Daily Kos
In a review-essay entitled Hope of the Web, Bill McKibben writes:
When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.
The book under review, and much of McKibben’s piece, is about the ways in which Internet activism has transformed the politics of the Democratic Party in the US. But the review is of interest also because it charts this medium’s possibilities in a more indepent context. This context becomes clear in lines like the following: “When we consider Kos’s own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence.” And the links it provides to sites like MoveOn, Informed Comment, Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, Firedoglake, and others.
But, I wonder, why is that the articles that discuss the impact of blogging (and there have been many) never seem to touch on one vital area: the personal blog. I mean personal in the sense that the interests addressed in the blog are personal and idiosyncratic, without an explicit agenda, and with no connection to a given industry or avenue of public debate.
All we hear is “Instapundit” this and “Daily Kos” that. If book blogs are under discussion, it’s the same three or four semi-famous ones, over and over.
And yet, there are thousands of well-written blogs with hundreds of thousands of daily readers, most with a non-commercial or political brief. This blog is a good example of that. Amardeep’s another. Mine (back when I blogged) was yet another. But, by their very waywardness, such enterprises seem to be doomed to (relative) neglect: they can’t be packaged, they’re not “selling” anything, so they are not useful to the mainstream media. But for the Alabama housewife who’s looking for the writings and drawings of fellow gardeners, or for the San Francisco college student who wants to read about the adventures of a professional cellist in England, such blogs are vital and deeply meaningful.
And, I daresay, such blogs may in the future also be the sites of substantial literary innovations.
Comment by St Antonym — April 14, 2006 @ 8:58 pm