In Defense of Max's Speech

May 1966 at a Manchester, England concert venue, Bob Dylan was stoned and angry. He was a rock and roll star, swagger and all, who had recently taken off his acoustic guitar strap as a Woody Guthrie redivivus, troubadour of the leftist revolution to put on a tight jacket and play electric guitar. As the set came to a close at Manchester, as Dylan was to play “Like a Rolling Stone,” a disillusioned, disaffected fan shouts with spite, "Judas!" Dylan screams contemptuously, "I don't believe you," as the echo of the accusation lingers and grows putrid. "You're a liar!" ¹

I ought to say a word or two in defense of my previous post about the blogosphere. It recieved some criticism. I suppose I wasn’t very clear: I’m not giving up protest songs nor putting down my acoustic guitar; I’m not signing off blogger.com nor buying a paid-subscription to Time Magazine; I’m not a traitor nor a liar. The purpose of my previous post was not to renounce the blog medium, but to reclaim the mainstream medium. Here are some of the comments made by my friend whom I greatly respect, Michael Tashman.

Come on, Max. What happened to the marketplace of ideas? You know.. power to the people?

The opening allusion of my previous was to the rise of democracy and to elitist opposition; what’s more empowering to the people? I believe in the power of blogs because I believe in the power of free expression. The inevitable further consolidation of America’s news conglomerations will become less dangerous in direct proportion to the degree that the blogosphere expands. Blogs and wikis excel on a macroscale; they will continue to aggregate the world’s collective voice, its collective intellectual means. In that way, blogs are indeed wonderful . You should know, I have a fundamental, even idealistic belief in the organic beauty of a free marketplace of self-expression. Blogs fill that democratic deficit in a marvelous fashion. Read first my post on the matter.

You said that blogging isn't intellectually self-sufficient, that most of the blogs don't really put forth orignal [sic], intellectual opinions.

This is a linguistic confusion. "Not intellectually self-sufficient" was intended to mean that blogs are an augmentation of the mainstream media rather than a separate entity from it. I didn’t mean to imply blogs are unoriginal; in fact, I believe that the blogosphere has the capacity to be a great deal more original than the mainstream outlets. Most importantly, the intellectual locus in the blogosphere is on the individual not the corporation; so free thought isn’t suffocated at birth. Originality comes at a price, however. No one can doubt that the spectrum of quality is far more pronounced on the blogosphere than on the news magazine shelf. Brilliance and stupidity are empowered by the same fitful stroke of free expression. Blogs are a lot of rough, and few diamonds: "But with 10 million blogs and a great many more soon to come, that’s a risk I’m willing to take."

Whereas today bloggers do mostly depend on the mainstream media, in the future they'll probably become much more self-sufficient.

Here, the linguistic confusion over “self-sufficient” does not occur. A great many web 2.0 enthusiasts, Glenn Reynolds and (presumably) yourself included, believe that by flipping the capitalistic mechanisms to the individual, allowing any David to brew his own beer and write his own Op-Ed piece, the elite mainstream outlets will no longer be relevant. After all, if it happens, the marketplace has spoken. I refuse to subscribe to this optimism. If blogs systematically generated thought, then they would be a corporation not a democracy. Blogs, therefore, as a democratic not corporate entity, are not self-sufficient. When examined, blogging is a terrible way to produce in-depth coverage and analysis of current events; they are too disparate and dogmatic to have the capacity now or ever in the future. But that’s OK. Blogs shouldn’t replace the ancien régime, they should expand it.

I’ve never been a man of precision, of bubbles filled in with a #2 pencil. Blogs might be a little inaccurate, but, like me and like unrestricted free speech, they excel on a macroscale not a on a microscale. They are optimal because they construct a forum for candor in which Truth is distilled to the top, unmonitored and unpurged. They embody the collective enterprise between words and writers and readers. Blogs provide a soapbox to the masses of the world – ill-conceived dogmatism, racist and ignorant ramblings, and sometimes lucid brilliance. My point is that the role of blogs is not to replace the mainstream media, but to check it and expand it.

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1. You can hear the concert here: Live 1966. ↑