A blogger's lament

Matt Welch, one of the first bloggers I discovered shortly after 9/11, says blogs have become just another partisan echo chamber:

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

[...]

So what’s wrong with a bunch of human beings using technology to organize themselves into political groupings? Absolutely nothing. The purpose of enhanced freedom is to enhance people’s ability act freely in the ways of their choosing, and we shouldn’t be surprised when they choose to do the same stuff they were doing before, only more efficiently. As I argued in my first-ever media column for Reason (“Hack Roast,” April 2004), partisanship is often the most powerful fuel driving media criticism, unearthing apolitical facts in the course of expressly political acts.

As with the last decade of boom-bust cycles on the World Wide Web, the only thing self-publishing has not lived up to has been the wildest and most specific hype of its most ardent enthusiasts—like me. And even if I was wrong about the transformative political nature of the post-9/11 blog explosion, the ensuing growth of the form has made it exponentially easier to seek out truth, however you define it.

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason’s Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn’t predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at June 12, 2006 07:55 AM