I’ve enjoyed reading the insightful blogger responses to Mother Jones‘ “Fight Different” package on internet politics. I’ve also enjoyed the less insightful ones. I was particularly entertained by this morning’s post on Techpresident, which is (usually) a smart group blog on everything politics 2.0. Techprez blogger Alan Rosenblatt has decided today that the mainstream media is too obsessed with his ilk (if he’s flattered, it doesn’t show) and that they’re failing to look more broadly at “how the web is playing an enormous role in all aspects of politics.” Singled out for specific calumny is our very own bastion of old thinking:
[A]fter reading so much mainstream press coverage about Politics 2.0 lately (for example, in Mother Jones this month), one might conclude that the sun rises and sets only on blogs and the bloggers that write them. There is so much more to online campaigning that we do ourselves a great disservice when we narrow our focus too much on blogs.
Thank you, Alan, for helping me understand why blog discourse often reduces to phrases such as “fucking dumbass.”
If Alan had actually read the package, he’d see one story on bloggers out of four main pieces and 27 published interviews with netizens, digerati and politicos. Here’s what Alan says Mother Jones is missing, which, since he’s too lazy to look for himself, I’ve conveniently linked to stories in the package that deal with each subject: “the web is playing an enormous role in all aspects of politics, including fundraising, volunteer organizing, message dissemination, and voter engagement through social networks and social media.” That’s brilliant, Alan. Thanks for letting us know.
The most interesting thing about the Techpresident post is how it illustrates the blogosphere as echo chamber. Some bloggers earn their soup by setting up the old media as a paper doll to be burned, which works fine as long as nobody reads the old media to see what they’re actually saying and nobody in the old media reads the blogs and bothers to debunk them when they’re wrong. Fortunately, I see some light at the end of the tunnel here. For one, Mother Jones has a blog (hi, Alan!) and we can tinkle on logos just like the Calvinists.
All of this is not to say that Techpresident is a lame blog. I’m glad that Techprez blogger Cfinnie linked to my interview with Howard Dean (thanks, Cfinnie!). Too bad Alan doesn’t read his colleagues either.
PS: I want to include a link to the blog of Seth Finkelstein, who is quite well-informed about many of the same issues we are discussing here and in the blog post on Rosen. I highly suggest following the links he’s pasted into the comments below, and in his post. Also see our post from Dan Schulman for discussion about gatekeepers.
