Leah McLaren is a young-ish, smart and sassy journalist for the Toronto Globe and Mail who recently wrote an op-ed piece titled “Logging Out of The Blogosphere”.
James Brady is the executive editor of the Washington Post, who recently, and by now famously, demonstrated his lack of understanding … nay, contempt .. for online readers who dared to question the WaPo’s reporting by leaving less-than-positive or congratulatory comments on one of the WaPo’s blogs.
Here’s an excerpt from Leah’s column-masquerading-as-contempt:
That’s fine for some, but it isn’t enough of a reason for me to go on-line — where the growing, unedited noise in the margins is too loud to ignore — when I can enjoy my favourite writers in more established venues. If I’m supposed to feel part of some cool, fringe community, or world-changing global discussion, I’m not getting it.
Well, yeah and yeah.
In my opinion, she’s right that there is a lot of unedited noise in the blogosphere, in the *margins*, as she calls it … and yeah, I also think she doesn’t get it.
In the article, she also creates her own noise about how *the underground media revolution is officially over”, and points out her conversation with a former blogger (with one of the *sell-outs* that helped create the perception that the *underground revolution* is over):
As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger picture is much more important.
“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said. “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds.”
In my adult, and working, life, I have run into many many many smart people who look at, think about and analyze much of what they encounter very quickly. In some ways, we live in an environment that focuses on, and is perhaps even addicted to, things that can be neatly described, that provide *solutions*, and that remain more or less the static model for how things are, and should be, done.
Now, what I would ask Leah (as a journalist .. or is she an opinion column writer ? The latter, I think .. a genre which often makes a living by being a tad edgy and snarky themselves. Nice work if you can get it .. blogger with a legitimate job, not marginalised .. I think) are these two questions …
Do you think, that because you and a bunch of other journalists and editors keep saying that the blogosphere doesn’t do editing and filtering the way you folks do, that all of a sudden, or even over time, people will begin coming back to neswpapers and magazines. Will the papers and magazines continue to provide you with all the information and news that a relatively small group of people decide is appropriate for everyone else .. even in the face of large amounts (and growing) evidence of how inaccurate, propagandistic and even corrupt some, or much, of that information and news can be ?
My sarcastic response .. in the online world, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the reader to evaluate and make decisions about what they read and think about. IMO, that’s clear, and her stated intent is but one example of one type of evaluation and decision. But that process is bigger than *either / or* re: traditional nedia versus blogs.
I would venture a guess that at this stage the world (or medium) of blogging is in a transitional phase wherein more and more filters (let’s call them DIY filters that tread the line between control and openness, where a new point of view is always potentially just a hop. skip and link away) will come into being, and new tools and applications that continue down the path of what has been called the Semantic Web are likely to appear over the next decade.
Because it involves people, information, opinion, voice and interconnectedness, the process of reading, writing, linking is a process of having impact (for better AND for worse) on peoples’ knowledge, opinions, abilities to think critically and understand. It’s social as well as informational, and social processes shape people and cultures.
What I hear in Leah’s cri de couer is a reminiscence for the Pleasantville of old, when kindly and benevolent hierarchs (men for the most part, but in the last 20 years or so having let a few assertive women in on the game) help us understand what we should know, and why and how.
And I found it interesting, too, that she spent time rummaging around the celebrity and gossip departments of the blogosphere … talk about meaningless drivel. Maybe deep down she’s ashamed of her interests, and wants to try to repress them by avoiding “the unedited noise in the margins” ?
I doubt that she drinks whiskey in the amounts Christopher Hitchens is rumoured to have ingested, so in all fairness I can’t use the words *whiskey-soaked*, (from the infamous “whiskey-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay” label George Galloway once applied to Hitchens), but I’d vote for her in any contests seeking to crown a winner for the title of “smug little know-it-all popinjay”.
I’m also assuming that she imagines that one day, as she grows older and moves up in the world of journalism, she will be one of those oh-so-valuable sources of edition that keep us all on the straight and narrow.
Here’s the clue:
My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check.
As Butterworth succinctly puts it: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.”
Sure .. and do you expect that this blogging medium, like the more traditional medium you know and love, will remain static and not evolve ?
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