By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
Jorge Luis
Borges dreamed of a library the size of a universe, whose wealth of books
would induce first
delirium, then despair, then breakdown of the social order.
Since we first became aware of the Web,
we have ricocheted between similar feelings over a universe far more
disruptive: one of unbounded,
uncensorable streams of text. The current craze is for something called
a blog. The name is the diminutive
of ''Weblog,'' an online news commentary written, usually, by an ordinary
citizen, thick with links to
articles and other blogs and studded with non sequiturs and ripostes
in sometimes hard-to-parse
squabbles.
Here's what blogs are not: (1) the super-personalized news filters that
social critics fretted would splinter
the nation into a million tiny interest groups, or (2) the Drudge Report.
Blogs don't limit your news intake,
break stories or promulgate rumor, at least not intentionally. They
have an only seemingly more innocent
agenda. Blogs express opinion. They're one-person pundit shows, replete
with the stridency and looniness
usually edited off TV.
Needless to say, blogs are addictive. They are not, however, the most
economical use of your time. To
read blogs requires a willingness to wander from link to link in the
hope that some mind-numbingly
detailed dispute over, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Catholic
Church's position on
homosexuality or an Oscar nomination will resolve itself into a usable
insight. Print journalists often
adopt a tone of peeved professionalism when talking about blogs; constrained,
at least nominally, by
stricter standards of relevance, they seem to resent the blogger's
high ratio of self-expression to
information. In The Nation, Eric Alterman began an attack on the pundit-turned-blogger
Andrew Sullivan
by declaring, ''Andrewsullivan.com sets a standard for narcissistic
egocentricity that makes Henry
Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi.'' In The Boston Globe, Alex
Beam wrote, ''Welcome to
Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought
goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print
book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outre, goes
unpraised.''
Whenever such criticisms appear in print, the Blogosphere (the bloggers'
term of choice) convulses with
narcissistic egocentricity. Bloggers like to disagree, but they are
unanimous about blogging's advantages
over traditional journalism: greater looseness of spirit; openness
to more points of view; a more
conversational tone; and a compulsive honesty that has bloggers linking
to articles in which they found
their ideas. Norah Vincent, defending blogging on the Los Angeles Times
op-ed page, went farther and
argued that the hostility between the old media and blogs forms part
of a larger political war, with the
elite liberal media establishment on one side and populist conservative
upstarts (often known as
warbloggers because of their support for military actions by the United
States and Israel) on the other.
Anyone who has watched Sullivan and his colleagues conduct campaigns
against the liberal economist
and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the left-wing writer
and filmmaker Michael Moore, for
example, would recognize a limited truth to Vincent's claim. But a
week's worth of meandering through the
tens of thousands of blogs now on the Web led me to as many left-wing
as right-wing ones. If warblogs
are becoming famous, it's because mainstream journalists are mentioning
them in their copy or on the
Sunday morning talk shows. In the three years since blogs were first
noted as a subphenomenon of the
dot-com craze, those that echo or bolster the print and television
commentariat have acquired what pundits
like to call ''policy significance.''
Numerically speaking, blogs pose no threat to ''the media,'' however
liberal or conservative. If blogs steal
readers, it is from political magazines, themselves so minuscule compared
with mainstream outlets that
their importance is more psychological than quantifiable. On the other
hand, the steady rise in the number
of readers of the brainiest blogs -- Sullivan recently reported visits
from 200,000 readers in a single
month; Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com has gone from the high hundreds
to 52,000 in a good month --
suggests that their formula does appeal to a potentially influential
sector of the reading public. If so, then
contrary to the assumptions of editors who boil down their coverage
to USA-Today-like nuggets of
informativeness, the future of journalism may lie in more writerly
personalities, not just more data.
It's easy to see why blogs would seduce. Logging on once or twice a
day not only gains you access to the
idiosyncrasies of someone's mind but, with every new post, reassurance
as to his or her existence. The
most popular bloggers post several times daily. Sullivan, for instance,
shot ahead of better-known
competitors in his first few months for no apparent reason other than
that he had more to say. His posts,
though sometimes scintillating, more often repeated previous posts,
and he tends to dwell on things like
his plumbing problems and the mundane details of computer and travel
hassles.
On the other hand, such obsessions probably help him more than they
hurt. No matter what a blog may
actually say, its more visceral effect is to prove, again and again,
the irreducible individuality of the
blogger. Blogs provide a counterweight to the increasing unreality
of mass journalistic culture -- its
quality of having been processed beyond the realm of the recognizable,
its frequent tone of unearned
authority. They're the antidote to the blow-dried anchor, the unsigned
editorial, the pronunciamento of the
token credentialed expert. David Weinberger, in a smart new book about
the Web called ''Small Pieces
Loosely Joined,'' notes that human fallibility -- mistakes in movies,
books and articles; the faux pas of
public figures -- is one of the most popular topics of online discussion.
In nitpicking, he says, we seek
evidence of the man or woman behind the mystique: ''We get to kick
in the teeth the idealized -- and
constricted -- set of behaviors known as professionalism.''
All this teeth-kicking, of course, distracts from the dutiful ingestion
of headlines that is supposed to be the
job of the good citizen. That's why blogs irk some traditional journalists.
They know that they and their
colleagues, being human, make mistakes, and don't see the point of
dwelling on them. But bloggers do.
They understand full well the hierarchy they're helping to topple when
they force an expert back inside his
imperfect skin and reduce him to just another blogger among many.