A few words on some possible uses of blogging
By Heraclitus
Okay, I had hoped to work these comments by Tocqueville into a more original post than what I'm about to write, but it appears it is not to be. Besides, a few weeks ago questions about the purpose of blogging and what it's accomplished were making the blogular rounds, so maybe some of these points bear repeating (for more see here and here).
Let's start by taking a look at Alexis de Tocqueville on the role of newspapers in America.
This discussion of newspapers takes place in Tocqueville's larger discussion of individualism and the need for associations, political and otherwise, in modern democracies. The very inequalities that define an aristocracy bind people together in immutable relationships of dependence, and the permanence of people's respective stations made those bonds all the more secure. In democracies, by contrast, all are equal, but all are also therefore isolated and shorn of any necessary connection to others in the larger society. Thus associations are necessary to draw people out of themselves, to create the kind of social connections that the essential features of democracy work to retard or eradicate. Modern democracy, which requires the people to govern themselves, thus relies on civil associations and social bonds to survive, but also makes these things more difficult to create.
Thus newspapers, according to Tocqueville, have an even more important role to play than disseminating information. Or, to put this point somewhat differently, both detractors and defenders of the MSM seem to agree that it presents a fairly uniform version of reality or of political events. Tocqueville, however, sees the real importance of newspapers as being less a matter of giving people a shared view of political life or of authoritatively announcing the truth behind or within current events and more a matter of facilitating communication and common action. But this communication and common action can and should be taking place among a variety of heterogeneous groups (the view of our MSM overlords that there should be one homogenous version of political reality is obviously a bad one, or at least it seems to me obviously bad). Thus whether or not those uniting get things "right" is less important than they fact that they are uniting, and thus keeping themselves from falling into an atomized sloth slouching its way towards the end of democracy (a little melodramatic, but you see what I'm saying).
I think it's obvious at once how blogs, especially with comments, can perform these functions or tasks even better than newspapers. I assume that the point of this discussion and how it bears on the goodness or relevance of blogs in obvious.
Of course, there are some strange or uncomfortable features of Tocqueville's analysis. He seems to take it for granted that most associations, and hence most newspapers, are expressions of what looks like a hive mind. Indeed, the high-flown and self-serving conception most journalists have of themselves as seeking something called "truth" seems completely out of place in Tocqueville's handling of their profession. The good that newspapers and blogs do is simply getting people to speak to and act with one another; Tocqueville doesn't seem to hold out very high hopes about the content of what you'll find in the average newspaper, or about its relation to the truth. I think this is mostly, well, true, both of newspapers and of blogs, although there are inevitably exceptions. Though on occasion there shines forth a hipster meanie who is extraordinarily insightful and original (much more so, in this case, than anyone writing for a newspaper), for the most part, the good that blogs do consists in igniting and fueling group action, not revolutionizing the way that people think.
This post is already long enough, and although there's surely more to say about this last point, I want to finish with the bashing of the MSM that any bloggist's (I'm taking this word from James Lileks, though I can't find the post where he originally proposed it) description of his medium must include at some point. Rather than ask what blogs have accomplished, it might be better to ask what the MSM has accomplished these past six years. Take, for instance, the indescribably execrable New York Times, which, after spinning the invasion of Iraq harder than Fox News and The Weekly Standard combined, has decided to devote itself to fellating the most retrograde government in Israel's history. Readers of this blog know the greatest hits of the Bush administration, but it suffices to recall the press's handling of the invasion of Iraq, secret prisons, and the current mystery about exactly what "techniques" are being used on prisoners at Gitmo to see the worthlessness of our current press. Somehow or other the MSM has come to regard itself as the gatekeeper to "reality," when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. They are, in fact, rather like the representatives of "the free and liberal press" in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, who loudly boast of their nobility and defiance of authority, but who in reality are more quickly and easily bought out than the petty bourgeosie who runs the actual printing press. This example, it seems to me, is enough to vindicate Tocqueville's conception of what a healthy press will look like in a modern democracy, and the role of blogs in realizing that conception.
Okay, I had hoped to work these comments by Tocqueville into a more original post than what I'm about to write, but it appears it is not to be. Besides, a few weeks ago questions about the purpose of blogging and what it's accomplished were making the blogular rounds, so maybe some of these points bear repeating (for more see here and here).
Let's start by taking a look at Alexis de Tocqueville on the role of newspapers in America.
When men are no longer bound among themselves in a solid and permanent manner [as they were in aristocracies, and especially the French ancien régime], one cannot get many to act in common except by persuading each of them whose cooperation is necessary that his particular interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his efforts with the efforts of all the others.
