What is this, a few journalists have discovered blogs for the first time and have decided they just don’t like ’em? This fellow Zengerle seems to see them as a threat to the Republic, and now some guy named Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator weighs in, with some devastating complaints.
- He is shocked at the funny names. “What the heck, for instance, is ‘Echidne of the Snakes‘ or ‘Nyarlathotep’s Miscellany‘?” Whoa. Burn. I’m sure glad I didn’t pick a weird name for my blog.
- He doesn’t get Fafblog. He seems to think it’s about stilted writing, rather than some of the sharpest mockery of the Right around. Satire and humor are things that Serious Journalists do not use, I guess.
- He doesn’t quite understand how links work. “Here’s a test: Visit any blog site that has a list of permalinks to other blogs, and pick the most seemingly off-topic link you can find. Within three blog links, you’re likely to find somebody advertising ‘Nude Live Babes!’ or ‘Celebrities In The Raw!’ or somesuch.” It’s true. I have discovered that you can get from my site to Michelle Malkin or Little Green Footballs in only two clicks. I am so ashamed.
- There’s the horrible narcissism. “The blogs particularly lend themselves to a bizarre combination of attention deficit and what I’ll call the ‘Shouting-From-The-Rooftops Syndrome,’ a malady in which every utterance is deemed worthy of broadcast because, well, it’s mine, dammit, and I now have a forum on which to broadcast it.” Unlike, say, a print journalist for the American Spectator, who would never write an article expressing his gosh-wow reaction to discovering there is pr0n on the intarweb, and that you can get there by clicking on links. He would only write important stuff.
- Worst of all, blogging tempts one into sin. “But what it doesn’t encourage is reflection, patience or, to stress again, discipline. And its wild informality, including the use and misuse of the written world, does not lend itself to careful persuasiveness.” That’s right, diversity and creativity are wicked…and are probably much too liberal for Mr Hillyer. People who write every day, day in and day out, for years can’t possibly have any discipline—writing because they love writing? Horrors! Where are the deadlines, the editors with whips, the challenge of a requirement to make Dick Cheney sound sensible and important? And how can you possibly find careful persuasive writers when the Nude Live Babes beckon?
Oh, well. Quin Hillyer (hey, wait a minute…what is he doing complaining about funny names?) really just cares about us. He even gives us parenting advice.
So, a memo to parents: Don’t let your children sit at their computers all day long. Even if they must be inside (outside exercise is often better), encourage them to read books and newspapers, to play board games, even to write notes to each other with pen and paper. That way they’ll learn to communicate rather than just to emote.
Good point. I should kick the kids outside and tell them to enjoy some fresh air and blue skies today. But my kids do read books. They don’t seem to care for the newspapers much, and the magazines they read are probably not the ones Hillyer would approve (my oldest does read The Economist, though…), but he’s wrong, otherwise. Our kids are adopting and modifying new media—is he aware of how much the youth are texting and IMing and MMORPGing and blogging and MySpacing and Facebooking together? I am, barely, but I’m not going to discourage kids from innovating because I’m a cranky old fart who thinks writing doesn’t count unless it’s done with the Palmer method on a Big Chief pad. And it’s gotta be serious, dammit. None of this high-falutin’ satire.
Thanks for bringing this up. I think some content for my proposed (well, borrowed and transformed) issues in multimedia authoring course should be about the reaction back on the “new media” by the “old media” …
“Written world” or “written word”? I see you just copied and pasted it, and it’s from the original article. I wonder if it was a typo, or they actually think that’s the expression?
I clicked links for ten minutes, starting at my own blog, and never came across any pron. Am I missing something? All I saw was written worlds.
He meant “Nude live squid”. Now try it.
Reminds me of Richard Cohen’s “Clicking Down a Digital Rabbit Hole” article, which we usually refer to as the “I FOUND THE INTERNET, MR. GUMBY” column.
I can’t get to porn from my blog, either, although FrinkTank had a rather salacious illustration of Harry Potter. I suspect that, like most people who holler about the Sinful Evils of Whatever, the author is starting from a position that’s not entirely aboveboard.
