Posted on 02/19/2003 8:22:56 PM PST by aculeus
I didn't expect this. When I started my weblog InstaPundit.Com in August 2001, the world was a very different place, and InstaPundit was a very different kind of weblog. I wrote about the greed of the music industry, the importance of allowing stem-cell research, and the ineptitude of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (OK, not everything has changed.) The term "blog" hadn't really caught on - we were still calling them "me-zines" for the most part - and the notion of a "warblog" would have seemed quite nonsensical, when a major topic of web conversation was who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards. (I voted for Alicia Keys).
That all changed on September 11 2001. It's hard for non-Americans to understand what a dramatic impact that had on Americans whose ancestors came here to escape the problems of the Old Country. ("What about the Native Americans?" you may ask. I can't know, of course, but I imagine that my Cherokee forebears' remote ancestors probably left behind some nasty goings-on in Siberia.) At any rate, the country went on a war footing, and quite a few people were unhappy with the way the "mainstream" media were covering the story.
It's been forgotten now, but in October 2001, the media was full of dark predictions about a "quagmire" in Afghanistan, and claims that there wasn't enough "proof" that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. Noam Chomsky was claiming that the US was planning a "silent genocide" in which millions of Afghans would starve to death as a result of war, and humanitarian groups were more or less echoing his predictions. Meanwhile we were told that the Afghans, natural warriors, would pick off American troops by the thousand, and Muslims across the world would rise as one, plunging the planet into conflict.
It was all twaddle, of course, and quite a few of us found ourselves pointing that out. Someone (I think it was Matt Welch) coined the term "warblog," and it stuck. What's more, people were eager to read our critiques. My traffic, which amounted to 1,600 pageviews on September 10, was soon 10 times that, and is still growing (it was over 120,000 pageviews on Valentine's Day). Other weblogs experienced dramatic growth in traffic, too.
Phrases coined in the "blogosphere" - as it is called these days - now percolate out into the real world with amazing rapidity. Scott Ott, who runs a humour weblog called ScrappleFace.com, coined the term "Axis of Weasels" in reference to the Chirac/Schröder alliance. Within a day it was the headline for the New York Post, and it was repeated on CNN, Fox, and, most gratifyingly, in French and German media. And, as the Daily Telegraph reported, officials at the state department and the White House were chortling over a Chirac caption contest that appeared on another weblog.
This is disconcerting, in a way. Many of my posts are written on a laptop while my daughter plays with Barbie (broadband internet and a wireless home network are vital to blogging success, at least for those of us with kids). The notion that they might be read by people at the White House is odd. On the other hand, the often poor quality of commentary in traditional media provides some reassurance: Nicholas von Hoffman was still predicting a "quagmire" even as the Taliban surrendered. He later admitted that he knew nothing about Afghanistan, or military matters. I suspect that many of those predicting disaster should war come with Iraq are similarly ill-informed.
Many webloggers know a lot about such subjects, of course, and because of the interconnection of the weblogging world, their views inform the general debate. Ideas circulate around the blogosphere at lightning speed, with mistakes - for example, a bogus photo purporting to show cracks in the space shuttle Columbia's wing, published in the Toronto Globe and Mail - often shown up within hours. (It was in fact a photo of the cargo bay, and the "cracks" were shadows.) Traditional media generally aren't fast enough to match this. To use a military term, weblogs are "inside the decision curve" of Big Media. Traditional media are trying to meet this challenge by creating weblogs of their own (the Guardian pioneered this) but for it to really work, someone has to read a lot of email and other weblogs.
James Lileks said it best: "A column is a lecture. A weblog is a conversation." The weblog world is a remarkably open and interesting one - pseudonymous Iraqi blogger "Salam Pax" has met a warm reception from the warbloggers, and he's getting his information on how to prepare for war from Israeli weblogs!
The challenge for webloggers will be to keep it that way and avoid getting too full of themselves; the challenge for traditional journalism will be to emulate the weblog world's speed, openness, and lack of pretension. In time of war, which this, regardless of what happens in Iraq, already is, such characteristics are particularly valuable.
· Glenn Reynolds is a professor of Law at the University of Tennessee.
Links
http://glennreynolds.com/#030128 Instapundit.com http://instapundit.com Matt Welch www.mattwelch.com/warblog.html Salam Pax http://dear_raed.blogspot.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
Coined there; amplified here.
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