The amateurs have arrived. Woohoo, great. We need amateur media, we need diversity and debate, and free exchange of information. We need the public to be a part of the media for the same reason we need the public to be involved in politics, because concentrating those jobs in a few hands doesn't work very well. I'm an amateur. Nobody's against amateur media.

But let's follow that analogy a step further, between democracy and amateur media. Think of a country that's about to become a democracy. Before there's democracy, the right thing to do is to be a missionary for democracy. You need to sell democracy, talk about how great it would be to have the public take part in the political process. Big words are allowed. "Imagine", you say, "a society where an enlightened citizenry uses its freely elected representatives to build a just and sound government." Fine words in a fine cause.

And then democracy does arrive, and it becomes clear to everyone that the citizens are idiots and their freely elected representatives crooks. Oops.

You don't turn back at this point. You don't say "oh .. let's bring back the dictators then". Because the dictators are far worse. But neither do you pretend that all those beautiful things you promised have actually come true. You don't gush about how great it is to finally live in a country ruled by an "enlightened citizenry", how great it is to finally have just and sound government, (unless you live in your own make-believe universe, or have sold your soul to the party in power.) Because everyone, even missionaries of democracy like yourself, can see that it isn't all that great.

It was right to be a missionary of democracy before democracy arrived, but it's not right any more. Democracy is not at all what you promised it would be. It's better than any alternative you know of, but it's still seriously flawed. So you need to change your focus, from "democracy will solve our problems", to "here's what's wrong with our democracy".

You may hold on to your old ideals if you like, but as practical goals they're dead. Use them as a standard to measure reality against instead, an ideal to work towards. Point out stupidity and crookedness, not because you don't want the people in charge any more, and not because you think the system could ever be perfect, but because you know the system will work better if more people push it in the right direction. You're not attacking democracy, you're trying to improve it.

So before there's democracy, you should talk about how great it would be. When democracy has arrived, you should criticize it. You're still serving the same cause, (good government), and your tool of choice is the same, (democracy), but the conditions have changed so your focus should too. You're not helping anyone by remaining a missionary, you'll just make a fool of yourself.

It's the same with media. Modern media history is a series of leaps towards more and more media freedom for more and more people. For every one of those leaps there's the same before-vs-after situation. Before mass readership ("imagine how smart people would become if they could all read books") vs after ("most books are crap, but here's one I like"). Before you're allowed to call your leaders idiots ("think of ordinary people exposing corruption and power abuse!") vs after ("oh God, here comes another conspiracy nut").

The arrival of amateur media on the internet is the latest of those leaps, and one of the largest. It's happening right here, right now, and I think that's great. In fact, I've been a kind of missionary. That has been the right thing to be. The internet is creating the best conditions that have ever existed for the free exchange of opinions. A world where nobody can censor you, and everyone everywhere can listen. Free, instantaneous exchange of information! Fantastic, if you like that sort of thing.

But it's becoming more and more silly to talk about how "great" amateur media are. They're not. Amateur media sucks. "Yes, but "-- stop right there. I know. Having amateurs around is better than not having them around, the professionals suck too, etc. etc. I agree. I'm for amateur media, every kind of them. I think we need blogs, and wiki's, and web forums. I think the world would be poorer without them, (without us).

Nevertheless, amateur media sucks. The amount of bullshit out there would make Jesus a misanthrope. Like Ken Layne said, "instead of a million tough-ass reporters breaking and making news from wherever it happened, we've got a million little Jonah Goldbergs and Maureen Dowds, all typing their little opinions based on the same AP copy." Most of us are able to admit the poor state of amateur media, if granted enough qualifiers, but where we part ways is in what we want to do about it. Some prefer to remain missionaries. "Yes, there are many bad blogs", they'll say, "but the blogosphere as a whole is a superior media structure, and we need to promote that." These people take a defensive attitude to blogging. To them, a focus on the flaws of blogs is a wish to abolish blogs, (and I suppose there are still people who want to roll back the media world to ca 1995.)

But why be defensive? We're here. The amateurs have arrived, and we're not going away. The new media terrain hasn't settled, but we can all see that when it does, it won't have anything like the barriers around professional media we've been used to. Just about everyone agrees right now that amateurs can be worth reading.

