Thanks, John Blake for reminding us of the longer view –and for the gentle rebuke to Ragos, whose rant (on his own op-ed page: talk about home-court advantage) struck me as under-meditated. For me the tension between “old media” and blogs is measured using parameters such as time, space and linkage.
(1) Time here means intrinsic cycle-time: how fast can the media producer receive new info, analyze it and send out a response over the channel, as part of the collective “discourse.” With a print mag, it’s weeks and weeks; with a newspaper, it’s days; with TV or radio, it’s not much less in practice than a newspaper but call it a few hours (to round up resource, get approval, find time slot in the product stream, deliver update). With blogs and the like, it’s minutes. The difference between a few weeks and a few days (slow print media and fast ones) is say 10x. The difference between a few days and a few hours (fast print media and broadcast media) is again about 10x. But the difference between a few hours and a few minutes (fastest broadcast media and average blogger) is not 10x. It’s more like 100x and that assumes the non-blog media is on red-alert flank-speed unsustainably quick turnaround cycle to meet a crisis. While for the blogger, sitting around in pajamas, it’s just another round of discussion and comment with however many other smart and interested people are paying heed. That instantaneity can lead to infantile outbursts and logorrhea. And that speed of propagation among networks of bloggers as an issue heats up, can cause crazy spikes and bad gossip. But when done right it allows bloggers to spot and explore and pressure-test and add new dimensions to a story long before the other (corporatized) media can even get started. When the tsunami hit Thailand 2 years ago, bloggers were putting up videostreams of the beaches, running stories, and posting contacts for donations, before Dan Rather had had time to tell his team to start thinking about plane tickets for Bangkok. .
(2) Space here means intellectual cross-section: who, besides himself or herself, does the writer include in the argument? How broad a view, whose analysis or what prior facts, does the writer consider –or is the writer just indulging in partisan or solipsistic gestures? Ironic that Blake, using a medium that lends itself to narcissism, should sweep up so many interesting and varied facts and allusions, directing our minds “outward” into that intellectual space –while Ragos, using the medium that allows more judicious reflection and orderly development of ideas, should suffer in comparison to Blake.
(3) Finally, linkage. Print-on-paper is “flat” –it can give footnotes but not live links to sources. TV and radio, ditto; only more so –if it’s hard to remember a phone number that’s shown or spoken in those media, far worse when it’s a web address, then needing transcription into a computer and logging-on to web, etc. And because this linking is enabled by blogs (and with intuitive ease), blogs without links become conspicuous, and maybe a little devalued –people expect (or should expect: the cultural norms here are evolving pretty fast) to be able to check the underlying record and thus test how much bias or BS has afflicted the blogger. The blog message is no longer just the blogger’s statement, it’s statement-plus-support as enabled by the links to sources. The constant check of story to source (like a feedback loop in a signal circuit) not only forces people to blog more honestly, it creates an environment where everybody is part of the loop and can help improve the product by commenting. Like a Wiki, where if a reader sees error, he can (and should) seek to correct it. Peer review process is implicit and constant: everybody stands in the role of witness. And when people are peers, they generally behave better than those who pound keyboards in a newsroom, get buy-in from a cadre of overseers who drink the same Kool-aid, and then send it to the press room –with feedback (if any) arriving days later and being given a public airing if and only if the keyboard-pounders and the editorial cadres think it would be in their interest. The blogs’ atmosphere of constructive criticism forces good bloggers to do their homework and share their sources through inclusion of live links and through posting of smart, cogent, often witty comments..That atmosphere is for me a big part of the value that the new medium offers, and which the old media do not, both because of bad habits acquired during their preeminence, and to a degree because of their na(ure. The former they may change, the latter they cannot.