This discussion of newspapers takes place in Tocqueville's larger discussion of individualism and the need for associations, political and otherwise, in modern democracies. The very inequalities that define an aristocracy bind people together in immutable relationships of dependence, and the permanence of people's respective stations made those bonds all the more secure. In democracies, by contrast, all are equal, but all are also therefore isolated and shorn of any necessary connection to others in the larger society. Thus associations are necessary to draw people out of themselves, to create the kind of social connections that the essential features of democracy work to retard or eradicate. Modern democracy, which requires the people to govern themselves, thus relies on civil associations and social bonds to survive, but also makes these things more difficult to create.
Thus newspapers, according to Tocqueville, have an even more important role to play than disseminating information. Or, to put this point somewhat differently, both detractors and defenders of the MSM seem to agree that it presents a fairly uniform version of reality or of political events. Tocqueville, however, sees the real importance of newspapers as being less a matter of giving people a shared view of political life or of authoritatively announcing the truth behind or within current events and more a matter of facilitating communication and common action. But this communication and common action can and should be taking place among a variety of heterogeneous groups (the view of our MSM overlords that there should be one homogenous version of political reality is obviously a bad one, or at least it seems to me obviously bad). Thus whether or not those uniting get things "right" is less important than they fact that they are uniting, and thus keeping themselves from falling into an atomized sloth slouching its way towards the end of democracy (a little melodramatic, but you see what I'm saying).
I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers often bring citizens to make very inconsiderate undertakings in common; but if there were no newspapers, there would almost never be common action. The ill they produce is therefore much less than the one they cure.
A newspaper not only has the effect of suggesting the same design to many men; it furnishes them the means of executing in common the designs they themselves had already conceived...
It often happens in democratic countries...that many men who have the desire or the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
The newspaper has brought them near, and it continues to be necessary to them to keep them together.
In order that an association in a democratic people have some power, it must be numerous. Those who compose it are therefore dispersed over a great space, and each of them is kept in the place he inhabits by the mediocrity of his fortune and by the multitude of little cares that it requires. They must find a means of speaking to each other every day without seeing each other and of moving in accord without being united. Thus there is scarcely a democratic association that can do without a newspaper.
I think it's obvious at once how blogs, especially with comments, can perform these functions or tasks even better than newspapers. I assume that the point of this discussion and how it bears on the goodness or relevance of blogs in obvious.
Of course, there are some strange or uncomfortable features of Tocqueville's analysis. He seems to take it for granted that most associations, and hence most newspapers, are expressions of what looks like a hive mind. Indeed, the high-flown and self-serving conception most journalists have of themselves as seeking something called "truth" seems completely out of place in Tocqueville's handling of their profession. The good that newspapers and blogs do is simply getting people to speak to and act with one another; Tocqueville doesn't seem to hold out very high hopes about the content of what you'll find in the average newspaper, or about its relation to the truth. I think this is mostly, well, true, both of newspapers and of blogs, although there are inevitably exceptions. Though on occasion there shines forth a hipster meanie who is extraordinarily insightful and original (much more so, in this case, than anyone writing for a newspaper), for the most part, the good that blogs do consists in igniting and fueling group action, not revolutionizing the way that people think.
This post is already long enough, and although there's surely more to say about this last point, I want to finish with the bashing of the MSM that any bloggist's (I'm taking this word from James Lileks, though I can't find the post where he originally proposed it) description of his medium must include at some point. Rather than ask what blogs have accomplished, it might be better to ask what the MSM has accomplished these past six years. Take, for instance, the indescribably execrable New York Times, which, after spinning the invasion of Iraq harder than Fox News and The Weekly Standard combined, has decided to devote itself to fellating the most retrograde government in Israel's history. Readers of this blog know the greatest hits of the Bush administration, but it suffices to recall the press's handling of the invasion of Iraq, secret prisons, and the current mystery about exactly what "techniques" are being used on prisoners at Gitmo to see the worthlessness of our current press. Somehow or other the MSM has come to regard itself as the gatekeeper to "reality," when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. They are, in fact, rather like the representatives of "the free and liberal press" in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, who loudly boast of their nobility and defiance of authority, but who in reality are more quickly and easily bought out than the petty bourgeosie who runs the actual printing press. This example, it seems to me, is enough to vindicate Tocqueville's conception of what a healthy press will look like in a modern democracy, and the role of blogs in realizing that conception.
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