Much has been said about the power of Internet publishing and the empowerment it gives to individuals to be heard. Not since the invention of the moveable type printing press (thank you, Herr Gutenberg!), has the world been so excited about the ability to speak out about everything and nothing.

The excitement however is sometimes wrongly attributed as a new invention, just like Gutenberg's machine which didn't introduce the concept of printing but rather made it easier and put it in the hands of more people than was previously possible.

The Internet has done just that, and is not by itself a new concept. What the Internet did do however was to provide a new medium for the viral infection of ideas and allowed access to this medium with little effort. Just like Gutenberg's machine, it allowed more people than ever before the ability to speak out their thoughts and views.

In the beginning

When the Internet first sprang to life, the killer application was electronic mail, now a noun and a verb which everyone understands. Three and a half decades hence, email is still the killer application of the Internet with it still being the lowest common denominator for membership in the online club.

However, Berners-Lee gave us HTTP, the web server and with it the HyperText Markup Language which spawned web and online publishing. Geocities, Tripod and their latter day descendants like Blogspot and LiveJournal provided entire swaths of online real estate for individuals to let loose the contents of the ether between their ears. This combination of events is the modern day equivalent of Gutenberg's printing press writ large.

The resulting bodies of information spawned first by the early adopters who were tech-savvy and later on by any individual who could spell self-aggrandisation, were called websites in an allegorical reference to virtual real estate. And websites they are, even though some may choose to use the more hip term of a blog or weblog. Blogs are nothing more than the websites of lore on Geocities with the only difference being a structured diary-like periodic publishing schedule.

Blogging

Like all other websites, individual or corporate, some have constantly new information or views and some lay stagnant until they're picked up by Brewster Kahle's archiving robots. But websites they remain with the same tools used to access the information on them and benchmarking their popularity with the same attributes of hits and pageviews.

Recently though a new meme seems to have started its viral progression. Bloggers, or individual website publishers as I like to term them, it seems are the new Fifth Estate, joining the First, Second, Third of the French Old Order and the Fourth of Edward Burke. We'll leave the First and Second Estates where they belong, in the annals of history but take a closer look at Estates Three, Four and Five.

Traditionally, the Third Estate were those who were not of the aristocracy or the clergy. This thus referred to folk like you and I, we the people. This made sense in feudal regimes where of the three estates, the first two usually ruled over the third. However, democratic republics, as started by the French and American Revolutions, turned this turtle and placed the Third Estate as the group calling the shots by electoral representation.

In an answer to "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", Edward Burke suggests journalists, writers and publishers, collectively called the mainstream press as members of the Fourth Estate. Playing on this theme, influential local bloggers and some observers of media have coined the term the Fifth Estate for individually run and published websites or blogs. By this they imply that the Fifth will watch over the Fourth just as the Fourth watches over the First, Second and Third. What a cyclical conondrum!

However, as the Internet provided the empowerment of speech and idea dissemination to Mat bin Public, it follows that the Internet enabled the Third Estate a louder voice than was previously possible. No longer were the actual denizens of the Third dependent on their elected representatives or reporters to voice their mumblings. They could now do it themselves in whatever form of rhetoric they desired, banal or erudite.

Real estate

It is this very prolific and defeaning noise which has taken form in various incarnations as websites, email lists and bulletin board postings. By giving the regular folk a voice and removing the reliance on reporters and journalists to carry their message, the Internet has both blurred the lines and hastened the metamorphosis of the Third Estate into the Fourth Estate. On this new medium, anyone could publish and be in a position to not only comment on but rather rally causes around topical issues.

The blurring of lines and role metamorphosis has given rise to blogger journalists and journalist bloggers, with both these animals trying to bridge the gap from their respective river banks. As we saw last week in this column, when cultures clash, conflict will form and flames will jump from one web server to the next until it engulfs logical thought. But this bridge will soon be crossed many times, and when this happens often enough, we would get a combined estate of the Third and the Fourth, instead of a brand new Fifth.

The Fifth Estate referred to thus is not a new class of the Old Order but rather the coming together of two prior classes of the ancient regime. This coming together will throw up a tectonic shift in the societal roles which we have become adjusted to, and in the process increase the heat of flammage. But the flames will only serve to melt the edges and fuse them together tighter, instead of pushing them further apart. As Paul Boutin says in Bloggers vs Journalists, "Columnists envy the freedom and hipness of bloggers, who in turn envy the huge readerships and paid-to-blog careers of columnists.".

Two hundred and fifteen years ago, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes said the following:

Firstly, what is the third estate? Everything.

Second. What has it been heretofore in the political order? Nothing.

Thirdly? What does it demand? To become something therein.

This applies to website publishers and bloggers in as much as by replacing the word "third" with "fourth" it applies to reporters, journalists and other members of the mainstream press. Both the Third and the Fourth estates are demanding to be something in the other's political order, not realising that what is needed is to cross the river and to not annihilate the other.

So, the Five that we think is being created is nothing more than the Three and the Four coming together in a vast fusion of tradition, styles, cultures and agendas. The Fifth Estate doesn't exist and just like the Internet and Gutenberg's press, is not a new thing but a different form of the same thing we've gotten used to over time.

The quicker we understand this state of matters, and the quicker we can end this drawing of lines in the sand and get back to the spectator sport of making fun of old fogeys who don't grok this new medium.

DINESH NAIR is a canine representative of an alien race which is using Earth and the interrelationships between humans as an experiment to understand why cats always look aloof. Email him at dinesh@alphaque.com .