More generalizations about blogs and narcissism

Edward Champion's recent LA Times article "Blogging: a crash course on introspection" is probably the most muddled commentary on blogging I've encountered in the past year.

His thesis is that "confessional" writing has been "spurred by cyberspace," with narcissistic bloggers baring their most intimate secrets with shameless abandon, pandering to "our voyeuristic culture." Champion wonders "why so many writers want (or need) to expose themselves."

The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he'd taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.

The "confessional" writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical "I" as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.

Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I've heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.

The article also seems to equate "confessional" with "narcissistic" and (though Champion doesn't use the word himself) "exhibitionist." However, the "I" of the confessional poets was, more often than not, something other than the "real" I, an invented self or persona that enabled the writer to explore a wider range of themes than his or her personal experience permitted.

What this article contends this all has to do with blogging remains a mystery. Supposedly, writers like Ginsberg and Plath and Lowell are off in the afterlife kicking themselves for having died before the Internet came along and gave them limitless opportunity to indulge in their narcissism and expose themselves to an online audience. Supposedly, a new generation of confessional writers has emerged, again "spurred by cyberspace."

If that is indeed the point of the piece, Champion selects an odd assortment of writers to prove it. His examples -- Amy DeZella, Jane Ganahl, Jonathan Ames, Josh Kornbluth and others -- are professional journalists and performers who were already working with personal materials publicly, before moving to the Internet. In their interviews, they all seem fairly discontent with their online experiences, probably because their presentational styles are better suited to print or stage than to the blogosphere.

If there really were a new confessional school of writing in the process of emerging online, I'd be interested. But Champion hasn't found one.

Bloggers, editors, and I.F. Stone

At Salon today, Gary Kamiya writes in praise of old-fashioned editing and editors, and naturally touches on the blogosphere:

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

Still, he says, the better writers will be the ones who ultimately prevail in the electronic age, as quality rises above the glut of competing voices. Success will be awarded either to the highly talented writer, or to the writer who collaborates with a highly talented editor.

Kamiya's piece reminded me of a tribute to another of my heroes, the rebel journalist I.F. Stone, that Dan Froomkin posted back on July 9.

"The best blogger ever," Froomkin wrote, "died in 1989 at the age of 81." The I.F. Stone Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971, was essentially a paper blog. Stone's newsletter was composed as a miscellany of short articles, opinions and commentary on material written by other journalists, like today's blog.

The newsletter's other blog-like quality was that it was unapologetically opinionated and passionate, "a far cry from the passionless prose that afflicts so much mainstream political reporting."

Like so many of today's top bloggers, Stone built a community of loyal readers around his voice — an informed voice, full of outrage and born of an unconcealed devotion to decency and fair play, civil liberty, free speech, peace in the world, truth in government, and a humane society.

Froomkin criticizes the feeble attempts at blogging so many newspapers have launched, which he complains are written "in monotone." Stone's informal, impassioned, energetic style is what the print-reporter-turned-blogger ought to be emulating.

As Kamiya contends, editors have a significant role to play in the future of online media. But both writers and editors need to be attuned to the way that blogging involves a different approach to voice from the newspaper column.

More bad news for print publications

NPR's Morning Edition has carried a story about another blow to traditional print publications. This time, though, no one's blaming the Internet, since the problem originates with the United States Postal Service.

Postal rates for magazines are scheduled to rise on July 15, an average of 13%, but the increases will not be uniform. Because they're not automated to USPS standards, small magazines like the American Poetry Review will see a steeper hike (20% or higher) than the big titles like Time, which may see increases of less than 10%.

To the editors of the small magazines, the inequities seem both unjust and suspicious.

NPR interviewed Teresa Stack of The Nation and Jack Fowler of the National Review, publications on opposites sides of the political divide that are nevertheless united in criticism of the USPS policy that will cause enormous increases in mailing costs.

"For a small magazine, $100,000 is a major amount of money. Opinion journals, because they are opinion journals, are often kryptonite to potential advertisers. Therefore, we are much more dependent on lower postal rates than the big boys."

The big boys in this case are the magazines published by media giants like Time Warner. Professor Robert McChesney (University of Illinois-Champaign) believes, in fact, that Time Warner was one of the architects of the new rate policy, which in effect eliminates a "periodical subsidy" that's been in effect since the beginning of the postal service.

That subsidy was created in the first place because "the founding fathers wanted to subsidize the delivery of newspapers and magazines," in the belief (as McChesney says) "that self-government requires a diverse and vibrant press. And the genius of the postal subsidy then, as now, is that it doesn't favor a particular viewpoint. It doesn't allow the government to pick which magazine gets it and which doesn't."

One might argue, as the USPS and Time Warner do, that this is no attempt to undermine a free and vibrant press, in order to favor corporate media. It may be true that this is simply a case of economic concerns trumping the needs of a democratic society, which is perhaps an even sadder interpretation of the situation.

In either case, corporate media continues to grow, and the independent press is further diminished.

