There's an essay in Foreign Policy this month that casts an interested but cautious eye on the blogging phenomenon. I might as well admit now that I haven't read it all yet, but I intend to. A couple of lines towards the end caught my eye:
"The growing clout of bloggers has transformed some into “blog triumphalists.” To hear them tell it, blogging is the single most transformative media technology since the invention of the printing press. Rallying cries, such as “the revolution will be blogged,” reflect the belief that blogs might even supplant traditional journalism. But, as the editor of the Washington, D.C.-based blog “Wonkette,” Ana Marie Cox, has wryly observed, “A revolution requires that people leave their house.”"
It's a facetious remark of course, and I'm not trying to read too much into it, but Gutenberg didn't leave his house either, did he?
Posted by Alan Allport at November 9, 2004 06:32 AMNeither did Emily Dickinson. Nor Proust. Nor, come to think of it, Bartleby.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 9, 2004 08:26 AMBlog systems are extremely important because they open up the web-space, if you will, to non-technical users. This is really the last, belated step in the revolution which www-boosters have been hollering about for a long time now, especially during the internet bubble but going back farther than that, I think.
Giving every schmo another forum to sound off in is not an inherently good thing, and anyone who thinks the world is going to change much on account of that is naive. But blogs have begun to interact with traditional journalism and affect society in interesting ways. It's quite amazing when you think about it.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 9, 2004 01:12 PMHmmmm, who was it who a few years ago made the wry observation that we used to say giving an infinite number of typewriters to an infinite number of monkeys would result in one of them writing a Shakespeare play, but now thanks to the internet we know that's not true.
Don't take it personal like.
Paul
Posted by: Paul Stables at November 9, 2004 04:36 PM