What interests me about blogs.
I started browsing the blogospere because I study the public sphere. I was drawn to Habermas's account of the decline of the public sphere, and to C. Wright Mills' analysis of the power of the media in his classic The Power Elite. The blogosphere looked like a potential answer to both of them. I thought I'd do scholarship on the blogosphere, but I sort of figured out that the bloggers themselves were already making every point I'd want to make about the blogosphere, and doing it much more effectively than I would. So I was drawn in in another way. During the run-up to the Iraq war, and even more in the 2004 election, I found myself browsing the blogosphere as a supplement and a guide to the news.
Many keystrokes have been devoted to the question of the relationship of the blogosphere to the mainstream media, and particularly to mainstream journalism. My favorite blogs--Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Kevin Drum's Political Animal, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, and Andrew Sullivan, to throw in someone who bats from the right side of the plate--all have a track record in mainstream media, and all have a complicated relationship to both printed media and established journalism practice. But with a difference.
A blogger is a journalist working in a journalism that hasn’t been invented yet. At least the ones I like are. That is, they’re doing all the things journalists do with facts–discovering them, relaying them, putting them in dialog with each other, giving voice to points of view, representing the public–but doing so without a worked out theory, a journalism, to govern their activities. The credibility of a journalist usually comes from fidelity to a worked out code of journalism. Because there isn’t yet a worked out code of journalism for the blogosphere, and because the on line environment has unsettled all the worked out codes elsewhere (more about that another time, or refer to certain published thoughts of mine), the credibility of a blogger has to come from somewhere else. Sometimes it can come from her or his expertise–hence my hero Juan Cole, the master of the unpublished thought for historians. Sometimes it comes from his or her evident intelligence. This is the case with Kevin Drum. He has his expertise, but its not really the key to his authority. It’s that it’s just him doing his thing in a pretty transparent way. It’s nothing you couldn’t do. You really could.
But you’d have to be somebody. That is, only someone with a specific and evidently real personal existence can win the conviction that a blogger needs. This may not be a hard fact of the medium. Maybe any chucklehead can pull it off, and heaven knows there are enough liars in the blogosphere who seem to do perfectly well. But no one can pull it off without constructing a convincing persona. And that’s the key difference–in newspaper journalism, your persona is supposed to be universal, not specific. Even when a newspaper journalist achieves a byline, the byline is less a form of authorial identification than it is a warrant that the journalist’s personal existence had nothing whatever to do with the content of the article.
What Drum and Sullivan get from their journalism disciplines is something other than the effacing of their personalities. What they get is an economy of style. One of the things I hate in a blog, and one reason why I’m not a more regular reader of Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink, is verbosity. Good writing is never verbose, wordy, or redundant. Rosen, whom I met once and then only briefly but who is a big fish in the same pool I swim in, is smart and honest and perceptive, but takes a long time making his point. Sullivan never does.
If each good blog has an economy of style, though, the blogosphere as a whole is supremely repetitive.
It follows that, if blogging represents a new journalism in the process of becoming itself, it does not necessarily represent a new system of political discourse. The existing journalism produces a dysfunctional system of discourse in spite of (or because of) its virtues as a journalism--evenhandedness, a need to efface authorship, the denial of values or commitments, a deference to established authority and expertise. The emerging journalism seems to be producing complementary dysfunctions because of its opposite virtues--spontaneity, personality, transparency, copiousness, hostility to privileged authority. But maybe that's because it hasn't really invented itself as a journalism yet.
I started browsing the blogospere because I study the public sphere. I was drawn to Habermas's account of the decline of the public sphere, and to C. Wright Mills' analysis of the power of the media in his classic The Power Elite. The blogosphere looked like a potential answer to both of them. I thought I'd do scholarship on the blogosphere, but I sort of figured out that the bloggers themselves were already making every point I'd want to make about the blogosphere, and doing it much more effectively than I would. So I was drawn in in another way. During the run-up to the Iraq war, and even more in the 2004 election, I found myself browsing the blogosphere as a supplement and a guide to the news.
Many keystrokes have been devoted to the question of the relationship of the blogosphere to the mainstream media, and particularly to mainstream journalism. My favorite blogs--Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Kevin Drum's Political Animal, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, and Andrew Sullivan, to throw in someone who bats from the right side of the plate--all have a track record in mainstream media, and all have a complicated relationship to both printed media and established journalism practice. But with a difference.
A blogger is a journalist working in a journalism that hasn’t been invented yet. At least the ones I like are. That is, they’re doing all the things journalists do with facts–discovering them, relaying them, putting them in dialog with each other, giving voice to points of view, representing the public–but doing so without a worked out theory, a journalism, to govern their activities. The credibility of a journalist usually comes from fidelity to a worked out code of journalism. Because there isn’t yet a worked out code of journalism for the blogosphere, and because the on line environment has unsettled all the worked out codes elsewhere (more about that another time, or refer to certain published thoughts of mine), the credibility of a blogger has to come from somewhere else. Sometimes it can come from her or his expertise–hence my hero Juan Cole, the master of the unpublished thought for historians. Sometimes it comes from his or her evident intelligence. This is the case with Kevin Drum. He has his expertise, but its not really the key to his authority. It’s that it’s just him doing his thing in a pretty transparent way. It’s nothing you couldn’t do. You really could.
But you’d have to be somebody. That is, only someone with a specific and evidently real personal existence can win the conviction that a blogger needs. This may not be a hard fact of the medium. Maybe any chucklehead can pull it off, and heaven knows there are enough liars in the blogosphere who seem to do perfectly well. But no one can pull it off without constructing a convincing persona. And that’s the key difference–in newspaper journalism, your persona is supposed to be universal, not specific. Even when a newspaper journalist achieves a byline, the byline is less a form of authorial identification than it is a warrant that the journalist’s personal existence had nothing whatever to do with the content of the article.
What Drum and Sullivan get from their journalism disciplines is something other than the effacing of their personalities. What they get is an economy of style. One of the things I hate in a blog, and one reason why I’m not a more regular reader of Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink, is verbosity. Good writing is never verbose, wordy, or redundant. Rosen, whom I met once and then only briefly but who is a big fish in the same pool I swim in, is smart and honest and perceptive, but takes a long time making his point. Sullivan never does.
If each good blog has an economy of style, though, the blogosphere as a whole is supremely repetitive.
It follows that, if blogging represents a new journalism in the process of becoming itself, it does not necessarily represent a new system of political discourse. The existing journalism produces a dysfunctional system of discourse in spite of (or because of) its virtues as a journalism--evenhandedness, a need to efface authorship, the denial of values or commitments, a deference to established authority and expertise. The emerging journalism seems to be producing complementary dysfunctions because of its opposite virtues--spontaneity, personality, transparency, copiousness, hostility to privileged authority. But maybe that's because it hasn't really invented itself as a journalism yet.
posted by jnerone at 2:49 PM
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