Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:56:46 AM
I can only suspect that the conversation around the eggnog at journalistic Christmas Holiday Parties is about how to put a pin in the blogging balloon. There are just too many of these "blogs are bogus" columns being printed at the same time for it to be an accident.
Now, we have a Wall Street Journal opinion page columnist, Joseph Rago who has written "The Blog Mob: Written by imbeciles to be read by fools."
The entertaining thing is that I think that the people he is writing for, people with wealth and an ego to match will look down their nose on bloggers simply because they do not understand the media. This guy thinks he is a . . . well, a writer:
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
That's his paragraph. The three dots at the end are his. For those of you without a 50 cent vocabulary (mine is only worth about 49 cents, I think, because I went to a one room country school) the definition, according to Dictionary.com of logorrheic is "pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech."
I think Joseph Rago inadvertently hit on the right word for his essay, and in particular, this paragraph.
But, Rago isn't done. He wants to insult every conservative in sight:
Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.
And regrets that lost world of innocence, that world that he finds undesirable.
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.
Finally, let me give Joe the irony he so desperately seeks in the blogosphere when I put a simple question at the end of the last words in his essay. They are:
Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
I ask: Why?
Thanks to Volokh Conspiracy for pointing this out.
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This blog came into being when the author got involved in a lawsuit and discovered that he could do nothing to stop attorney misconduct. See "Thumbnail Info on This Blog