The blog in society
Over at City Lights, Montana's most important blog, Ed Kemmick has had to turn into a comment cop. (The discussions on his comment boards got so nasty and irrelevant that he has now promised to go through and edit them.)
Ed's blog is important because it has come to serve as not just a host for his rants, but a public discussion space. As a story in last week's New Yorker showed, democracy depends not so much on the quality of journalism as its existence, a space for public discussion. With its wide readership, and sponsorship by a leading newspaper, Ed's blog can serve as such a 21st century space.
I believe such spaces have to be moderated. You can't publish one crackpot's daily 1000-word letters to the editor; you can't permit 20-minute rants on the evils of growth at every planning board meeting; you can't plaster a bulletin board with 40 copies of a poster selling a '72 Gremlin. When I ran the Billings Streetmail (an email-based interactive newsletter from the dot-com boom era), I believed my most important job was not asking survey questions but editing the answers. To Ed's and his employer's credit, they seem to have figured this out about the blogosphere (I trust that unlike Streetmail, they've also figured out a revenue-generating business model...)
Not all blogs can or should serve this function. I've asked for comments only via email, which frustrates some bloggers but must suffice given my ignorance of commenting scripts and other demands on my time. But I'm intrigued by the compromise at Andy Borowitz' Yahoo Group: you have to join and identify yourself to post.
What do YOU think? Drop a line to info@johnclaytonbooks.com. To receive these posts via email, write to johnclaytonoutreach-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. (You need not put any text in the message.)
Ed's blog is important because it has come to serve as not just a host for his rants, but a public discussion space. As a story in last week's New Yorker showed, democracy depends not so much on the quality of journalism as its existence, a space for public discussion. With its wide readership, and sponsorship by a leading newspaper, Ed's blog can serve as such a 21st century space.
I believe such spaces have to be moderated. You can't publish one crackpot's daily 1000-word letters to the editor; you can't permit 20-minute rants on the evils of growth at every planning board meeting; you can't plaster a bulletin board with 40 copies of a poster selling a '72 Gremlin. When I ran the Billings Streetmail (an email-based interactive newsletter from the dot-com boom era), I believed my most important job was not asking survey questions but editing the answers. To Ed's and his employer's credit, they seem to have figured this out about the blogosphere (I trust that unlike Streetmail, they've also figured out a revenue-generating business model...)
Not all blogs can or should serve this function. I've asked for comments only via email, which frustrates some bloggers but must suffice given my ignorance of commenting scripts and other demands on my time. But I'm intrigued by the compromise at Andy Borowitz' Yahoo Group: you have to join and identify yourself to post.
What do YOU think? Drop a line to info@johnclaytonbooks.com. To receive these posts via email, write to johnclaytonoutreach-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. (You need not put any text in the message.)
