Thursday, December 28, 2006
Consider the source
Posted by Harold Henderson on 12.28.06 at 12:48 PM
"The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced," writes Joseph Rago, assistant assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal at Opinion Journal, "and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness."
Blog journalism, on the other hand, "appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form.... Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought -- instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition."
Overgeneralized twaddle like this is nothing new, and substituting ideology for cognition is what most people do most of the time in any medium available. But it's especially instructive to hear it from a publication that has just published ten articles on "Poverty: The Search for New Solutions", in which race is mentioned, very briefly, just twice.
Comments (4)
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I find myself leaping to Rago's defense, ironically, only because I read so many interesting blogs. Most of the blogs I'm interested in (including yours) are written by established writers working in old media and/or academics. Here is what one great blogger (who also writes for "The Weekly Standard") had to say about Rago: http://galleyslaves.blogspot.com/2006/12/on-blogs-bloggers-and-pat-conroy.html
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Jeff, interesting thought. I think I like Jonathan Last's version of the argument better than Rago's -- it's a tad less dogmatic. But isn't even Last saying that this MEDIUM is ruining us participants as serious people? (And didn't Andrew Sullivan's tenure at New Republic do his rep more damage than since?) I'm just not buying it until someone does a serious comparison of the fraction of dreck in various media. Anyone can cherry pick bad (Rago) or good (me).
You are right that someone needs to do a serious comparison. However, I think Sullivan is the poster boy for how blogs can turn a normally careful and thoughtful writer into someone, in the words of one of my favorite bloggers Mickey Kaus, very "excitable". I could write a small paper on Sullivan's decent into incoherence, but the creation of the word "Christianist" would be my starting point.
