Fisker? Flamer? Blurker? There's room for everyone here-but is that a good thing?
In the blog glossary at
, a "blog" (in its noun form) is defined as "a contraction of weblog, a form of on-line writing characterized in format by a single column of text in reverse chronological order (i.e., most recent content at the top) with the ability to link to individual articles. There is usually a sidebar displaying links, and the content is frequently updated."
But that's just the beginning. The blogosphere (or blogistan) has its own rules, vernacular and social order. But it's not a self-contained universe. The impact blogging is having on the "dead tree media" is indisputable-the Jeff Gannon case being one of the more recent and bizarre examples.
This week, two well-known national bloggers express the pros and cons of this evolving media form. Here at SFR, reaction to blogging is varied. We've got more than a few blurkers in the house and at least one former progblogger whose blogathy resulted in blog mutism. Nonetheless, we offer a selection of our favorites-some of which will be old-hat to the blogerati, but may provide a good launching space into the seemingly endless blogiverse. Meanwhile, if you know of a good local blog we should know about, send the link to:
.
Blogging While Black
Blogging is not a luxury, it's a civic responsibility.
By Christopher Rabb
In 2004, "blogging" was on the lips of millions of Americans, despite the fact most people didn't know
what the term meant beyond the idea that it somehow
influenced the evolving landscape of American politics.
The most notable example of this blog-centric neo-populism was in the successful fund-raising efforts of former presidential candidate Howard Dean. Under the tutelage of his rogue campaign manager, technophile Joe Trippi, Dean embraced blogging and
its power to reach voters in new and effective ways that transformed his candidacy from insurgent to front-runner. In the process, this dark horse candidate raised over $45 million from over 600,000 Americans. The average contribution was $70 from grassroots benefactors, many of whom had never given to a political campaign before, still more who had never or rarely voted in the past. Importantly, the Dean campaign proved once and for all that a candidate could not only talk to potential voters, his candidacy could become that much more viable by actually listening to them. In so doing, the Dean campaign created a new paradigm. No high-priced tuxedo dinners or celebrity galas necessary.
Last summer I was fortunate to be one of the 37 bloggers "credentialed" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. An added distinction to this history-making role was that I was the only official blogger whose readership was predominantly black.
Before the advent of blogging,
my online entrepreneurial venture, Afro-Netizen, was purely e-mail-based. Since 1999 I had been e-mailing my content-primarily aggregated news from various sources-to thousands of largely educated black
urbanites nationwide and abroad. My motivation for this pursuit stemmed largely from my beliefs about the Civil Rights Movement and the success of its
grassroots communication tools.
In this post-civil rights era, it seems we have embraced the consumerist fiction of simple charismatic leadership, without understanding the reality of the grassroots organizing that gave the Civil Rights Movement its direction, power and effectiveness. Many of us forget that it was a movement that was executed through organized struggle. And behind the marches was the power of technology that allowed freedom fighters young and old to spread the word.
Before there were cell phones, personal digital assistants, laptops and the Internet, there was the mimeograph machine-the manual and primitive predecessor of today's copy machines. Information about boycotts, marches and other forms of protest
was spread through printed leaflets, which papered black communities throughout the South. The grassroots communication tool of today's digital age is the weblog-our generation's mimeograph; our talking drum. Despite our disproportionately high voting power, consumer power and impact on American culture and entertainment, black folk are virtually missing in action in the blogosphere. The need to communicate with like-minded black netizens, for me, was essential. This web avocation remained in guerrilla mode until I blogged at the Democratic convention, and forever shed Afro-Netizen's self-imposed stealth status.
Little did I know that the contagious nature of content shared on blogs would catapult Afro-Netizen (and many
other weblogs of different creeds and constituencies) into the public eye literally overnight.
In Boston, I interviewed members of Congress and uploaded the digital audio recordings to my blog. I attended progressive symposia that the networks would not cover and uploaded my observations when I got back to my hotel room. I took pictures while on
the floor of the convention and elsewhere and shared those images with my readership. And while I was covering the convention, the media were covering my fellow bloggers and me more closely than Ben Affleck and Bono.
I was interviewed on-air by C-SPAN and Canada's CBC network broadcast I later learned reached over 35 million viewers. Before I could begin to process this staggering fact, I would be interviewed by still more publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and New York Newsday.
This was important for Afro-Netizen, but signaled an even greater possibility for the black community. In light of the highly populist and independent panoply of voices in the blogosphere, the mainstream media have dubbed this web phenomenon "participatory journalism." But blogging is not exclusively or primarily about reporting the news; it is fundamentally about grassroots communication between individuals and groups without the filter of government agencies, political parties, corporations and other such entities.
Thus, blogging is inherently
egalitarian and democratic because anyone-even those who are not tech-savvy-can set up their own weblog and wax philosophical within just minutes. And to do so is often of little expense, if not free (minus the value of your time, of course). Such blog platforms as
,
and
are three of innumerable online sites that the curious neophyte can use to make their voices heard amidst an American media universe monopolized by essentially seven corporate behemoths. Moreover, a blog's endemic power comes not from its ability to generate revenues, but is derived from the will and capacity of its readers to coalesce around the sharing, mobilization and analysis of issues the more entrenched institutions do not address. Namely, the issues that have an overwhelming impact on the black community.
