Talking to ourselves

Monday, 14th September 2009

Heat vs light, talking vs shouting... John Naughton celebrates ten years of Blogger.com while, in a Q&A, Kevin Drum offers a cautionary take on the state of online punditry:

At the same time that more experts have entered the arena, the tribalism and partisanship of the rest... has increased. So even if the experts have a positive influence — which I’m not sure of — I don’t think that’s translated into higher overall quality. Basically, the experts provide us with more raw data than they used to, but it gets cherry picked and twisted as much or more than it ever has.

In your view, what has fueled that increase in tribalism, partisanship, and cherry-picking and does it appear to have occurred equally on “both sides”?

That’s pretty hard to pin down. But if I had to guess, I’d toss out three reasons. First, politics itself has gotten increasingly tribal and the blogosphere has followed along. Second, as the blogosphere aged, bloggers started to realize that their opposite numbers were never going to change their minds. As that became clearer and clearer, engaging with them got a lot less interesting. And third, blogs became more important... After all, if there’s something serious at stake, it makes sense to do whatever it takes to promote the cause. Politics ain’t beanbag, and blogs these days are serious players in the political process...
Conservative blogs have, I think, gotten objectively crazier in the Obama era than liberal blogs did even at the height of the Bush era. Some of the stuff they’re pushing these days is just batshit nuts. But solely on a partisanship scale, liberal blogs today strike me as just as partisan as conservative ones.

Rod Dreher joins in the discussion at his site, explaining why he sticks with his long-time sparring partner Andrew Sullivan even though he disagrees violently on, say, "Christianism". [Scroll down past the pot talk.] I go through similar phases with both of them (I'm no longer a church-goer and I was never a libertarian) but even if I drift away for a while, I always return in the end. After all, that's part of the joy of reading blogs - charting the emotional journeys that writers embark on day after day, hour after hour.