So the right thing to do now is to change our focus, from "amateur media would be great" to "here's what's wrong with amateur media". Not because we want the amateurs to go away, but because we want them to do a better job. We want to make amateur media suck less, and we can't do that by being missionaries. Missionaries have become anachronisms. The missionaries talk as if amateur media is a goal in itself, but it's no more a goal than democracy is a goal. Good government is the goal, good media is the goal. Anything else is just a step on the way.

What's wrong with amateur media? Everything that's wrong with the professional media, and a few things more, and on a larger scale. Bloggers are sharp at spotting the flaws of the professionals, so here's an excersise: Take everything you've ever written about those unresponsive, mediocre, clique-dominated "mainstream media". Every indictment you've made of their ignorance, hypocrisy, and self-importance. All those "that's the MSM for you, does anyone trust them anymore?"

Now apply all that incisive criticism to the amateurs. Yeah, the professionals are ignorant, hypocritical gas-bags, but so are all of us. Undermining the mainstream media monopoly was important, but it was a one-time job. Once achieved, the next step awaits, and to continue blabbering at this point about the wonders of amateur media and the evils of "MSM" is just self-congratulatory bullshit.

Stop talking about "blogs" as if they were some radical new kind of media, which operate by principles of their own that are inherently superior to traditional media. We're all just different shades of the same thing, and quality is distributed even more sparsely among the amateurs than it is among the professionals. It's not about amateurs vs professionals, it's about quality vs bullshit. (And I mean that in a more radical way than you think, but that's a topic for another post.)

Here's the new agenda, which supersedes the old one: Most media sucks, amateur and professional media alike. They always will. But if you actively search out quality, strive not to suck yourself, and stop excusing the suckiness of others (because they're part of the "movement"), at least you'll pull in the right direction. Unlike the missionaries.

And please stop being so goddamn smug and righteous. Please, no more sniggering and sneering. No more "I'm sure glad we're better than that". No more "the MSM just doesn't get it".

For my part, I'm out of the blog movement. I'm an amateur who likes to write and uses a blog to do it. There's a community here of people like me, but there's no movement, no those who get blogs vs those who don't. Writing is all there's to it, and quality is the only standard that matters.

And then democracy does arrive, and it becomes clear to everyone that the citizens are idiots and their freely elected representatives crooks. Oops.

If your political system only works if enlightened, selfless people run it, your political system doesn't work.

Politics attracts corruption like manure piles attract flies.

You may find interesting that book, probably soon published in english.

«La haine de la démocratie» by Jacques Rancière

http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2913372481/402-0222002-3193741

Best regards,
Sensi

So, you have become a blog pessimist too? Well, welcome in the new club, I guess I have to say.

You are of course completely right that it is all a battle between quality and bullshit. While it was essential to break the media monopoly and spread media power to the masses (why do I sound like Lenin? He was no supporter of free speech!), well, it did not help all that much.

Quality is more often found in MSM, than it is found in amateur media. And that is the next battle. Get less bullshit and more quality everywhere.

The Forbes articles you link to is found in its whole here: http://www.forbes.com/execpicks/forbes/2005/1114/128sidebara.html

"And that is the next battle. Get less bullshit and more quality everywhere."

A first step towards reducing bullshit on this particular blog would be for its author to stop being such an ardent Islam apologist. Apart from that, this is actually a nice blog, and I quite like it. :)

Øyvind: So, you have become a blog pessimist too?

It's not that I've stopped believing in blogs, I just don't find blog apologetism interesting or useful any more. It has served its purpose, which was to get everyone to accept that amateurs can have something to say that's on the level of the best of professionals. And they can. But they usually don't, and neither do most professionals, so that's more important to focus on.

Anthony: A first step towards reducing bullshit on this particular blog would be for its author to stop being such an ardent Islam apologist.

So disliking some Islam critics makes me an apologist? I don't dislike people proportional to the distance between our views. What's more important is how you think about the world. Have you fallen for any obvious tricks, like apocalypticism or polarization? Do you have respect for the complexity of reality? Do you act like a believer who thinks it's more important to convert people than to use rational arguments?

