Clive Davis

VOICES IN THE ETHER

I thought Guido Fawkes came a cropper too. (The moral of the story: never go on live TV with someone as experienced as Michael White.) But I'm still puzzled as to what ails Oliver Kamm:

I'm deeply sceptical of the value of political blogs and hostile to the whole medium of blogging.... I'm increasingly convinced not only that blogs impoverish our political culture but that they poison it too.

If he means Westminster gossipmongers, then I see what he means, up to a point. (I took Guido's name off my blogroll ages ago.) But they don't seem to be his sole target. Does he mean blogs written by non-journalists? Or blogs written by people who have the misfortune to be less clever than he is? Seems to me that there are simply good blogs and bad blogs, just as there are good columnists and boring columnists. Here are some blatantly obvious examples of quality sites, from Left and Right (I'll stick to US sites, so as not to offend anyone) : TPM, Andrew Sullivan, Crunchy Con, Dan Drezner, Ann Althouse.) Now, in what way have they impoverished the political culture? 

As for where blogs can go wrong, Rod Dreher supplies an example in a typically intelligent post responding to a reader's query about global warming. Obviously, Rod's criticism also applies to the conventional media, but it's fair to say that blogs have made much of the running on this particular issue. (Admission time: I regularly post links to climate sceptics, for the simple reason that I don't like the smugly apocalyptic tone of non-scientific alarmists.)

I do share this reader's puzzlement over the intense emotion that so many on the right invest in fighting the idea that humans  have anything to do with the globe warming...The environment is to conservatives what defence is to liberals: the big issue that we don't instinctively get, and that makes us suspicious.

Rod adds these thoughts from the science policy blog, Prometheus:

A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.

Absolutely. Blogs should plead guilty. But so too should much of the scribbling profession.

THE UTTER INSULARITY OF THE BLOGOSPHERE?

Anyone who thinks it's "the greatest web video ever"  must lead a quiet life. Still, if you have the patience to sit through the whole of the Bloggingheads fracas (forever to be known as The War of Jessica Valenti's Breasts) you'll find that Ann Althouse does make a reasonable criticism about the intolerance of left-wingers towards people who don't quite fit the template. The same phenomenon does exist on the Right, obviously, but not to the same extent. That said, I've stopped reading about half of the right-wing American sites that used to be on my daily list. Most of them have been saying the same thing over and over since mid-2004.

BOOK-WRITING VS BLOGGING

In case there's anyone out there who thinks the two are even vaguely related, Rod Dreher is on hand to set them straight. Some salutary thoughts, too, on how difficult it is to make money out of all that hard labour. (Since I've been getting up at 6am for the last month in order to do battle with my muse, I'm not too sure I want to hear about that part.)

SITE NEWS

My long-cherished plans to move to a new URL are on hold at the moment, for reasons I hope to be able to explain shortly. You'll also notice that the Pajamas Media ads will disappear in the next couple of days. Time for us to part company, especially as I've had next to no involvement with the editorial side since I went to the launch in New York at the end of 2005. Meanwhile, my laptop/connectivity problems still haven't been sorted out entirely, in spite of the confident tone I struck yesterday. I'm plugging away, hitting buttons and hoping for the best. Apologies again for the slow service.

RENT-A-KEYBOARD

As I was invited to dinner at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's last weekend, I made a valiant attempt to overcome her loathing of blogs. No luck, unfortunately.  As a matter of fact, I met Yasmin before she was a columnist, and I suspect that if there'd been such a thing as blogging in those days, she would have had a good one. Her main objection to the upstart form is that she's been on the receiving end of a flock of amateur scribes who couldn't tell the difference between facts and gossip. Not a pleasant experience, although another of my friends once had a Daily Mail reporter hanging around on her doorstep, trying to get dirt on her boyfriend, who was (shock, horror) a divorced man. All in all, proper journalists still have the potential to do more damage.

While a blogger such as TPM's Josh Marshall can sometimes do a lot of good:

"It just seemed natural. I liked the informality of the writing. The freedom of it appealed to me," Marshall said. "It just looked like fun. I saw it as a loss leader for my journalism." Once he started, however, he never stopped. He continued to freelance, but gradually moved more and more of his attention to the blog, living in near poverty as a result. When he needed money to do something for the blog, he asked his readers for it. Remarkably, they gave it to him.

[Via Arts & Letters Daily]

An interesting profile, even if some parts appear to have been written for the benefit of Rip Van Winkle:

Blogs tend to be informal, cheap to produce, free to consume, fast, heavily referential, self-referential and vain because of it; profane, accident-prone yet self-correcting.

Just in case you didn't know...

SHARKS & MINNOWS

Some thoughts on how smaller bloggers can join forces, from James Higham. He uses the C-word - "community".

OPEN HOUSE

Live-blogging your own wedding ceremony or the birth of your child? Even I'd think twice about that:

Some academics say the live posts are the latest twist in the decades-old conflict between living in the moment and memorializing it from behind a camera lens, only worse....Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted "A Note To Other Bloggers" on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact...Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony.

THE FALSE INTIMACY OF BLOGS

Agony aunts aren't normally my favourite reading, but my eye was caught by Lesley Garner's latest Lifeclass column [not yet on-line, as far as I can tell]. It's a response to a blogger's description of "virtual reality bullying" at the hands of another member of her "online community". As I spend far too much time in the ether (despite cutting down since the New Year) I decided to go through the laborious process of copying out a passage. There's a lesson for me here:

The first thing I thought, as I read your story, was how absurd it was. On one level there is a "community" of people, talking to each other. On another level there is no community at all. It is just you in a room, in front of a plastic box.

... I know of no other remedy for this peculiar contemporary form of disillusion than a cold plunge into the reality of your own life. Internet contact is effortless and immediate in a way that walking out of your front door and attempting to build relationships with real people is not. Real life is like wading through treacle. Material reality demands that we have to make physical effort in the real, intransigeant world. We have to find real people and spend time with them. We must go out on cold nights and take buses and risk running out of conversation because we have to fill real time and not just spend little snippets through cyberspace when a good line strikes us.

My people skills have always been erratic. They've probably grown slightly worse since I started blogging, especially as I prefer writing to talking to individuals I don't know too well.

CORRECTION: It is on the web site after all. Go here. I made the mistake of trying to Google it up instead.

SMALL SCREEN

I'll be on 18 Doughty Street's Blogger TV programme tonight, 9pm.

WORDS FROM ON HIGH

Heaven forbid that blogs should be "taken seriously as an intermediary for debate." Can't have that, can we, Oliver? Yes, there certainly is an echo-chamber effect in blogs (just as there is in newspapers and the rest of the media). And, yes, the comments sections often descend into a virtual reality brawl. But that doesn't mean the medium itself is worthless. Of course, if Lord Kamm of Elysium thinks blogs are such a menace, he could always consider closing down his site as a token gesture.

Seems to me that Danny Finkelstein and Mick Fealty sum it all up very sensibly.