cross-posted at skippy as well as a literal cornucopia of other community blogs.
all of blogtopia (yes! we coined that phrase! except, apparently, at yearlykos) is a’buzz over daniel henninger’s haughty dressing down of the discourse found on our sites.
danny boy, writing on wsj’s site opinionjournal, made the point that those darn blogs are just so…uncivilized:
but in a “blogs trend survey” released last september, america online reported that only 8% blog to “expose political information.” instead, 50% of bloggers consider what they are doing to be therapy. some might argue that using the internet to self-medicate includes many nominally political blogs, but more on that shortly…
we deconstruct this and other henninger nuggets after the jump:
we won’t bother to mention danny boy’s obvious bait-and-switch here, lumping the majority of blogs which have little to do with the national discourse on politics and more to do with what jeanie wore in algebra today and isn’t nick lachey better off without jessica, in with the sort of sites that we, and he, actually think of when he says the word blogs, ie, dailykos, atrios, redstate, etc. but, of course, that’s just what he does.
then there’s politics. on the huffington post yesterday, there were more than 600 “comments” on karl rove and the white house staff shake-up. “demoted my — the snake is still in the grass.” “he should be demoted to leavenworth.” “rove is bush’s brain, and without him, our decider-in-chief wouldn’t know how to wipe his own —-.”
from a primary post on the same subject on the daily kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in democratic politics now: “i don’t give a —-. karl rove belongs in shackles.” “a group of village whores have taken a day off to do laundry.”
intense language like this used to be confined to construction sites and corner bars. now it is normal discourse on web sites, the most popular forums for political discussion. much of this is new. politics is a social endeavor. the web is nothing if not “social.” but the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.
at the risk of enabling, does the internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? as populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others’ therapy. it takes a village.
armando makes the point on dkos that the wall street journal is a pot in no position to call the kettle crazy:
i wondered whether the insane dominated political discourse long before the advent of the internet. for example, this story, that was legitimized by the wall street journal editorial page, made me wonder for the sanity of those who took it seriously:
among the allegations spread by citizens for honest government’s paid “expert witnesses” was that bill clinton, as governor of arkansas, provided protection for the cocaine trade.
. . . [w]hat ultimately legitimized the allegations was a series of editorials and articles on the subject that appeared in 1994 on the editorial page of the wall street journal. rep. jim leach, (r-iowa), chairman of the house banking committee, acknowledged in an interview in the fall of l996 that he had directed his committee staff to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the mena allegations after first reading about them in the wall street journal.
meanwhile, cbs’s blogophile quotes other bloggers’ opinions on danny boy’s self-righteousness, including instapundit, writing in tcs daily:
pardon me for sounding rude, but what, exactly, does this have to do with the internet? the “let it all hang out” ethos predates tcp/ip. and cable tv and hip-hop were around long before the internet had much effect on american culture. and the truly defining moments of culture-shift are pretty old, too: black-power salutes at the 1968 olympics, the appearance of televised cursing on norman lear’s all in the family, the abandonment of court decorum at wimbledon and the u.s. open. and it seems to me that it’s pretty hard to blame the internet for what’s on tv now, too. instead, it seems to be a general cultural phenomenon — the same thing that has people attending church, or dining out, in shorts and flip-flops. disinhibition isn’t just for the internet. it has become general, and the notion of behaving better when in the public eye has taken quite a beating. henninger’s focus on the internet misses the point: his own examples suggest that if people are behaving badly on the internet, it’s because they’re behaving badly everywhere.
henninger seems — like a lot of newspaper people these days — to be focusing on problems with the internet not so much because the internet is a problem, generally, as because it’s a problem for, well, newspaper people. the newspaper industry is sinking financially, and the internet is getting blamed not only for that, but for anything else that’s handy. that’s too bad, though, because once you strip away the paranoia and fud-spreading, henninger has something of a point. political discourse, of course, has been going downhill since, well, about 1968 too. (or maybe 1967, with barbara garson’s scurrilous play, macbird, which featured a necrophile lbj exulting over jfk’s assassination.) not that we ever enjoyed the kind of golden age that some social critics today might imply, but people certainly did, in general, maintain a degree of decorum, or respect for office, that vanished with the generalized hatred of lbj and richard nixon. and things have certainly gone downhill since, if that’s possible.
of course, prof. reynolds cites an obscure lefty stage parody of the 60’s, and avoids altogether the obvious examples of recent disinhibited discourse: limbaugh, wiener, hannity, coulter, and their ilk.
we also wonder about the rest of us “being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people,” specifically, crazy people who screw their mistress’s daughter, then beat up the daughter when she doesn’t get an abortion. and, we wonder why language that “used to be confined to corner bars and construction sites” wound up on the floor of the senate, or on the podium at a campaign stop.
we agree w/at least the first part of prof. reynolds’ reply to danny boy: bad behavior is not limited to, and in fact, pre-dates the internets. danny boy’s op-ed piece is just another example of dead trees media getting all huffy and puffy about those darn citizens that dare to express their opinions, and about a communications platform in which those citizen opinions are on equal footing with the usual corporate top-down media pundits. in other words, it’s the words themselves that are important, and not the reputation, laurels, bank account or connections of those who write them.
so f*ck you, henninger.