Amateurs for human rights in China

Tony Long, in his Luddite column at Wired, has registered another traditionalist's complaint against Web 2.0 and in moderated support of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture.

To Long, the Internet ("a narcissist's dream come true") has performed a disservice by supplying amateurs with tools for reporting on events that only trained professionals should have access to.

He complains that "opportunity and desire alone do not professional historians or journalists or pundits make. There's this process known as 'learning your craft' and 'paying your dues' that all professionals must endure. Sorry, but trolling the web and blogging from your darkened study doesn't qualify as on-the-job training."

As someone who spent eight years of postgraduate work earning my doctorate, I wholly support the idea of "learning your craft" and "paying your dues" toward your professional credentials. What I can't credit is Mr. Long's assumption that our professional historians, journalists and pundits are doing a swell job without the interference of the untrained, poorly informed masses.

The media may be chock full of professionals; but in these days when even NPR has begun parroting the Bush administration's recent, transparent act of propaganda in labeling every insurgent in Iraq as "Al Qaeda," many of them don't seem to be measuring up to their responsibilities.

It seems to be the professionals, rather than the amateurs, who are "killing our culture."

But never mind about the American situation, for a moment. Imagine instead a country where media is overtly controlled by the government and the elite, where ordinary citizens have no hope of drawing attention to gross injustices because the press has been ordered not to report on them. That's the point of a heartening story at Breitbart.com, about 400 Chinese parents turning into "citizen journalists" to rescue their children from slave labor conditions in brickyards.

"The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press," Breitbart reports. In another case, police riots aimed at flower sellers in Zhengzhou were recorded on someone's cell phone and eventually posted on YouTube.

In response to this growing power in the hands of a previously powerless group of people, the Chinese government has called for a "purification" of the Internet, and has tightened its crackdown of "cyber dissidents."

That's probably the best way to deal with amateurs. They ruin everything.

The crisis in newspaper book reviews

Novelist Richard Ford has never read a literary blog, but he's ready to critique them anyway.

In a May 2 New York Times story about the decline of the book review in papers across the nation, Ford remarks that "“Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership, in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

While I'm reluctant to second-guess one of our greatest living authors (and a fellow Mississippian, as well), such high-brow stereotyping of the blogger lacks understanding and gratitude for the contributions the blogosphere has made to the book industry, and to individual authors such as Mr. Ford.

The crisis of the newspaper book review was a topic of conversation on yesterday's Talk of the Nation, when John Freeman of the National Book Critics Circle was a guest. Economics are at the root of the problem, with publishers struggling to cut costs in the face of market uncertainties, in part brought on by Internet competition. Seemingly no one views this as a welcome development, and no one with an ounce of sense is about to claim that the blog can replace the traditional book review.

But book bloggers are a major force for good for the publishing industry, and for authors. Motoko Rich of the Times mentions the case of the short story collection This Is Not Chick Lit, which was largely overlooked by print reviewers but received a great deal of support and attention in the blogosphere. The result? The book "is now in its sixth printing with 45,000 copies in print."

I hope that Mr. Ford, a man of great sagacity, will reconsider and sample at least a few of the book blogs where 'guys sitting in their basements' have been promoting his work for years. I myself stand second to no one in my love of the old-fashioned book review, and I hope for its rescue.

However, if it goes the way of extinction, the blame will fall on the newspaper publishers who have abdicated their responsibility to the literary community -- a responsibility that the literary bloggers seem happy to assume.

Tragedy, news, and social networking

As students at Virginia Tech cope with this week's tragedy on their campus, and attempt to return to a normal life, many of them are expressing anger at the press for creating a state of siege on their campus. "You've got your story. Now go home," one young woman said this morning during a story on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

One grievance that students have raised -- and it's a legitimate one -- is over the way that reporters from wire services, newspapers, television and radio raided their LiveJournal, Facebook and MySpace pages hoping to contact witnesses to the shootings, urgent for interview time. Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com has compiled a catalog of requests students received from ABC, the LA Times, CBC, CNN and others. Some display sensitivity to what the students' emotional turmoil, but others lived up to the mainstream media's image as crass, heartless purveyors of suffering.

Slate's Michael Agger reports that a number of students, realizing they were drawing media attention "rapidly set their journals and MySpace pages to friends-only," to block unwelcome demands for details and emotional reactions that one anonymous poster satirized with the words: "Please let us exploit your grief. ASAP THANKS!"

That was the right decision, but the fact that it needed to be made points out the dilemma of social networking, that it erases the distinction between public and private. By posting personal messages to their network of friends, on a public site, the students opened themselves to this kind of unwanted attention, at a moment when tragedy drew the eyes of the media to their campus.

Robin Hamman urges the news media to "Think before you link. Understand that some content published in public was never intended to be seen by a mass audience." He's drawing an intriguing and subtle distinction between the "public" and the "mass" -- probably too subtle for anyone to expect a reporter hot on the trail of a breaking story to observe, though.

