cherry the challenge he and the other organisers have taken on board. I can’t imagine that they made the decision they did blindly…

Cherryflava: And the winners are…?
The reason behind that decision was to improve the overall representation and fairness in a system, which at the end of the day is there to promote and showcase all individuals who write a blog in South Africa…

Clearly lessons have been learnt this year which will hopefully go a long way to making the South African Blog Awards even bigger and better going forward.

The awards belong to all South African bloggers [not just a select few] – and therefore all bloggers have the right and need to participate in their functioning to promote and elevate the relevance of independent publishing in South Africa..

I doubt if I would have been as patient or accommodating. (But then I’ve always believed that ‘fairness’ is a figment of the collective imagination as are ‘rights’. I think ‘rights’ are what we call ‘privileges’ when we start taking them for granted)

Me thinks the really interesting question is how next years awards will work…

(And I find it telling that in my quick scan of a few of the back-seat critics I don’t notice anyone volunteering to get involved in future or having the audacity to launch an alternative.)