June 27, 2004
The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged.
George Packer, writing in Mother Jones, argues that blogs are ineffective vehicles for political discourse. This appears to be a rebuttal to Lev Grossman's pro-blog article in Time Magazine: Meet Joe Blog. (MeFi link.)
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Monkeypoop. Not the FPP, but the linked article. Why is it that people of an established medium feel that new media are inherently different and somehow lesser or greater than existing media? A blog is a method of publishing that is quick, easy, and potentially able to reach a staggeringly large number of people with minimal cost. A blog is also something that is generally lost in the heap of other blogs. He makes the point that blogs are very personal, and very immediate. I will grant you that many or most blogs certainly are. But he somehow thinks that this is a limitation of the medium, when it's clearly a limitation of the writer. He claims that, because of the abovementioned limitations, blogs are somehow incapable of putting together a series of coherent thoughts that is necessary for proper political analysis and reporting. I tell you, I cannot think of a medium that couldn't convey proper political analysis if the right person got ahold of it. I can envision Interpretive Dance that could convey many of the points that I wish people would understand in the upcoming election. I wouldn't want to see it, but despite the abstractness of the medium, it's still a potentially valid one. There are trends with blogs, as with any other medium, but there are no limitations on the medium itself; there are only limitations of the people who use the medium.
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I hate blogs. I'm also addicted to them. This sounds like what many otherwise intelligent women say about soap operas. It also sounds like the way homophobes feel: I hate fags. I'm also addicted to them. "artificial universe"
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Why do these blogs keep sucking my cock?
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!
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Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere
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One approach to blogs in general is to treat them as advertisements.
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If I wanted to start a revolution, I'd be surrounding the Bastille. Blogs are a revolution of procrastination against the evil tyranny of productivity.