I haven't written about Islam for a while, but the things I do write about these days have everything to do with why I loathe Islamophobia. Distance has nothing to do with it. I don't think I've changed my views about Islam very radically since the early days of this blog, back when the Islamophobes thought I was one of their own, and I thought they basically agreed with me but was just a bit more excited. It's still a large distance, but only because that's what happens when people decide to unsubscribe from common reality and form their own. I'm still on "their" side of the spectrum, we just don't share the same reality.

(And yes, by replying to a comment about Islam I've sentenced this thread to death. And that's why I don't write about Islam anymore. Oh well, it wasn't very active anyway.)

It is very important to have amateur press regardless of how bad it is. Another opinion on the "truth" is always extremely important even if it is poorly written. The fact that it is now proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the US Goverment are guilty of treason and no main-stream media has the guts to say it as it is (unlike Bob Bowman, David Ray Griffin, myself and thousands of other individuals around the world) to me proves beyond all reasonable doubt that amateur press is extremely important.

The strength of amateur media is not the quality of the writing, it is the diversity of opinions and points of view. I agree with your opinion of the quality of the writing on the web, but that is beside the point.

I will not defend the quality 99% of the blog in existence nor 75% of the quality of the political blogs. They do suck! But I will defend the concept of a blog per se.

I believe that being a missionary for the 'blog movement' (I hate that name) is just like being a missionary for better government because the current system is unbalanced. Personally I am not going to stop 'converting' :)

I will go on, if simply because Mass Media needs something to balance against it. It will take many Davids to tame this Goliath. Unless we tame it, we'll never regain the balance lost to democracy when mass-media appeared.

I agree that media history is a series of leaps only partly, for while there were many leaps in the accesibility to view media, the big leap to lowering the barrier of entry to making your own was very recent.

Tal Rotbart: They do suck! But I will defend the concept of a blog per se.

So do I. But it's not the mainstream media that needs balancing, it's all bad media, everyone who simplifies and distorts. And if you see it from that angle, blogs are very much part of the problem, and promoting blogs as such does nothing to solve it. Good media is the solution, and blogs can be good, as can professional media, but most aren't. That should concern us a lot more than the supposed hardships we suffer under the evil MSM.

Bjørn, I disagree because:

When MSM is unbalanced, there is no counterweight. When a blog is unbalanced, there is always another one to balance it out, that is the beauty of distributed media.

You can, if you wish, get the fuller picture by looking at events from many angles. That is why I don't mind "all typing their little opinions based on the same AP copy", it is actually exactly the idea.

Of course I would be happier if there's one or two truely new news items per day (see Mark Russinovich's blog entry which brought down Sony's DRM) coming from blogs, on which many bloggers will also be typing their own little opinions upon, right next to their comments on the same AP copy.

It gives us the fuller picture and it is more 'true' because truth is in the eye of the beholder, and as long as you get many such beholders to look through their point of view, you'll get the wider view.

If you feel your 'diet' of blogs isn't balanced, extend it and change it! There isn't just one 'clique' of blogs, there are many. It's a network, not a hierarchical tree.

Tal Rotbart: When MSM is unbalanced, there is no counterweight.

Sure there are. There are blogs. Remember: Everything I'm saying assumes blogs exist, and that they are part of the media reality. If blogs don't exist, then they're the first step towards a solution. But once that step is taken the old arguments don't apply. Blogs are not the solution. They're a step towards the solution, but they're also part of the problem.

There isn't just one 'clique' of blogs, there are many. It's a network, not a hierarchical tree.

That's exactly my point. Remember, I'm not attacking "blogs", like they were a unity and I knew of a better alternative. This isn't about for or against blogs, everyone's for blogs these days. This is about quality. We have to focus on how to make media more accurate, and we can't do that if we're stuck in the pre-blog fight for amateur media. The war is over, we got what we wanted. So now what? Now we assume the responsibility we have demanded, and start acting like real media. Which means doing more than voicing our wild guesses in a rhetorical and authoritative way.

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Secular Blasphemy: Blogging and the big new media revolution, November 6, 2005 01:51 AM