Sadly, this issue will come up again, during some future crisis or catastrophe when social networking once more becomes citizen journalism. But a richness will result from the ability of individuals to tell their stories at first hand, unmediated, and for those stories to link organically, for a fuller picture to emerge.

As TextualDeviance has pointed out of the Virginia Tech tragedy, "the students and student journalists at this school have done a better job of covering it than the mainstream media have, by not only being more on top of it, but by integrating content from multiple sources into a cohesive, continually updated story that still manages to be journalistic despite much of its amateur origins."

The price of that richness will be a further sacrifice of the personal and the private.

The future of newspapers

A recent blog from Arianna Huffington about News 2.0 presents an optimistic vision of papers like the Washington Post starting to successfully embrace the digital age. The Post, for example, has "gone from a largely local paper with a print circulation around 656,000, to an international paper attracting eight million unique online readers a month."

But I began growing nervous as the article continued in its rosy assessment for the future of hybrid digital-and-paper delivery system like NewspaperDirect. The debate over the merits of the printed page vs. the computer screen has been continued too long. This old debate is wrongheaded in its approach, obscuring how dynamically different hypertext is from hard copy, consumed in tedious discussion about which is more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing.

So I was relieved when Huffington at last turned to a more vital issue, how new media is beginning to affect journalism in its substance, rather than in its delivery methods. She praises, rightfully, sites like Talking Points Memo and TMPmuckracker for bringing together "journalistic doggedness and reader interactivity" in breaking the recent Justice Department scandal involving the fired U.S. attorneys.

It's beyond question that the mainstream media has, for the past decade, failed the public miserably in its duty to inform and watchdog. Witness the lead-in to the American invasion of Iraq, when the only responsible critique of the plan was offered by Knight Ridder and by the online "fringe." Most newspaper, as well as all the commercial broadcast networks, simply yielded themselves to the euphoria and hysteria of the moment.

New media developments may assist in increasing a mainstream newspaper's audience, but they won't save the newspaper industry from its own growing corruption and incompetence. I am myself a daily reader of the New York Times online, but I entertain no illusions that I'm getting more accurate information or improved coverage from the electronic version. It's still the Times, limited in what it can report and predetermined in its outlook by its old political and corporate affiliations.

Never mind the joys of listening to the rustle of the pages and the feel of ink smudging your fingertips. If you're not getting complete, balanced, independent reporting from your newspaper, you're wasting your time. The online press is beginning to flex its muscle and prove its potential for wedding professional journalism with citizen journalism.

Huffington herself points out that "breaking a big story isn't always about getting the inside tip from a Deep Throat -- many times it's simply the piecing together of seemingly random bits of information there for everybody to see. But when they are assembled together, suddenly a big story can emerge. The blogosphere excels at this."

Anna, Robert and Jimmy

The recent, sudden death of Anna Nicole Smith produced a telling exchange of viewpoints last week, when National Public Radio's Robert Siegel interviewed Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.

The issue at hand was speculation that Wikipedia had beaten traditional journalistic outlets to the story about Smith's passing. An anonymous editor had promptly posted the time of her death on her biography page, supposedly before any other news source. Wales corrected the rumor, claiming that the source had, in fact, been an announcement on CBS.

I enjoy Siegel's calm equanimity on All Things Considered in the afternoon, even if his delivery exemplifies what Camille Paglia once called the "repressed mellifluousness of National Public Radio." So it was especially interesting to hear him growing a bit nettled over Wikipedia's reported coup, and over the encyclopedia’s editorial policies. Transcripts are available from NPR and on LexisNexis, but they don't convey the edginess of his conversation with Wales. For that, you need to listen to the audio on NPR's site.

Siegel suggested that Wikipedia had based its report on a "slimmer basis for confirmation" than a news organization would have used, but Wales countered that it was "pretty much exactly the same" in that Wikipedia had acted on "a citation to what was being reported at another outlet." Siegel questioned the "hierarchy of editors" who had made the decision to remove the story from the site for a short time. Wales replied that Wikipedia instead acts through a "social hierarchy" of "experienced editors," and then admitted that by "experienced" he meant anyone with an account over four days old.

Siegel called four days a "pretty low bar." The interview maintained a veneer of civility, but Siegel attempted to cast the episode as a case of reckless amateur journalism, downplaying Wales' point that Wikipedia had simply posted information that had been already been broadcast by a major news organization, CBS.

The greater significance of this episode is the speed and adaptability of Wikipedia's social network in catching and disseminating news. Siegel groused, politely, about the absence of a "hierarchy," pointing out that the site's editors were "members of an online community" rather than professionals meeting together in a room somewhere. Wales' reply was a simple "Exactly!" What Siegel addressed as a flaw, Wales clearly recognized as Wikipedia's distinct advantage.

It was especially interesting that Siegel didn't react to Wales' referring to CBS as "another outlet." This raises an interesting question. Is Wikipedia an encyclopedia, or a news outlet? Or are the distinctions between those two functions beginning to blur?