We live in a world supersaturated in information, in which the technologies of communication have vastly outpaced our ability to find something new to say. Information of one kind or another is everywhere, much of it provided for free. I sell information for a living. The market forces are against me.
Yes there is more information out there than a single person can consume. But to claim there is nothing new to say is hogwash. Unless Archenblog is operating under a topic restriction, there is as much new information has there is someone to consume it. Americans, simply are so self-involved, they in general spend little time with what's going on in the world. Witness that Technocrati doesn't even offer a "Foreign Policy" tag! The only tags I found on the list that relates to world events is World News and World-News. A quick perusal of that tag category reviews few topics originated from America related to world news beyond the Middle East. Other blog catalogues have the same absense of a worldview catagory. Everyone is primarily focused on their own perspective. I'd call that part of the problem.
You can tell yourself that the words you type are better than the other words out there, that they're fashioned together with superior raw materials (lots of interesting consonants like "K" and "v"), forming premium sentences that contain an unusual number of adverbs and adjectives per square meter. You know the motto here at the A-blog: "Using Adverbs Promiscuously Since 2005."
These ruminations were inspired by the Bill Raspberry piece the other day on why columnists are necessary. Bill has pondered whether a world of too much info needs opinionators. He decides that they're useful filters -- to a point: "I find it useful to have a half-dozen opinion columnists digest the day's offerings for me so I get a sense, from several points of view, of what is worth spending my time thinking about. That, by the way, is one of the reasons I deplore those members of the craft who write (or so it seems to me) as political propagandists. I don't need a political-operative-by-stealth using valuable op-ed space to promote partisan interests." Who's he referring to? I'd guess Robert Novak, for starters, since Novak seems to channel Cheney et al. George Will does not represent the Republican Party in power -- he's an old-line Conservative, not a neo-Con, and it seems unlikely he'll be getting invited to many Bush family Christmas parties. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Op-Ed types who say liberal things and sound like Democrats, but the Democratic Party, as an institution, doesn't have anyone voicing its opinion on the Op-Ed page, since the party doesn't actually know what it thinks.
He does have a point. It seems like there is an awful lot of political blogs that talk about much the same thing, each trying to squeeze out a new angle that might capture the audience. "Promiscuous adverbs" sometimes is all it amounts to. But the reason is far from his allegation of too much information, it's America's narrow focus of interests in politics.
But there is a purpose to political blogging, even if repetitive.
From another WaPo Blog William Raspberry:
The same torrent of information that makes blogging attractive also underscores one of the services columnists provide: the weeding-out function. During those times when a single story dominates the news -- as during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath --you don't really need a columnist to help you know what to think. It's those other times, when there is genocide in Darfur, political violence in Gabon, race riots in France, bird flu in Asia, the toppling of a government in Canada and a congressional scandal in the United States, that you may find it helpful for someone to arrange the information for you -- not so much to tell you what to think as to tell you what, among thousands of options, you might want to think about.
News organizations have always done that, of course, in what some describe as a gatekeeping function. That is, they not only decide what is on the news agenda in any given news cycle but they also do their best to screen out bad information and to distinguish between hard fact and rumor -- something the unchecked Internet cannot always do.
Point well made. But now he loses his way.
To say you read it in The Post or the New York Times is to claim some level of authenticity. To say you read it on the Internet is about as helpful as saying you heard it on the telephone. That's the branding function of newspapers.
This is no longer the case. It seems that everyone has an agenda. The MSM has become a conduit for powerful special interests. One can no longer tell news from propaganda. The only solution is to check multiple sources, with different axes to grind, to attempt to ferret out something near the truth.
But sometimes you feel the need for something more. I find it useful to have a half-dozen opinion columnists digest the day's offerings for me so I get a sense, from several points of view, of what is worth spending my time thinking about.
Back on track. I blog for myself. I write to share my insights into the patterns of events across the globe. I've come to believe I have a knack for pulling out the forest from the trees. But ya know, as much as I'd like someone to read this, even if no one did, I'd still write it. It purges my anger, frustration and helplessness and gives me one last chance to find understandable patterns that separate world events from chaos.
1 comment:
I am pretty sure that the best way to get others to read what you write, is to write about what is important to you, and to do exactly what you are doing, which is to write in a way that serves an emotional purpose for you.
That way, what you write is not merely a conduit for someone else's agenda.
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