June 9, 2003

Blogs: Truth Serum for the Media

David Warren says blogs are truth serum for the media and academia...

A revolution is happening in journalism, right now; a revolution with huge political implications. Blogs are the cause. And the fall of Howell Raines this last week is like the first brick in a Berlin Wall. It will not stop tumbling. Though made of words, a blog is a different thing, in kind, from printed articles in a newspaper or magazine, in which sources of information may be stated but must be taken by the reader on faith, unless the reader has the time, ability, and personal connections to retrace them. And if he does, what he finds must then be taken on faith by his readers. The blog may be updated by the minute or the hour, it remains accessible and searchable through its archives, but most crucially, it contains those Internet links. Through them, the bloggers are universally networked. They link each other's precise words, and - comes the revolution - are able to reference most of their sources almost instantaneously, in the original form.

In principle, it is a reversion to and extension of the invention of the footnote, by the scholastics in the High Middle Ages. This was one of the great advances of Christendom - the idea that the truth should be sourced, precisely - though it entailed, as Ivan Illich argued, a compensating loss - the transformation of "reading as prayer" to "reading as learning".

That aside, the political implications expand, as the possibilities for news management by an overwhelmingly glib and "liberal" media establishment contract. And likewise in the nearly closed shop of academia: for the rapid advance of academic blogging will soon put paid to much of the rubbish which passes for scholarship today. For those living under tyrannical regimes in the "Third World", access to alternative information improves with imported technology. In Iran, for instance, the number of bloggers has recently exploded, leaving the ayatollahs with only the bad option of unplugging the entire country from the outside world. Truth and freedom have usually marched together. In the larger view, blogging does not threaten print, but enhances and extends it. The web is now offering both media and world a new and powerful truth serum.