Folks,
Lefty writer Andrew Leonard "survey[s] the wreckage of the lefty blogosphere" in the wake of the election (http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2004/11/03/echo_chamber/) and raises warnings about the risks of spending too much time in the company of people we agree with.
Not that there's any risk of that here.
In an off-list conversation with Nick, he opined that we're at the beginning of what may turn out to be a generations-long coming-to-terms with having an unprecedented variety of points of view available via the Internet. Right now, we just don't know what the heck to do with it.
Some hole up with their fellow (Left|Right)-Wingers to tell each other how right they are, how evil the other guys are, and think that they're on to some New Truth. That's the problem that Andrew Leonard focuses on. It may be that the "echo chamber" effect is not the problem, but just another symptom of the bipolar illness that increasingly grips us.
Then again, Some decide, like "Bones" at http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html, that the whole thing is a bloody great waste of time.
Sadly, too few attempt to take in the whole panoply and make some sense of it.
Which, by the way, was why they were called "web logs" in the first place. They didn't start out being public journals or soap boxes. They started out as annotated collections of links to interesting stuff that web readers found and wanted to share with friends and the public. Web Logs. But the Internet already had something called "web logs," which are the records that web servers keep of their activity. Thus, the ubercool types with their black clothing and heavy black-framed glasses had to make up a new word to go with the new paradigms that they were making and breaking every day and a half: blog.
Dave
PS: I Hate the Word Blog
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
