Jurassic Press: Blogs vs. Old Media

CULTIVATING LIBERALISM
FOR ALL CLIMATES
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Jurassic Press
Blogs vs. Mainstream Media
Pierre Tristam/Candide’s Notebooks, April 29, 2006

The Economist devotes its latest survey (reproduced in full here) to “New Media”—blogs, wikis, podcasts—and reaches this, among several hopeful (or dire, depending on where you stand) conclusions: “ The mainstream media are in a good position to get things wrong.” It’s a quote by David Weinberger, the blogger’s blogger. Case in point: “many people in the traditional media,” the Economist’s Andreas Kluth writes, “are pessimistic about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even democracy.” It’d be silly to deny the torrential excesses of bad manners online, but just as silly to consider it any more or less torrential than the tenor of manners on the average city street. It’s more relevant to ask: who appointed the mainstream media the Praetorian Guard of manners online? But these media are being outrun by a corrective (and a collective) they’ve yet to grasp.

The trouble with mainstream media of late is an excess of civility, and pseudo-civility at that. It’s the civility of the Old South, where form and manners matter to the exclusion of content and purpose, where class, and classism, seem to have become of greater value than the pursuit of truth, let alone truth “without fear or favor”—class-busting truths among them. The resulting slavery of information in the hands of a few Barry Diller-like “moguls” has given us a mass media diverse in appearance only. Look at cover story after cover story in Newsweek, Time, USNews & World Report, where it’s as if colons, fat and narcissism are the three branches of government; look at Business Week, a Wall Street cheerleader that wouldn’t know morality from Donald Trump’s lip-addled ass; look at the wealth and celebrity porn of Vanity Fair, the sleeping-pill centrism of The Atlantic, the (with apologies to Laura) headless-chicken identity of The New Republic. Should I get on with the dailies? The Times, the Post, the Journal, even USA Today—they all have their brilliant corners, their Orion-like reporters who manage to be the paper’s (and our fibrillating democracy’s) saving grace. But they’re minorities on their own turfs. Our media in general are catastrophically bland, segregated, dull, predictable, all of which would still be tolerable if they weren’t what a “free press” should never be: the courtesan of the establishment.

No wonder then that blogs, among others, are picking up the slack, providing the subversion the media themselves no longer provide. Sure it’s messy, hard to define, wanting in quality here and there—and remarkable for its quality here and there: have a look at the blogroll to the left, for starters. I have to agree with Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future that we’re probably on the verge of a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity. At any rate, have a read: The Economist’s survey is mostly pay-per-view, but not at the Notebooks.

THE DAILY JOURNAL

VANPOEM

As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat

Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.

On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.

It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into

before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.

Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown.

—Van Foreman