Here authors discuss their views on subjects or areas that spark their imagination or inflame their passions.
They have an opinion they wish to share. They are not blogging to relieve internal pressure, as confessional bloggers do, but to initiate a conversation. This opinion is syndicated, typically by RSS, throughout the blogosphere, gets commented on, linked to, reposted and discussed by a number of other blogs and bloggers. A meme develops.
Comments beget new blog entries which in turn develop, deepen or die.
These are real conversations with all the strengths and weakness of
conversation. They can be unstructured, unsavoury, often nasty,
sometimes profound, occasionally enlightening, mostly entertaining but
sometimes brain-numbingly boring, mean and outright stupid. And, as in
life in general, we tend to think that conversations we start are
“better” than most others.
These
discussions can be of great value. They allow access to useful sources
of information from areas often inaccessible to mainstream journalists.
One of the more famous is the Baghdad
blog which was a source of alternative information and experience from a war-threatened, then war-ravaged
Iraq
. The blog, written by Salam Pax, has since been published in book form.
[
There was a controversy in blogging circles as to whether or not Salem
Pax actually existed. Journalist Peter Maass wrote an entertaining and
interesting piece on how the elusive Salem was actually his interpreter.]
There are also blogs ( I write this from the perspective of a european journalist) from culturally and intellectually inaccessible (to me) areas. Muslim girls discuss their lives, Chinese students, ethnic minorities in large cities, sub-cultures – these peripheral areas are reported on from the inside and commented on by the outside in a dialog that is seldom available.
The
point here is that there is interactivity, communality, argument and
discussion. And speed. It is amazing to watch a issue spread.
A timely example is the current affairs program 60-minutes on the "Bush AWOL letters"
On Wednesday night, CBS News released four memos
it claimed were written in 1972 and 1973 by George W. Bush's commander
in the Texas Air National Guard. In one of the documents, Lt. Col.
Jerry B. Killian writes that a Guard official was "pushing to sugar
coat" Bush's training evaluation; in another, Killian suspects that
Bush is "talking to someone upstairs" about getting transferred. Within
a few hours of the CBS report, bloggers were questioning the
authenticity of the documents. By today, the doubts were on the front page of the Washington Post.
[slate]
And Jay Rosen has this to say:
PressThink:
"Here are some quick thoughts-- not about the charges, which seem
serious to me, but about the general atmosphere and what's at stake if
this turns into a political scandal.
Four things to stick in the front of your mind:
* It completely elevates the episode and charges it with political and
cultural tension that the anchorman, Dan Rather, presented the CBS
report Wednesday Night accusing Bush of disappearing from Guard duty.
If Sixty Minutes had presented a damaging story of that kind at the
height of an election campaign and it turned out to be based on forged
documents, that would itself be a crisis. But it was Dan Rather on
Sixty Minutes, and it is now Rather on the hook if the documents are
fake. (Indeed, Rather told the Los Angeles Times, 'I'm of the school,
my name is on it, I'm responsible.') That brings in Rather's celebrity,
the corporate iconography in which an anchorman is always involved, the
succession drama at CBS News now that Rather is 72 years old, and the
enormous venom out there for Rather, who is seen on the Right as a man
of many political sins. Thus, PowerLine wrote: 'This would appear to
signal the end of Rather's career. If the documents are ultimately
accepted as forgeries, which seems inevitable to us, he can't survive.'
All of which means this is not just a scandal, but a cultural theatre
for it, and that's different."
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