Author:
Dear Editor,
It’s nice to actually get a response-and an articulate one, at that-to one of my articles. I can even cheer Max Weidman’s jabs at my expense, because I’ve always been a fan of vitriol and an unrepentant contrarian. So nice work, Weidman. But such an article demands a response from yours truly, so here it is.
Weidman’s ECLS classes seem to have done their job: he gilds his prose with not-so-subtle references to Marx, and posits the Web X.0 as an uncontaminated point of resistance to the hegemony of traditional (read: evil) media forms, thanks to its sacred multiplicity. This is all well and good-after all, even the watchdogs need watchdogs. However, his brand of enthusiasm is precisely what my article was meant to temper. Contrary to Weidman’s assertions, I don’t view the internet with suspicion and fear-do you really think anyone of our generation does? I’ve been keeping a blog for years (mostly concerning obscure, early-’90s hardcore bands), contributing to user-created sites like Everything2 for much longer, and hammering out pieces for a webzine since last summer.
That said, not all journalists are created equal. I know the suggestion of any kind of ineradicable hierarchy doesn’t harmonize with the warm and fuzzy iRelativism that we swim in; sorry. The blogosphere is a valuable and important contributor to our national discourse, as I suggested in my article. Accountability matters. But so does expertise, and here we might have to agree to disagree: lionizing the political check-and-balance of liberal bloggers next to tabloid gossip may serve as a nice postmodern joust, but it’s way too comfortable for me. And if a specific political counterbalance is what interests writers like Weidman, how’s it going to be once the right really gets organized and takes to the web the same way they did to the churches and the radio?
In the end, Weidman and I agree: neither one of us wants to hold a wake for the LA Times. Maybe Weidman’s right, and I just don’t have the requisite faith in the masses. But even Bakunin was allegedly a dictator at heart. And I don’t really mind being called a dinosaur-I still admire apparently fossilized curmudgeons like Bill Buford or Gay Talese much more than I do Blogger Y. But in the final analysis, I’ve still got hope for the unwashed, blogging masses, who I think should take a page from Devo’s playbook: “duty now for the future.”
– Jon Kirby, senior, History
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