Samizdata

Glenn Reynolds has some well aimed remarks about Tim Cavanaugh’s rather meandering article about bloggers. Whilst I concur with Glenn’s remarks, he lets Cavanaugh off far too easy. Cavanaugh states:

For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they’re wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media. You can cut on Salon all you like, Mr. Blogger, but they have a man in Afghanistan. Do you?

He does not seem to grasp that we are about punditry not field reporting. The fact is, there are bloggers all over the world pointing out obscure stuff and commenting on it… hell Samizdata alone has contributors in Britain, Ireland, USA, Croatia and Australia. Without Tim Blair and Jason Soon, how many of us would pick up on the Australian stories they bring to our attention? Salon may have a reporter in Afghanistan, but of all the commentary about Muslims that I have seen in Salon, is it really more insightful or informed than that found on Adil Farooq’s blog Muslimpundit? No, it is not.

Instapundit has so many eye balls each day that it is clear from Glenn’s posts he gets a huge amount of useful pointers and comments from readers, which provides news and perspectives in and of itself. Cavanaugh seems to have missed that altogether. There is a degree of responsiveness and dynamism that more established, less immediate media channels cannot match. We blogs are not trying to replace the established media, but rather we have popped up to fill an empty but useful ecological niche, rather like the birds hitching a ride on the back of a hippopotamus and in return nibbling at unwanted parasites in the hippo’s unscratchable nooks and crannies. If we are the birds, and BigMedia^tm is the hippo, guess what that makes Tim Cavanaugh…

And as for Cavanaugh sneering at the fact we all refer to each other, there are two points:

1. Firstly, we can afford to be civil to each other because we are not all competing for a limited pool of jobs (no wonder he hates us)… we see each other as a resource rather than rivals, even more so when we disagree.
2. Secondly, it is that ‘hive mind’ thing Glenn once mentioned. Someone picks up on a story and the ‘hive’ swarms together, dissecting it and commenting, with a slew of follow up posts as the hive’s different ‘takes’ collide…such as the various ‘interblog’ gun wars or Enron debates (for that is what they are, debates).

Established media pundits feed off their network reporters… bloggers feed off each other in much the same way, following their hyperlinks to their sources. And as our sources are far more varied (Peter Jennings is not prone to dissect all too many odd Pravda or Zambia Post or bonkers Feral Tribune articles he found by listening to someone else’s broadcast), so too are the opinions and directions we go in.

And of course the editorless ‘screw the received wisdom’ blogger ethos was never going to make us friends in Cavanaugh’s circles.

Glenn is of course right that bottom feeders like Cavanaugh just do not like the competition… and the fact many of us write better than he does and about more varied things. But most of all he dislikes us because we do not fit into any of his limited pigeon holes neatly. He reads us but his silly article shows he sure as hell does not understand us.

As the focus of events is less and less on Afghanistan, the focus of the blogger punditerati is likewise fragmenting in many directions… one of the interesting things about the many blogs over the last few months has been that many bloggers have been picking up the same news stories and it has been fascinating to see differing interpretations. With the advantage of many probing eyes, obscure on-line reports get picked up from more unusual regional newspapers or some out-of-the-way repository of cypherpunk web documents, and suddenly a new surge of interacting interpretations hits the blogs. I suspect this is what Glenn Reynolds meant when he once described himself as being part of a ‘hive mind’.

However as the focus of events becomes more fragmented and regionalized post-Taliban, the stories that get picked up and blogged becomes more regionalized as well. I am fascinated by Glenn Reynolds’ often innovative takes on geopolitics and other issues on Instapundit but when I get to his views on a US plagiarism scandal involving folks I have never heard of, I tend to wander off elsewhere after the third article on the subject, checking other blogs for war news or perhaps something more generally pan-Anglospherical in appeal.

Yet I suspect this is a natural process, a cycle rather than movement towards some less interacting endpoint… the ‘hive mind’ will fragment into locally focused clusters only to surge back together periodically as a global story catches the imagination. At the moment the Canadian bloggers are all bouncing off each other in a quite interesting manner over largely Canadian issues. In a similar way, certain blogs seem to hit ‘hot streaks’ and the rest start reacting to that blog’s interesting views rather than just what the established media is reporting, setting up an interesting interblog harmonic for a while. It will be intriguing to see what dynamics take hold in the longer term when the majority of blogs stop thinking of themselves as ‘warblogs’. I suspect blogs, or something like them, are here to stay but they are sure to start mutating over time into… well, good question… into whatever comes next. We will just have to wait and see what that is.