Mother Jones on Blogging

I just picked up the May/June issue of Mother Jones in London Drugs while shopping for unmentionables for one of my roommates. There were a number of articles I was interested in but the one on blogging titled "The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged" (you can read the whole thing without paying by clicking here).

The article is written by George Packer, a self-confessed blog and political news junkie. The focus of the article is largely on the upcoming 2004 presidential election, and unsurprisingly all the blogs cited are American.

Packer points out a number of fairly obvious facts about blogs: that they're read by only a small slice of the public, and that the vast majority of them are maintained by reasonably affluent men. This tends to create in his mind a fairly predictable echo chamber effect that leads to a deadening kind of commentary. I agree with this only in so far as he focuses his reading on American blogs.

There are a huge variety of bloggers out there should one take the time to look. Finding bloggers that have points of view not simply following the American spectrum of left-right politics is not especially difficult. This is particularly true if you take the time to find blogs outside North America.

It is also important to note that a large number of blogs deal with anything but politics, or only touch on them tangentially as the world intrudes into bloggers' other considerably varied interests.

I tend to agree with his formulation of political blogging as a modern version of pamphleteering. Anyone with a computer, an internet connection and the desire to write sentences can place their opinions out in the ether for anyone to peruse. Yet while there are many similarities, he gives short shrift to the differences.

The internet provides bloggers with access to huge amounts of information that they can point their readers to should they wish to delve into greater detail on whatever subject is at hand. Much of that additional detail is written by journalists, who Packer seems to feel have a greater ability to grasp the nuance of political events.

What can be safely said about blogging is that it is a very young and very quickly evolving medium. Like professional magazines, journals, and books, what you get out of blogs depends on what you put in. There is certainly a lot of crap out there, and finding the gems can take time.

Packer does start an interesting thread that he doesn't explore quite enough. He points out that a lot of political journalism in the last few decades has become a rather elitist and self-congratulatory affair. Access to the powerful has become a sign of status, yet that access comes with the price of a lack of objectivity. What established pundit is going to jeopardize his status by being critical enough of those in power to lose his access? As the lack of true critical writing in established media in the U.S. has demonstrated, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, not very many journalists are all that brave when it comes to asking hard questions of those in power.

What the proliferation of blogging has started, from my point of view, is the beginning of a greater democratization of news and opinion. For the longest time media, particularly news in the more traditional mediums of television, radio and print, has been moving toward a concentration of ever fewer corporate owners.

Blogs provide people with quick access to news and opinions that aren't normally covered by mainstream media, because they don't follow in lock step with the accepted opinion of those in charge of the news rooms of the big media players.

Admittedly blogging is still in its infancy, but it is moving rapidly to becoming a source of news that provides their readers with a filter for the massive amount of information available on the internet. With time I think parts of the blogosphere will improve dramatically, as bloggers hone their, for lack of a better term, craft.