For those millions of us Afro-netizens who go online to shop, research and communicate with one another, the epicenter of black life has become the media. But until the media we rely upon includes blogs in particular, we are literally ceding our best hope of communicating and organizing amongst ourselves-two bedrocks for any viable movement for a community's uplift.
Those of us fortunate
enough to regularly use the Internet and who now have an almost addiction to
,
,
and
, cannot afford to limit ourselves by so gravely under-utilizing the web and the opportunities at hand. We must blog while black. It is not a fad or a luxury; it is our civic responsibility to do so. And to abdicate this duty is to succumb to the dangerous mythology that blackfolk must wait for our next messenger from above, all the while not realizing that the messenger is at our fingertips and the inviolable message from generations past endures in our hearts and minds. Where the success of all previous grassroots movements has been measured by feet on the ground, the power and effectiveness of blog activism for black folk and other dispossessed communities will be measured by hands on the keyboard.
Who Watches the Watchdogs?Bloggers and the New McCarthyism.
By Ted Rall
Upon hearing that I'd started writing a blog, a Luddite pal asked me to describe this latest new-media phenom. Political bloggers, I explained, link to articles in traditional media. Then they rant and/or rave about them. "Great piece in the
Journal." "The usual crap at
." Anyone can write one; you don't even have to use your real name. "Oh," he replied. "A blog is like a column without the responsibility."
Bloggers want you to know that there's a new sheriff in town. Edward Morrissey, writer of the right-wing blog Captain's Quarters, boasts to the New York Times: "The media can't just
cover up the truth and expect to get away with it-and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore." And what are Morrissey's qualifications to police the media? When he's not harassing old-school journos like Dan Rather and CNN's Eason Jordan out of their jobs, Morrissey manages a call center near Minneapolis.
As a free speech fan, my initial reaction to the blog explosion-there's a new one born every 7.4 seconds-was delight. If you've been interviewed for a newspaper article you've probably had the
experience of being misquoted or taken out of context, or at least had your name misspelled. If reporters get these basics wrong, how can we trust them when they tackle the big stuff? Moreover, the
mainstream media is an ivory tower. Anyone who has tried to call a paper to complain has suffered through phone-tree hell before possibly wrangling out the limited satisfaction of a two-line correction on page 83 beneath the obituaries. But now anyone with access to a computer can, with the proper string of ideological comrades in cyberspace, call the mainstream media to account.
"I think the relation is more symbiotic than parasitic," writes Glenn Reynolds of the right-wing blog Instapundit. "Bloggers are more like the fish that protect sharks from parasites." Bloggers, fierce new watchdogs of the fourth estate, claim they're
democratizing American journalism.
It all sounds great-until you read them. Once you spend some time surfing this ocean of like-minded righties, however, you realize the awful truth: the "populist" blogosphere is
cowing the mainstream media even further into submission to the powers that be.
At a time when simply having a conservative Democrat spar with a conservative Republican is enough to earn the tag "fair and balanced," the fact is that the political blogs are dominated by the hard right. Such a development might have served as a laudable counterbalance during the ? 1930's a period of liberal political hegemony.
But when talk radio, cable television news and all three branches of the federal and most state governments are under the control of the right, the blogger wolf pack merely serves to further ossify a dangerously out of
whack ideological imbalance. Moreover, conservative blogs mirror their mainstream counterparts by applying a far angrier and more violent tone than that of their liberal foes. Here's a sample of online comments written by Republican bloggers: "Ted Rall should be beat to within an inch of his life with a baseball bat." "Every morning when I read the
paper, I hope the headline will bring me tidings of [Ted Rall's] untimely demise. Untimely? Nah. Overdue." "When I flush the toilet, it isn't considered violence, is it? So killing Ted Rall should be no different."
Death threats against liberal pundits are commonplace among, and essentially unique to, the right-wing blogs. And the GOP thinks that's OK. Nowhere can one find a responsible mainstream Republican to speak out against this hate speech.
Borg-like, the various right-wing blogs simultaneously discuss the same stories, applying identical rhetoric. They create blacklists and urge their readers and fellow bloggers to threaten and harass their targets. Surfing this cheesy world of flag-draped neo-McCarthyite HTML makes it impossible to deny Columbia Journalism
Review writer Steve Lovelady's conclusion that most are "salivating morons" who form an ideological "lynch mob." Worse, many of the right-wing bloggers are flat-out liars.
My jaw dropped when gay GOP blogger Andrew Sullivan accused me in 2003 of "urging the murder of
American troops in defense of Islamist terrorists." Of course I'd done no such thing, and he knew it. If I had had the ready cash I would have slapped the lying bastard with a richly deserved libel suit. Incredibly, Time magazine hired Sullivan to write a column.
