WHAT'S THE MEANING OF "ANY"?:

Is new media blogging out the old? (SHAWN MACOMBER, 10/24/04, Foster's Sunday Citizen)

"If postmodernism is dead, where are all the pieces?" Michael MacDonald wondered late one evening last week on his blog, A Year’s Subscription (www.ayearssubscription.com). "We are always in an age of postmodernism. It is how we must view the present. It is the lens through which we examine the past. And then we know that there is no past. There is no future. There is only you."

You want to know where all the pieces of postmodernism are? They’re scattered across the Internet, and you couldn’t pick them up and force them back into a single local paper if you wanted to. The inmates are running the asylum, and they don’t need your permission to validate their own opinions.

MacDonald, of South Berwick, who also teaches at the UNH writing center, has stumbled upon something here that thousands of reporters and pundits have missed entirely in this sudden explosion of interest in weblogs, or blogs. Blogs are essentially online diaries open to the world on any topic the writer chooses. The mainstream media, however, is obsessed with the idea that blogs are about Dan Rather and those questionable documents, about real-time fact checking and challenging the status quo. You know, ordinary people sitting at home in their pajamas all day tooling around the Internet, making life for real journalists harder.

MacDonald may not be a New York Times reporter or a CBS executive, but he knows better than that. He knows that blogs are really about "only you," the empowerment of individual voices to be heard to whatever end they choose.

Bloggers are not all unemployed political junkies. [...]

Orrin Judd’s blog, the right-leaning Brothers Judd (www.brothersjudd.com/blog/), began as a regular email to all his friends of interesting articles with his comments tagged on the end. The Brothers Judd simply serves as a version of that old mass email sent to anyone in the world interested in reading it.

"My own belief is that the success of blogs stems from the overflow of information that modern life brings us," Judd, of Hanover, said. "I suspect people use their favorite bloggers as filters, folks who will sift through a large number of stories for them and select out the better ones. This being the political season people are looking for political stories, but there are just so many that they don’t have time to read them all themselves, so bloggers can cull the herd for them."

Judd said he’s skeptical about the current media hype, up to and including suggestions that bloggers could sway the election.

"Their real influence, such that they have, is probably coming from the fact that journalists themselves are relying on blogs to keep abreast of stories," Judd said. "I think though that they generally don’t measure up to the hype. Bloggers have a tendency to want to make the blog be about themselves rather than about the world. The world is an interest the reader shares — the blogger’s life presumably isn’t. Even worse is when bloggers link to other bloggers to argue about picayune points each has made. The entire blogging universe becomes very claustrophobic at that point."

Here are the rules we try to follow:

(1) No profanity.

(2) Minimal self-reference (though none would be unnatural)

(3) Minimal linking to other blogs.

(4) Minimal reference to comments. (Folks who write comments don't get to do so on the front page, so we try not to write about them on the front.)

(5) Try--though I'm bad about this myself--to only quote about three paragraphs, or no more than a third, of any story you blog. We want folks to go read it at the site that owns it. But if you need to use more to make the excerpt make sense, no problem.

(6) Never let it interfere with real life.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2004 1:14 PM