I was flipping channels briefly on TV this morning, and saw a clip of a woman giving advice to parents sending their kids off to camp. One of her pearls of wisdom was, “just unplug.” To which she added “write a letter to your kids instead of using all the technology”. Write a letter? Unless theirs cash in the envelope, why waste a stamp? You might as well go out and chop the tree down yourself and carve in your message into it. Or, use a stone tablet, at least that’s a little more environmentally friendly. What an inefficient way to say “how’s camp, are you having fun?”. Not to mention firmly cementing your child’s impression of you as an “old fart”.
Mainstreammedia has always been at war with blogotopia.
I just have to love how bloggers have adopted the idea that they are the “new media” — apparently without a sense of irony or history. Doesn’t the whole idea of “the internet changes everything” reek just a little too much of 1999 and the “new economy” of the dot-commers?
Don’t get be wrong — I like blogs — hell, I was an early Slashdot user and before that a Usenet poster — but posting stories or comments on a blog is more like chatting with some like-minded people in a pub than journalism.
I find it ironic that someone from mainstream media is complaining about bad journalism in the blogosphere.
Many portions of blogtopia are devoted to exposing the lack of journalism in mainstream media.
Hmmm…
I hate to correct someone whose posts I like, but since when is “American Spectator” a part of “mainstream media”?
(Sorry.)
Nah, I take the opinion of an “American Spectator” writer about as seriously as I take the rest of Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers. I don’t drink Snapple, either.
But blogging is new media. It’s new, and it’s a medium.
“Here’s a test: Visit any blog site that has a list of permalinks to other blogs, and pick the most seemingly off-topic link you can find. Within three blog links, you’re likely to find somebody advertising ‘Nude Live Babes!’ or ‘Celebrities In The Raw!’ or somesuch.”
Ah, yes, the vile scourge of massive interconnectedness. Gets ’em every time.
I have to take issue with the claim that the blogosphere contributes to short attention spans. Much more than in newspaper, radio, or TV coverage, I have seen blogs engage readers in lengthy (as well as careful) analyses. Bloggers tend to engage each other, linking earlier (sometimes much earlier) posts to continue conversations. Even when the “old media” decides a story is “over”, blogtopia may still be working on it.
But maybe Hillyer didn’t delve deeply enough to notice?
A medium? You mean neither rare nor well-done? (with apologies to Eddie Kovacs)
But seriously, yes, blogging is a medium in the same sense as “oil and canvas” is a medium — a method of expression. But is it comparable to the journalistic institutions of the “mass media”?
One of the most frustrating things I find about blogs is their circular citation — if one blog says something like “Dick Cheney was a mafia hit man in his youth” it is too often justified by linking to another blog rather than to a genuine news account presenting concrete evidence. And if anyone questions “Well, why isn’t this on the front page of the New York Times if true?”, the general reaction is “Why do you like Cheney so much? Isn’t an assertion by a blogger who claims to be a former police officer good enough for you? Obviously the NYT is covering up the truth.”
It’s nothing new. People complained about writing, at one point:
…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories, but, trusting in external, foreign marks, they will not bring things to remembrance from within themselves. You have discovered a remedy not for memory, but for reminding. You offer your students the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
-Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b
People always complain that the new development will destroy human culture or some such nonsense. Looking back, I’m pretty happy that we didn’t listen to them.
Jonathon Badger said,
I think a more apt comparison is blogging to op-ed writing, rather than the whole big tent of “journalism,” in which case the comparison holds some water.
Fair enough.
Critics of blogs routinely assume that blogging is a vice of the young, but all the surveys I’ve seen suggest that it is mostly a pastime of the middle-aged and older. Just how many teenagers and twenty somethings have you met who have the patience to write whole paragraphs or even essays? Text messaging it ain’t.
Within three blog links, you’re likely to find somebody advertising ‘Nude Live Babes!’ or ‘Celebrities In The Raw!’ or somesuch.”
