Richard Fernandez
Richard Fernandez is always worth reading, and this article is no exception. Down toward the bottom, he shares this very interesting insight:
Somehow this Lost World [the "intellectual universe" of the blogosphere] has raised an intellectual edifice whose ideas the media is now warning against or at least trying to examine for signs of danger. But what are these ideas? They are many and varied, contradictory and conflicting. Like any such they are of uneven quality, full of genius and error, insight and nonsense, hyperbole and sober wisdom. But ... and here is the essential point ... it is a body of ideas that exists in surprising detail. What's changed is the press is trying to put a name to it, attempting to characterize it in terms like 'Left' and 'Right' that they understand.
And that's the thing. For all of the outright lunacy out there, the "good" parts of the blogosphere threaten the monopoly that the mainstream media have long held in the world of ideas. It's the same dynamic that now threatens the movie and music industries: the on-line world offers and rewards different ways of making and distributing art, music, and ideas.
There will always be people whose mindsets fester in the echo chambers of the left or right, but for those who are interested in forming a broad worldview there are plenty of places to find respectable and intellectually challenging discussions from a variety of differing viewpoints.
Moreover, the nature of the internet allows us to get to those places more easily, via "aggregation" sites like TBR (and even TOS, back in its heyday). There's no way I'd have heard of Fernandez, for example, had I not discovered him through links over at TOS.
The old media will fight this, of course -- or at least, most of them will. But eventually somebody is going to realize that there's profit and reputation to be gained from fearlessly offering that broad perspective on a large and very public scale.
