Ah, the sweet sound of another old-media journalist bemoaning the end of Culture at the hands of those pesky bloggers. Don’t those rank amateurs recognize the harm they’re doing by… sharing their thoughts and ideas with others online?
I exaggerate, but not by much. It’s a bit puzzling to see a book like this come out in 2007—it seems clear at this point that while the phenomenon is still evolving and changing, the blogging/social-internet/citizen-journalist cat is highly unlikely to crawl back into the bag whence it emerged, and so it seems a bit pointless to whine about it. There are plenty of serious questions and problems one could raise about this media shift (actually they have been raised, and discussed to death already), but what are these whiners seriously suggesting we do about them? Sit there and wish really hard that people would stop, uh, sharing their thoughts and ideas with others online? Good luck with that.
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It’s elitism. To think that somebody can go and share their thoughts with the world without having the financial resources necessary to sit through four to eight years of college and build contacts in the publishing business, without learning to say only things that publishers find uncontroversial, or *lucratively* controversial?
The Wrong Kind Of People might find themselves with a voice, and they might say all manner of things with it.
Something must be done.
Ed, you’re right–it’s just plain and simple elitism. It’s just hard for me to believe that somebody would just come out with such a nakedly elitist point of view like that–especially an elitist point of view that has been heard countless times before to no real avail. In addition to making the author look like a snob, it’s sort of like holding up a sign that says “I, a self-professed internet critic, don’t get the internet at all.” And that’s weird.