R U As Bored As I M?
I continue to find the "public debate"blogs a bit of a chore. Remember Timothy Crouse's characterization of "pack journalism?" Now we have pack blogagalism, with a whole bunch of bloggers chasing the same scrap or two of insight
However, at the level of rhetoric, they may be doing some ineresting things.
And then Aldon, watching from on high, urges us to think about the means by which diversity can be maintained, possibly outside the scope of A-list blogs. Also, thank you Aldon, we have to think about how blogs are read, not just how they are written.
Lastly, it's almost always a mistake, I am discovering, to think of blogs as self-contained narrative, instead of as networks. Note the similarity of the chart there to the thing I keep drawing, obsessively, like a minor X-Files character, on the board.
posted by Printer's Devil @ 5:01 AM
4 Comments:
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One of the things that I dreaded during this week was the nomination of a new Supreme Court candidate, for much the same reasons that you describe. When a far-reaching, polarizing issue like this hits the media, I tend to steer clear of the political blogs because it just seems like a lot of noise, with very few fresh, innovative ideas mixed in. And the blogs become dominated by the story to the point of saturation. My favorite time to scan the political blogs is when the news cycle is not spinning at a feverish pace, when there is no preeminent story, and when the hope of finding a little diversity in the political blogosphere exists. So yes, I am as bored as you and am sick of these stories.
I actually consciously avoid posting longish posts on unrelated topics at times when there are hot news coming out. I know nobody will read anything not connected with the event of the day. Lately, the news cycle has been relentless, almost daily. I think there's been more than a month since I posted something thoughtful.
Sorry to post on your class blog, but this is an interesting topic.
A lot of the big national political blogs are more like massive support groups than they are arenas for actual public debate. People visit them because the information they receive, which is usually incredibly partisan in some way or another, comfortingly reinforces their point of view. This is why FreeRepublic bans moderates and liberals as soon as possible (and removes the offending posts), and why Daily Kos turns like a pack of dogs on supporters of Joe Lieberman. They wreck the good mood.
So you're right; they are networks.
...So am I part of one? Sort of, in that there's a small pool of Connecticut political bloggers who I link to and who link to me. We often write about the same big stories, although we don't all interpret them in the same way. I do see some of the national rhetoric filtering down, but in general local sites and blogs seem to have more freedom to be creatively nuts than national blogs.
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