Posted on 12/31/2005 6:38:42 AM PST by Loyal Buckeye
Of all the stories leading America’s annual greatest-hits list, the one that subsumes the rest is the evolution of information in the Age of Blogging.
Not since the birth of the printing press have our lives been so dramatically affected by the way we create and consume information.
What is wonderful and miraculous about the Internet needs little elaboration. We all marvel at the ease with which we can access information, whether reading government documents previously available only to a few, or tracking down old friends and new enemies.
It is this latter – our new enemies – that interests me most. I don’t mean al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden, but the less visible, insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility: the angry offspring of narcissism’s quickie marriage to instant gratification.
There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the blogosphere – the "electroniverse" where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of blogs (Web logs) and bloggers (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new "citizen journalist," I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Say what you will about the mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.
That a Jayson Blair of The New York Times surfaces now and then as a plagiarist or a fabricator ultimately is testament to the high standards tens of thousands of others strive to uphold each day without recognition. Blair is infamous, but also gone.
Bloggers persist no matter their contributions or quality, though most would have little to occupy their time were the mainstream media to disappear tomorrow. Some bloggers do their own reporting, but most rely on mainstream reporters to do the heavy lifting. Some bloggers also offer superb commentary, but most buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents.
Even so, they hold the same megaphone as the adults and enjoy perceived credibility owing to membership in the larger world of blog grown-ups. These effete and often clever baby "bloggies" are rich in time and toys, but bereft of adult supervision.
Spoiled and undisciplined, they have seized the stage, a privilege granted not by years in the trenches, but by virtue of a three-pronged plug and the miracle of WiFi. They play tag team with hyperlinks ("I’ll say you’re important if you’ll say I’m important") and shriek "Gotcha!" when they catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight. Plenty smart but lacking in wisdom, they possess the power of a forum, but neither the maturity nor humility that years of experience impose.
Each time I wander into blogdom, I’m reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.
What Golding demonstrated and what we’re witnessing as the blogosphere’s offspring multiply is that people tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves. Likewise, many bloggers seek the destruction of others for their own self-aggrandizement. When a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages, hoisting his or her head on a bloody stick as Golding’s children did the fly-covered head of a butchered sow.
Schadenfreude – pleasure in others’ misfortunes – has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Judith Miller, bloggers are slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.
I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there – professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and journalists who also happen to blog. But we should beware and resist the rest of the egogratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.
We can’t silence them, but for civilization’s sake and the integrity of information by which we all live or die, we can and should ignore them.
I believe it is also fear. The media still claims they hold a patent on integrity and that their job is to seek out the truth no matter where it leads. For years we, the public, were supposed to accept this just because they said it. Until the internet they could claim that role but do anything they wanted because unless you had access to the media you couldn't challenge them effectively. The Dan Rather fake document scandal was a shot across their bow. They can no longer do anything they want without a challenge, and this has them terrified. It's kinda what wiretap technology did to the Mafia. Unfortunately, just as with every old institution, instead of cleaning their own house the MSM will simply go on the offensive and attack the competition. Their days are numbered.
There -- I fixed it.
If only that were true. Ms Parker must live in a very tight bubble.
Simple - just like with so many other things that they they profess to hold high, the left's reverence for the First Amendment is nothing but a lie. The truth is much closer to what Kathleen Parker doesn't quite dare to say right here - they think the First is really a "collective" right, just like they think the Second Amendment is a "collective right" that applies only to the individual state National Guard forces (the "militia" in their view).
In Parker's view, us rabble are simply too ignorant and uneducated to properly use the First Amendment, and that as a result it should be restricted only to the press, true (as in leftist) academics, and enlightened "artists" who give us such masterpieces as photos of crucifixes dunked in urine and eight-year-old children decked out in bondage gear with bullwhips sticking out of their asses. If nothing else, the blogosphere is revealing these "elites" as the hypocrites they really are when it comes to "free speech."
