Using a blog to write about the blogosphere is a bit like trying to control the ocean by spitting in it. I'm fully aware of this, but the title of the web site is The Essayist, not The Fatalist, so I'm going to give it a go.
In part, writing about this is futile because the blogosphere is already pretty navel-gazing. We bloggers are self-consciously devoted to our craft, to the joy of saying "Look at me publish!" We enjoy what we do and enjoy the connection to worldwide events that it brings us. Blogs bellowed in triumph at bringing down Trent Lott, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and yes, that Gannon chap. Those of us not quite so influential as Reynolds or Kaus or Wretchard cling to the hope that one day we will be, and in the meantime, we enjoy being part of the national dialogue.
Or maybe that's just me.
What about a website like, say....this one? Looks like a blog. Has posts and entries like a blog, links like a blog. But...is it journalism? What about xilan's blog? My girlfriend's LiveJournal? What shall we call the other millions of LiveJournals where people happily trade pictures and record the non-contentious, non-earth-shaking events that constitute life for the majority of us? Are they part of the sphere?
Peggy Noonan, with her noted quality for getting to the heart of a matter, has proclaimed in her most recent column that blogs are "a public service." I understand what she means, but I disagree. A public service is a duty and a bore, a mass institution to serve the masses. I hear the words "public service" and think of those obligatory ads warning kids about drugs. Every kid sees the same message, and after the first 50 or so, diminishing persuasiveness returns start to set in. But we see them all the time, because how is an instituion supposed to change it's marketing to please one person? There's no future in it.
The blogosphere is not public, but uniquely private, a million windows to a million minds, each connected to the others, yet each self-contained. Regardless of labels that some apply to Daily Kos, there is no Hive mind online. There's no way to enforce one. Anyone who wants to is free to disappear without trace, or to set up one's own shop, because everything done online is voluntary. Every actor is radically free, to do something positive, something negative, or nothing at all. What kind of system can be imposed on that?
Using terms like "left-blogosphere" or "right-blogosphere" are valid only up to the point of stating that the two don't talk to each other a whole lot. Beyond that, describing their habits and stereotyping their methods according to some aesthetic straw-man (yeah, those mindless liberals, they're like insects, man) means ignoring all the other details, all the other minutia. And when we want that, we've got the MSM waiting for us to sit down and accept their information flow.
The bane of TV reportage is that the camera, all appearances to the contrary, is a strikingly limited means of capturing data. There are only so many, and only so many capable of funding their preparation and use. The wide world that the camera did not see was the Great Unenfranchised in the era of Big Media. We would be foolish to replicate their error by creating false tribes and false descriptions gleaned from the segment of blogs that devote themselves to the daily political kerfuffle. As partisan as we are, we're not here to create voting blocs.
So I start where I began, in a declaration of largeness. And I'm okay with that.
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