What do you bet two of those links were “via Boing Boing” and “Suicide Girls”?
Thank you Xerxes for finding that bit from Plato. I was wracking (racking? wacking?) my brain for it and, pow, you came up with it!
I sometimes catch myself thinking “well, whem I was a kid, we blah blah blah”, at which my better self falls down laughing itself silly.
Blah.
Here we go, the old farts, the ones with the monetary support, the nifty offices and the cool invitations are now officially pushing back against the new kids on the block (ABSOLUTELY no pun intended).
I’m 44 but I’ll stick with the “kids” (who aren’t) and write in any forum I wish to just as I’ll continue to ignore venerable sources of information who lack any real depth.
Maybe it’s just the old (48 in July) *&%)@ in me, but I was thinking of magazines as media. “Newsweek” is mainstream; I don’t really think a hard-right magazine like “American Spectator” is mainstream (how many dentist offices have “AS” in the lobby? I’ve never seen one); by extenstion, I view their websites in the same light.
What would you do if you noticed other-than mainstream magazines in your dentist’s office? “Creation” magazine, for example…
What, you mean there are dentist offices without “Creation” inside them?
From Texas, exaggerating, but probably not as much as I wish I was.
So… Dentists tend to be Creationists?
But what it doesn’t encourage is reflection, patience or, to stress again, discipline.
Ah, yes. Those awful, badly-written, stream-o’-consciousness blogs. No doubt, anarchy will follow in their wake, when we can no longer compose neat little arguments and write tight little essays which fit properly between the ad holes.
Meanwhile, I still try, periodically (pun intended) to read newspapers. And begin to notice that the vast majority of the content within is spectacularly vapid. Outside a wealthy, lucky handful, they’re understaffed, pumping out safe ‘human interest’ fluff, filling in the holes that remain with wire copy. Those wealthy lucky few generally utterly lack the cojones to do proper investigative work, and when the US administration lies its fat ass off pathologically and for months, they, well… write it down. And when someone does have the sheer temerity to ask an actually penetrating question of the lying shill running the press conference, and he banishes her to the back of the room, stops taking her questions, does one of those losers have the integrity to show solidarity, give his question to her when he gets the nod?
Erm, no.
Must take discipline, that. I mean, not screaming ‘liar’ at the top of your lungs and being hauled off.
And ah, yes, then we’ve got cable news. Same lack of content as print… in fewer words, sometimes with pretty graphics and theme music composed for the occasion.
My point being: yep, blogs are a bit silly, now and then. But hearing some yutz from print complain about this (cover story in the Spectator as of this moment: really, Karl Rove is such a nice man… I mean, gee, look, he drove me home) reeks too much of black pots and kettles.
“Don’t let your children sit at their computers all day long. Even if they must be inside (outside exercise is often better), encourage them to read books and newspapers, to play board games, even to write notes to each other with pen and paper.”
Newspapers and board games! Pen and paper! Quill and ink! Outhouse and corn cobs!
Yeah, I’ll just stick to my trusty local newspaper that’s been doing half-page frontpage headlines on this grisly local murder since last week.
Man this quote just screams at me to post something about the Church of the Subgenius for some reason.
must be the slacker in me.
Please help. I’m sure I was only a couple of clicks away from ‘Nude Babes Live’, and now I’ve become trapped in this science blog. It’s most frustrating.
No, they didn’t. Or if they did, this quote isn’t evidence of it.
This is not Plato himself “speaking”; this is part of a dialogue between the Egyptian god Thoth and an Egyptian priest. As Thoth was (even in Plato’s opinion) mythological, presumably this conversation didn’t literally occur.
Jonathan Badger: Your question is one suitable for the course idea I mentioned … there are lots of others. As for Plato, determining exactly what Plato’s view on something was is notoriously difficult. Plato himself was not above creating myths for things he did endorse, so perhaps that part of the Phaedrus is his view too. (There’s a research project for you!) As it happens, I believe that’s the standard interpretation, though.
Quick. Uninstall “The Economist” and install “The Financial Times”. Orders from Don DeLong.