I got off easy compared to Eason Jordan, who lost his job at CNN for claiming-off the air-that "he knew of 12 journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq," as Congressman Barney
Frank quoted him in the Washington Post. And, he claimed, some had been targeted by US forces. In fact, more than 50 war correspondents have been killed in the Iraq war-of whom a portion were apparently shot intentionally by American troops. Two journalists for Al Jazeera were killed in 2003 by US troops firing at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, well known to CENTCOM as the main residence for foreign journalists. Two more Al Jazeera journalists reported being tortured by US troops last year; another has been rotting in the Guantánamo concentration camp since 2001 Eason had the facts right, but the blogger lynch mob howled so loudly that CNN fired him anyway.
The mainstream media let Bush steal an election and lie his way into two wars. It allowed Condi Rice to be confirmed even though she got caught lying about the existence of Al Qaeda briefing
papers given to her by the outgoing Clinton Administration. Lord knows the journalistic conglomerates need a firm boot in the butt, but the right-wing
bloggers aren't ideologically inclined to deliver it.
Bloggers are ordinary people, many of them uneducated and with nothing interesting to say. They're sitting in their rec rooms, regurgitating and spinning what real journalists have dug up through hard work. They don't have sources, they don't report and no one holds them accountable when they make mistakes or flat out lie. Yeah, there's a new sheriff in town. Unfortunately he's drunk, he's mean, and he works for the bad guys.
Blah, Blah, BlogA little of this, a little of that.
By SFR Editorial Staff
LOCAL
www.adventurejournalist.com/notebook
Tonya Poole describes herself, on her blog, as an "adrenaline junkie, intellectual voyeur, mischief maker, gourmet geek." Indeed, her blog has a little something for everyone, including recipes, musings on local weather, poetry, photography and-impressively-archives dating to August, 2002.
http://alisavaldesrodriguez.blogspot.com
Albuquerque writer Alisa Valdes Rodriguez is the pioneer of Latina chick-lit. The author of
Playing with Boys
and
The Dirty Girls Social Club
also has a chatty blog that delves into everything from gossip to Latina issues.
Santa Fe journalist Zelie Pollon is no couch potato. She's been back and forth to Iraq as part of her Baghdad Project (a link to which exists on her blog). Pollon's concise entries have been a mainstay link to the world-altering events in that country.
Garret P Vreeland's dangerousmeta blog is eclectic (he says so), with topics ranging from northern New Mexico environs to art to technology. Perhaps the most alluring component of his blogs, though, are the links, which usually are to articles and sites the average net user could easily miss.
www.gregoryp.com/lucid-dreaming
The Lucid Dreaming blog, from Santa Fean writer gregoryp™ focuses, ostensibly, on "issues of structures, costumes, toys, vehicles and other accessories and ephemera of the Burning Man experience." But there's more there, including a recent post on Hunter S Thompson's death and a running ticker on the cost of war in Iraq.
Every political junkie in New Mexico knows that New Mexico Politics with Joe Monahan is a must-bookmark. Anyone who thinks bloggers can't be taken seriously will re-visit that opinion after checking out Monahan's reportage-not to mention his journalistic fearlessness.
www.lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com
Los Alamos National Laboratory Computer Scientist Douglas Roberts began his blog, LANL: THE REAL STORY, to create a forum for open discussion about the lab, following some of the restrictions on such discussions after security violations led to a shutdown last July.
http://steveterrell.blogspot.com
Santa Fe New Mexican political and music writer Steve Terrell used to complain to SFR that he hadn't been included in its now-defunct annual Hunks de Santa Fe issue. But we're not including him in our blog roundup just to make it up to him. Terrell's blog includes regular playlists from his KSFR radio show, reprints of his political columns and other worthwhile and regularly updated entries.
AND BEYOND
Once upon a time, fanatical readers were called bookworms. Well, no more. At this site, if you're an avid reader, you'll appreciate the daily updates and links to author and literary news, along with a weekly magazine, reviews, opinions etc.
As the founder of
, journalist Farai Chideya has been on the vanguard of new media, not just by pushing the Internet envelope, but by pushing new writers and new thinkers for nearly a decade, and finding-yes-new! ways of writing about politics, diversity and pop culture.
by Washington Monthly writer Joshua Micah Marshal and, of course, Ana Marie Cox's University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds isn't just a blogger. He's a blogger celebrity. His website is so famous that instapundit is actually a vocabulary word in the blogger glossary. Why so popular? Reynolds focuses on politics, law, technology and culture, but his real strength are his constant updates and links. There's always something new, and it's also an incredible gateway to other blogs. Also check out:
,
.
http://www.artsjournal.com/blogs
The art blogs hosted here provide a cross-section of architecture, visual art, music, pop culture and media topics that is hard to beat and consistently engaging.
nomatterwhatyouheard.blogspot.com
Rock 'n' roll fans will appreciate this ongoing commentary about rock, punk and the underground with articles on the industry, the technology, you name it. You'll also find great links to other music blogs, reviews, resources etc. If you're looking for even more music blog crit, check out
.
