Matt Welch and Blogging’s evolution

I had launched my blog (or shall I say “warblog,” which is what I named it, apparently coining a term I’ve come to loathe) five days after the September 11 massacre and almost immediately found myself swept up in an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation. As a consumer, it was exponentially more edifying to me than the post-9/11 fumblings of the mainstream media’s binary, Crossfire-style opinion slinging.

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.
reason online

I have a lot of time for Matt Welch whose libertarianism is tempered with a SoCal sense of “get real”. He is leaving Reason for the LA Times which is a good move for him and a better one for the sadly declining Times.

In this envoi Welch laments and purports to be surprised with the way in which partisanship has overwhelmed the early promise of blogging. But, of course, the technology of transmission does nothing to alter the nature of the discourse being transmitted.

People who thought Bush was a chimp before 9/11 thought so afterward, people who hated Israel or Arabs or Muslims or pomo scholars or rappers before 9/11 saw 9/11 as proof of the essential rightness of their position: whether they blogged or not didn’t matter. Or, more accurately, it did matter because it gave them an entirely unmoderated forum in which to grind which ever axe they happened to want to swing.

However, where Welch goes wrong in his piece is in assuming that the inhabitants of PJMedia or the DailyKos are somehow the future of new media and blogging. In a sense they are already its past simply because their positions have become as predictable as the most earnest pundits of legacy media.

What is happening in parallel to “A” list blogging and MSM is the evolution of an entire generation of people who have ceased to rely on MSM for much of anything. They live on the net, buy their stuff there, form their opinions from their reading, share their views by IM and MySpace and in gaming forums. They are as likely to read baseball blogs and gossip as longheads pontificating on Iraq or pork or the Canadian election.

Critically, this net generation is throughly sceptical of the sort of authority which MSM - left and right - represents and mainstream blogs aspire to. They are used to looking at links and googling to check facts. That is if the story interests them enough.

MSM is technically incapable of responding to a wired generation. And it will be until it converts to interacitve, purely electronic transmission. Mainstream blogging, with its continued assertion that it will somehow surplant legacy media, misses the point of a wired generation. It is not about the publishing platform. It is about the content.

In five years blogging has gone from enfant terrible to a reasonable facsimile of the legacy media it was to replace in five years. The next step out is going to look a lot more like memorandum. But it is the step after that - whether it is in the direction of Digg or someething completely different which is literally the million dollar question.

Written by jay on April 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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how to deal with elected terrorists

“Haniyeh is to tell Abu Mazen (Abbas) tonight that Hamas is able to adopt the two-state solution as a platform of the Cabinet. But we know Israel doesn’t accept us. We want to give room for movement and to lift international pressure on the Cabinet,” the senior official said.
ap

The Israelis dismiss the Hamas waltz with reality as verbal gymnastics which it may very well be. However, the West, by breaking off relations with the PA under Hamas and withholding any funding is doing what needs to be done to force Hamas to accept that it must negotiate with Israel.

Now there is always the danger that Hamas will find the billion that the Troll of Ramallah^tm stole before he was gathered to his Hellish reward; but even then the reality of the self inflicted plight of the Palis is beginning to sink in.

Hamas is fighting the bit complaining that the withdrawal of funding amounts to “collective punishment of all Palestinians” which indeed it does. So what? What the Palis have to clue into is that the Israelis are going to make peace in the area with or without Palestinian co-operation. If need be by finishing the wall and leaving the Palis to stew in their own juice largely forgotten by the West and hated by the Arab world. It is pretty much up to Hamas as to whether it will retain its purity and ensure this fate or beging to negotiate.

The collective action of the West in the face of the Hamas victory shows what can be achieved when the West works together.

Written by jay on April 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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