Just on the off-chance that the author will read this thread- a word about bias is in order.
I am biased. I admit it. I am a Conservative, and I tend to see things from within that paradigm. I usually agree with other Conservatives and disagree with Liberals. But, contrary to the journalism racket's conventional wisdom- I am not an imbecile that needs to be told what to think, or how I should interpret events of the world around me.
But when I see (as an example) two Congressmen- one Republican and one Democrat- who have committed some identical breach of ethics under the exact same circumstances, the Republican (R) will be splattered all over the front page above the fold, and the Dem's coverage will be buried inside. You know how we know he's a Dem (absent mining Google)? The party affiliation usually isn't mentioned at all.
What do you think that says to us about the paper? If the political polarity in the above example were reversed, it would be equally reprehensible, and would identically speak to the credibility of the paper.
Good observation. Some things I like about net forums & blogs are that factors that carry so much weight in the other media, that have no bearing on accuracy and truth, such as physical appearance, quality of voice, charisma and presence etc., are nullified.
So someone that is scrawny, bed ridden, pain wracked, stringy haired and with a tinney sounding voice but who is providing more insightful, accurate observations can compete with the tall, dark, handsome, buffed, jock with the booming voice and commanding presence. [who now is a motivational speaker cuz he doesn't know squat about anything].
more like beyond pathological allegiance to getting it left.
I think you are right. No one is 100% perfect in their job performance. Everyone makes mistakes. Most are small, even trivial, but so can be serious. When the public demands 100% perfect performace, the stress is too great for most people, especially if they are held accountable for any deviation, regardless of degree, from 100% perfection. Bloggers are doing it to journalists and the trial lawyer and patients are demanding it of doctors. The bar that is being set is idealistic and unattainable.
The panicked squeals of the media elite are SO soothing.
Never before has there been an actual "Marketplace of Ideas" so accessible, cheap, and self-regulating.
That sounds to me like an admission of exploitative business practices. Maybe the usual style of hit-and-run smear-job, out-of-context 'investigative reporting' is in order.
A "blogger", by definition, is a single person who publishes his own opinions on his own web page. As such, his powers are rather limited and his opinions are not necessarily more valid than any other person you happen to meet.
What the Old Media avoids like the plague is the mere mention of the "F-Word".
Forum.
That is exactly what FreeRepublic is and that is exactly what exposed the attempted fraud by CBS in RatherGate.
A Forum, unlike a blogger, is the collective knowledge of thousands of individuals, from all over the World, with tens of thousands of man years of real world experience in everything from computer fonts to law to medicine to business to baking to landing an F-14 on the deck of a carrier.
That is a level of expertise that no Old Media research department can ever hope to duplicate.
In regards to fact-checking, a false fact posted on our Forum on Post 36 will have several rebuttals by Post 59.
The only way that Old Media can can puff itself up in comparison to the Forum is to set up a "blogger" straw-man and then proceed to beat the stuffing out of it.
Forums do not try to replace media as they do not have to dedicated resources need to collect news at the source.
Forums, however, have stripped the Old Media of its monopoly on the global dissemination of information and have therefore stripped Old Media of its ability to falsify facts with total impunity in order to advance their very thinly veiled political bias and agenda..
Hopefully, journalists one day will see the merit of applying the same standard to voting. Then the Democratic Party is finished. :-)
Unfortunately, Parker defines the terms "snarks, sasses and twits" far more broadly than we do. She means everyone outside the journo/intellectual elite.
That's actually a pretty good article.
My comments on the article posted on this thread stand but I call them as I see them, and one at a time.
Not exactly true. You exist to gratefully consume all that the Beautiful People produce.
Parker has been around a while. She actually makes sense, sometimes. :-)
LOL. Well, after observing the lack of substance in the piece, in combination with the tone with which she delivered her opinion, I conclude that Parker is a snark.
Everbody gets to make their own value judgements, that's the beauty of it.
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