Fug Big Media
"Blogging isn't creating a new underground movement as much as it's creating a new batch of Norman Mailers."
Well, now, that's just what we need...
The quote comes from this interesting take by Steven Rubio, from a decidedly left activism-friendly perspective, on warblogging and blogging-as-commmunity, casting a mostly-critical eye on the "second superpower" meme. Most of the recent articles trying to analyze the significance of blogging have tended to resemble one another. This one covers most of the same bases, but the different angle and personal focus is refreshing and makes this one much more interesting.
The salient point is one that is perhaps ironic: a "genre" characterized in its essence by solipsism can be a means for gaining an honest understanding of how people think outside of ones own, parochial world. The war has raised this issue in a particularly pointed way for many people, though the effect has also not been without irony: some react by re-examining and attempting to assess their own prejudices and received wisdom, while others have taken solace in a retreat into a digitally-enhanced version of the familiar.
Is there in fact anything new here? It has always been the case that drawing from diverse sources can be an effective guard against ideological paralysis; and it has always been the case that many people don't do very much of this. Yet the existence of a blogosphere, comprising an infinite amount of material, viewed from as many perspectives as there can be, filtered and commented on by countless thousands of mostly smart people all with differing perspectives and hobbyhorses of their own, allows a reader who is so inclined to engage in, to benefit from, ideological cross-pollination as never before. It can be a tool for genuinely "auto" autodidactism, as well as for amassing rhetorical and evidential ordnance for attack polemics; and as well for propagating and "organizing" support for an activist agenda. (Those who champion this last application alone, as Rubio points out, are often afflicted by a dearth of familiarity with the former ones, as they tend not to acknowledge that the "other side" can and will do it as well, and might even be doing so more effectively.)
When I was in college, I used stop in at Cody's every couple of weeks to buy the Nation, the New Republic and Commentary, which, in my circle anyway, was a pretty eccentric thing to do. Now I can do the same sort of thing, but with a far greater magnitude. That's still fairly eccentric, but encountering other such eccentrics is not as rare as I'd once thought.
The worry is, of course, that readers may not actually do this, but rather may tend, even within the greatly expanded field of possibilities, to stick to sources that confirm their prejudices and articulate the views they already hold, with special kudos to the ones who do so most eloquently or arrestingly. That would be the digital equivalent of the ideological campus coffee shop discussion, which resembles a conversation only superficially, as a posed photograph of people sitting around a table: in its extreme form the chief goal is to find the most rhetorically effective way to express agreement with everybody else on key, pre-decided points. That certainly happens in the blogosphere, and I admit even I may be more guilty of indulging in it than I like to imagine.
Nevertheless, I think that on the whole, the blogosphere is a help rather than a hindrance to those who want to avoid ideological rigidity and who would like to see this quality cultivated by others. I see this unreservedly as a good thing. Certainly, as a participant rather than only as a reader, it has been a way for me to sharpen my ideas and understand more clearly what I'm disagreeing with when I react against something. The best, most interesting writers, in the blogosphere as elsewhere, are often those who critique their own parochial ideological-political world from within, or those who document (clearly and with evidence and examples) the process of successive mini-crises of confidence which characterizes much of the experience of an honest engagement with the world. This world may not need more Norman Mailers, but it could do with a few more Steven Rubios and Matt Welches.
P.S. By the way, I should mention that a few years back Steven Rubio conducted what I still feel is the best published interview I've ever participated in. It appeared in Punk Planet in Feb. 2000, and mostly concerns punk/personal history and song-writing rather than politics. Anyone who's interested can read it here.
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 8, 2003 11:58 AM | TrackBack